Catholic Research Initiatives at Boston College Libraries
In keeping with its motto of “Value Beyond Discovery,” Boston College Libraries is pleased to offer diverse programming to encourage widespread engagement with Catholic content at the University and beyond, to facilitate collaboration between institutions and scholars, and to promote scholarship on the Catholic Church.
Programs & Opportunities
Catholic Religious Archives
Preserving and making accessible archival records of religious orders and congregations
Travel Grants
Grants defray costs of researching at Boston College and other archives with Catholic collections
Digital Initiatives
New projects seek to foster innovation and collaboration with Catholic source materials
Events
Programs on campus and online provide settings for scholarly inquiry and advancement
Publications
Initiatives facilitate the impact of new perspectives on the Catholic intellectual tradition
Program Highlight: Catholic Almanacs Project
With guidance from the Digital Scholarship Group, Boston College students are contributing to a pilot project that involves extracting data from nineteenth-century Catholic almanacs published in the United States. They have learned XML coding to convert the almanac’s information on institutions, priests, and women religious into data points for later use in maps and visualizations (learn more).
An almanac page juxtaposed with an encoded version of the text. The encoding organizes and structures the text into data points.
The interactive map being created with the alamanac data.
Program Highlight: Catholic Repository Online
A new database will provide full, searchable, and browsable access to a curated selection of newspapers, journals, and books for Catholic research. Initial titles complement the archival collections at the Catholic Religious Archives at Boston College, but publications will also include the histories of the institutions and people identified in the almanac project.
Program Highlight: Interactive Catholic Artifacts Collection
The Digital Scholarship Group has begun scanning religious artifacts housed at Boston College in the Catholic Religious Archive, Burns Library, and McMullen Museum. The collection of 3D models will allow users to observe in greater detail the physicality of the object through digital means.
A statue of Mary, Catholic Religious Archives
African Wood Carving gifted to the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa, Catholic Religious Archives