Digital Initiatives

Collaborative projects are underway that seek to maximize the strength of Boston College’s Catholic collections as well as its unique digital capabilities in order to provide the wider scholarly community with open access to unparalleled online services. If you wish to learn more about collaborating on either of these projects, please email librariescatholicresearch@bc.edu.

Catholic Almanacs Project

Currently in the pilot stage, the Catholic Almanacs Project is a digital project that involves extracting data from the nineteenth-century Catholic Almanacs and structuring it for making maps, data visualization, and other forms of data manipulation. With guidance from the Digital Scholarship Group, BC students have been doing much of the work, using XML encoding to convert the almanac’s information on institutions, priests, and women religious into data points (learn more).

Interactive Catholic Artifacts Collection

This collection of 3D models broadens access to some of the more unique three-dimensional objects housed in Boston College’s Catholic Religious Archives, Burns Library, McMullen Museum, and Ricci Institute. The artifacts, created with photogrammetry, structured light, and infrared modes, allow close and interactive examination for scholarship, teaching, and general curiosity.

Catholic Repository Online

A forthcoming database will provide full, searchable, and browsable access to a curated selection of newspapers, journals, and books that support the research of Catholicism. Initial titles complement the archival collections at the Catholic Religious Archives at Boston College, and publications will also include the histories of the institutions and people identified in the almanac project. A beta version of this database will be available for open access by September 2024.