Seminary students help launch digital research library

Summary: Calvin Theological Seminary PhD graduate student Todd Rester recently helped launch the Post-Reformation Digital Library, an online resource that puts primary sources about the Reformation within the reach of a scholar's computer keyboard.

See full story: http://www.calvin.edu/news/2009-10/prdl

The original writings of Calvin, Luther and their contemporaries held in special collections in European libraries can now be accessed from a scholar's computer keyboard. For the last two years, Todd Rester, a PhD graduate student at Calvin Theological Seminary worked as part of an editorial board of seminary graduate students with seminary professor Richard Muller and Hekman theological librarian Lugene Schemper in getting these materials online. They named the online resource the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL).

The PRDL is a bibliography, a "finding list" of links to resources from research libraries, scholarly initiatives and other sources from all over the Web. The list is organized alphabetically, and the linked names of Reformation authors take the user to digital versions of their works.

"A lot of these sources were coming online, but there wasn't a systematic arrangement of them," said Rester. "We decided to put together a wiki, and it just grew."

The PRDL is sponsored by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and Calvin's Hekman Library.

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Received on Thu Dec 24 11:17:30 2009