Digital Collections Overview

The Office of Digital Initiatives in Wright Library builds and curates digital library collections, creates web-based applications for access and use of those collections, and drives technological innovation in support of the library’s mission. These extensive and diverse digital collections are listed below. View each collection’s website for details.

Collections

Theological Commons

The Theological Commons is a digital library of over 150,000 resources on theology and religion. Developed in partnership with the Internet Archive, it contains books, journals, audio recordings, photographs, manuscripts, and other formats dating from 975 C.E. to the present.

This collection will expand over time as more of Wright Library’s holdings are digitized and as we incorporate relevant materials digitized by other academic libraries and partnering organizations.

Abraham Kuyper Bibliography

This classified bibliography of works about Abraham Kuyper currently contains over 1,400 records compiled by library staff at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, assisted by Kuyper scholars worldwide.

Abraham Kuyper Digital Archive

This digital representation of Kuyper’s complete archive (over 100,000 pages), was originally developed at Princeton Theological Seminary in cooperation with the Historical Documentation Center for Dutch Protestantism at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where the physical archive is housed. The digital archive is hosted by The Neo-Calvinism Research Institute in Kampen.

The published books by Kuyper that were formerly available at https://kuyper.ptsem.edu are available in Theological Commons.

Guides to Manuscript Collections

Many of the manuscript collections in Special Collections are described in detail in online finding aids (guides).

Original Digital Library

Digitized materials from our original digital library, created in 2006, are still available from other locations, as listed on this site.

Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture

The Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture foster original scholarship pertaining to youth and the contemporary church. This lecture series, begun in 1996, is sponsored by The Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. The lectures are fully searchable and can be read online or downloaded as PDF documents.

Web Archive

Because web sites change frequently, ephemeral but valuable content is easily lost over time. The Web Archive project at Wright Library collects, preserves, and provides access to web content for current and future generations of researchers by capturing copies of selected web sites at regular intervals.


Searching

Each of the digital collections listed above has its own website that includes search capability. Collections that include printed or typed text (books, journals, audio transcripts, archived web pages, etc.) allow searching the full text of those resources, in addition to their descriptive bibliographic records (title, author, etc.).

To search across the bibliographic records of all digital collections, use the main search box at the top of this page or on the library’s home page. Search results include items from the digital collections listed above, in addition to many other sources of content. To include only digital collections and exclude all other sources, on the left-hand side of the search results, under “Library Location” select “Digital Collections at Princeton Theological Seminary.”


What is the difference between digital collections and library databases?

The digital collections listed above are openly and globally available to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser. By contrast, library databases contain fee-based content that is licensed to libraries by commercial publishers for restricted institutional use.


Contact us

We welcome feedback from users, including general questions, data corrections, and suggestions for improvement. When contacting us, please provide the web address (URL) of the resource in question whenever applicable.

We also encourage users to nominate materials for inclusion in our digital collections, although the materials normally must be in the public domain and held by Wright Library at Princeton Theological Seminary.

To contact the Office of Digital Initiatives, please use the library’s contact form.

Office of Digital Initiatives staff members:

  • Gregory Murray, Director of Digital Initiatives
  • Donna Quick, Digital Production and Quality Assurance Specialist
  • Maggie Wilkey, Metadata Librarian