Introduction to the Collections

The Yale University Library consists of a central collection in the Sterling Memorial Library, seven school libraries, and forty-seven departmental and college libraries, containing a total of more than nine million volumes. These resources are available to the Divinity School community, in common with other members of the University.

The Divinity Library, which was established as a separate collection in 1932, now contains over 400,000 volumes on which full service can be offered, and subscribes to 1,700 current periodicals and other serials. In addition, the Divinity Library holds more than 170,000 microforms. The primary strength of the Divinity Library is in the history of missions, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox; Christian doctrine, historical and constructive; biblical literature; and church history. The missions collection is one of the world's two major collections, and the section on doctrine is unusually complete. Subjects especially well documented include Jansenism, American slavery and the Church, and the classical theologians, especially Augustine, Aquinas, Schleiermacher and Harnack.

The Henry H. Tweedy Reference & Resource Program, established in 1992, supports resources in electronic formats, including computer data, audio and video materials, within the scope of the Divinity Library collections. The Tweedy Program includes six public microcomputer workstations for utilizing local datafiles such as the American Theological Library Association Religion Database, and the electronic Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, as well as connecting to remote resources on the Internet. There are also video and slide viewing stations available within the Library.

The Divinity Library Archives and Manuscripts collection, a rich source for primary research material, now comprises more than 2,700 linear feet of personal and organizational papers, printed pamphlets and ephemera related to various aspects of American religious history. Particular strengths of the collection are its documentation of Protestant missions, records related to American clergy and evangelists, and documentation of religious work among college and university students.

Archival holdings include records of the World Student Christian Federation, the Student Volunteer Movement, the Student Division of the YMCA, the Student Christian Movement in New England, and the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. Personal papers are available for prominent American religious leaders such as Horace Bushnell, Dwight L. Moody, John R. Mott, Arthur Judson Brown, George Sherwood Eddy, and Henry Knox Sherrill, for other early New England clergy, and for many Divinity School faculty and deans.

The extensive China Records collection includes manuscript material from missionaries and organizations active in China from the early nineteenth century to 1951. There are pamphlet collections focusing on missions, religious and benevolent societies, issues of peace and war, New England churches, and Congregational Church records, as well as an extensive collection of historical sermons.

These manuscript and published materials are supplemented by more than 66,000 microforms representing missions-related archival collections, such as the Council for World Mission (incorporating records of the London Missionary Society), the International Missionary Council and Conference of British Missionary Societies, the American Home Missionary Society, the Methodist Missionary Society and the Ghana Archive of the Basel Mission.

Resources found elsewhere in the University relating to the Divinity Library collection include 125,000 volumes classed as religion in Sterling Memorial Library and the Seeley Mudd Library. These libraries contain a wealth of scholarly periodicals and publications of learned societies, the source material of the Protestant Reformation, Byzantine and Orthodox literature, early Americana, and a primary collection of Mormonism.

Other collections important to the Divinity Library are: the American Oriental Society and the Judaica Collection at Sterling Memorial Library, the Lowell Mason Collection of Hymnology at the Music Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Art Library for Christian art, the Law Library for canon law, and the departmental libraries for archaeology, ancient Near East and classics.

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