Our increasingly hybridized information environment, in which both print and electronic resources are available and offer certain advantages, may be described as “dimorphic,” alluding to the dual modes of sustenance evident among certain semi-nomadic peoples in the Ancient Near East. In this session, reference and digital services librarian David Schmersal will draw upon amateur interest in the Ancient Near East to explain how dimorphic social structure may provide a useful heuristic device or metaphor for understanding the information-seeking behavior of students, faculty, and other researchers. Such insight into user behavior may be applied to collection development, instruction sessions, reference interviews, and other crossroads between libraries and our patrons’ information needs.

No abstract

Many faith traditions affirm a profound connection between physicality and spirituality. Similarly, libraries, even while facilitating sublime intellectual connections between authors and readers, have done so, and to an extent continue to do so, as physical places and through the physical medium of books. Given these connections, it is perhaps not surprising that theological libraries can serve as a nexus for exploring the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, between the largely incorporeal acts of intellectual analysis and spiritual contemplation and the physical ecology in which such acts occur and the physical (and digital) media that make them possible. As we have become increasingly aware of the fragility of our physical environment, such connections have taken on greater significance, both as a topic for intellectual analysis and a guide for faithful praxis. This paper offers further consideration of these themes and explores ways in which theological libraries, our collections and services, can both model and further good stewardship. 

A quick search using the subject “Indians of North America – Religion” in Bridwell Library’s catalog retrieved 130 results out of a collection of about 490,000 volumes. This suggests (a) The Library of Congress may want to consider revising some of its subject headings (but that is a topic for another time), (b) religious and spiritual practices among native North Americans/First Nations are not widely studied by our students. While there are certainly exceptions, likely this situation is not unique among theological libraries. This session represents an effort to rectify this by sharing and inviting colleagues to share recommendations of resources on spirituality and religious beliefs and practices of various native North American/First Nations groups and their relation to the faith traditions that are more broadly represented in our collections.   

No abstract