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Many readers of academic books prefer reading on paper. In many of our contexts, however, avoiding academic eBooks is becoming less and less of an option as students (as well as other users) have few viable opportunities for accessing print-on-paper information if that content is already available to them in electronic form. This session primarily considerrf ways in which librarians and information professionals can demystify and make useful the academic eBook for the (disinclined) user. Currently, we have a mixed bag of experiences regarding how the academic eBooks in our collections operate and we don’t yet know what the academic eBook of the future will look like or be able to offer to our readers. This session explored some options for both preparing the uninitiated for the variety of eBooks they will encounter, as well as consider some point-of-service strategies that may prevent a research conversation from ending abruptly when paper resources on a topic are scarce. How can we best help the resources that we have access to currently be more informative for our readers?

This study reviews some of the methods, results, and required resources for when a small library conducts a collection evaluation to support a new academic program.  The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky launched the Institute for Black Church Studies in 2020. Two primary foci of the Institute are to offer an M.Div. concentration and a graduate-level certificate in Black Church Studies.  Given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter, attention to the breadth as well as the depth of the currently available collection is required as a means of evaluating areas of strength and weakness.  The unique, all-digital, cooperative structure of the library provides added complexities and opportunities to support this new program.

Gregory M. Scott and Stephen M. Garrison have written a number of student writer's manuals, though this volume is their first foray into religion and theology. In 1995 they published The Political Science Student Writer's Manual bringing together the experience of Scott as Professor (now emeritus) of Political Science and Garrison as Professor of English and Creative Writing (both from the University of Central Oklahoma). The retitled The Political Science Student Writer's Manual and Reader's Guide is now in its 8 th edition (2016). Subsequently they have addressed other disciplines, bringing in subject specialists to coauthor with them. The current publisher has available their manuals in sociology (2016), psychology (2018), and philosophy (2017), although previous endeavors have also covered other disciplines. For their religion and theology manual, they have collaborated with Joel Hopko, coordinator of the Jornada de Fe for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Hopko is also the Region XIII representative of the National Association for Lay Ministry. This book consists of four parts divided into twelve chapters, with a target audience of undergraduate students (vii) and, to a lesser extent, their instructors (ix). The first part focuses on reading and writing in introductory religion and theology courses, and the second seeks to build on the first in developing scholarly skills. Part three considers some dimensions of the study of religion, and part four envisions a pivot to theology, the study of scriptures, and homiletics and liturgics. The parts are not equal in length or depth, with the first comprising half the work (103 pages) and the other three being 37, 23, and 18 pages, respectively. The work includes both brief (iii) and detailed (iv-vii) tables of contents, a glossary of religious and theological terms (184-7), a reference list (188-90), and an index (191-5). The book includes forty-four "Read & Write" exercises, one for each chapter subsection. These exercises range widely from the relatively brief and manageable to the surprisingly long and complex. "Freewrite" (31) and "Correct a Sentence Fragment" (45), for example, are brief and manageable tasks that students might even explore on their own. Most exercises in the volume, however, are much more expansive and complex assignments, with many requiring outside research and significant time. One particularly curious example is "Explore Doctrinal Options for the Separation of Church and State" (19, 20), in which students are asked to "find more information about Pastafarian doctrine on a variety of websites" and write an essay of up to ten pages considering what constitutes the establishment of religion and what qualifies as legitimate religion and religious doctrine. This is a fairly wide-ranging and complex task for just the fifth exercise a student reading this manual would encounter. While the overall plan of the book tries to scaffold learning, this strategy is not always consistent in application. The book repeats the idea that writing is the best metho...