Concordia Seminary makes its library available electronically

[RCCAtl]

                                     Concordia Seminary launches online repository
                                   Two websites, one app help users access content

Concordia Seminary, St. Louis – one of the largest denominational seminaries and home to the second largest Lutheran library in North America – is making its vast trove of theological and scholarly resources more readily available to people around the world.

Users now have three new choices to get the Seminary’s rich content: two websites and a new mobile app. They can access classes on Greek or Hebrew, Bible studies and other helps for biblical interpretation, podcasts, academic papers, journal articles, videos and more.

“It’s like the sower of the good seed parable. This is like the sower casting the seed all over the place — not just where the soil is fertile, but even where people may never had heard of Christ or stepped foot in a Lutheran church,” said Rev. Ben Haupt, the Seminary’s director of library services.

The new tools are:

Scholar.csl.edu
The scholar site — http://scholar.csl.edu — is the home of the Seminary’s digital institutional repository. Offering an ultramodern, long-term solution for managing digital content, the site mimics a library catalog of resources. Digital versions of the Seminary’s vast collection of published materials, conference and scholarly works, lectures and items from the rare book collection are available complete with full descriptions and tagging for maximum search ability. This site requires a full screen for best accessibility.

Resources.csl.edu
Thanks to the ingenuity of the Seminary’s in-house Technology Services team, the new custom-designed resources website — http://resources.csl.edu — offers visitors a user-friendly, Netflix-style experience for accessing on-demand content. From the home page, visitors can choose from a carousel of options with the most popular items leading the feed. A key feature is easy scrolling to access a huge variety of resources. The same resources available on the scholar site are available here; they are just presented in a different way. This site is mobile-friendly.

Concordia Seminary mobile app
With the launch of its first-ever app, the Seminary joins with leading educational institutions in the mobile space. Students, pastors and other church workers, scholars, seekers and lay members alike are able to connect with the Seminary anytime from any place. The free app features a campus map and a robust collection of links to resources, news and giving opportunities to support the Seminary’s mission. Users also can connect to the Seminary’s official social media apps and watch live-streamed events. To get the app, search “Concordia Seminary” on the Apple and Android (Google Play) app stores.

“In our increasingly mobile society, it’s imperative that we offer the tools that make our resources available to those who need them in the way they need them,” Haupt said. “As we launch these new accessibility tools, I’m excited to see how they will help to spread the light of the Gospel.”

As one of the first educational institutions to offer content for Apple’s iTunesU, the Seminary has an idea of the popularity of its resources. In 2014, more than 1 million downloads of Seminary-produced content were made by students, pastors and laypeople from around the world.

The Seminary’s institutional repository will continue to grow as new resources are produced and archived materials are converted to digital files. Items that have been available on iTunesU will continue into the foreseeable future.

“Like Gutenberg enabled Martin Luther’s works to be printed and dispersed, the Internet is our Gutenberg printing press,” said John Klinger, the Seminary’s Chief Information Officer. “Today, we’ve moved from a Gutenberg to Google world, and we are doing what we can to share our rich, Lutheran theology with people wherever they are by means of today’s state-of-the-art tools.”

About Concordia Seminary
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis provides Gospel-centered graduate-level theological education for pastors, missionaries, deaconesses, scholars and other leaders in the name of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS). To learn more, visit www.csl.edu.