





































Listen and Learn Sessions  251

Digging Deeply in  
Catholic Studies
The CRRA’s Collaborative Approach  
in Providing Access to Rare and Unique 
Catholic Collections
By Alan D. Krieger, University of Notre Dame; Pat Lawton, University of Notre Dame and 

the Catholic Research Resources Alliance

ABSTR ACT This paper introduces the work of the Catholic Research 
Resources Alliance (CRRA), a non-profit organization comprising fifty 
Catholic colleges, universities, seminaries, and religious congregations. 
In service to its mission “to provide enduring access to Catholic research 
resources in the Americas,” the CRRA has launched two significant 
initiatives of freely available and collaboratively curated content: the 
Catholic Portal and the Catholic News Archive.

The paper includes a brief history of the organization and introduces 
the Portal and the Catholic Newspapers Program. Highlights include 
innovations in deep indexing and discovery through finding aids across 
aggregated content, digital content, text mining applications, and links 
to additional Catholic digital resources.

The homepage of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance’s recently 
revamped website states that its Catholic Portal “provides global, freely 
available access to rare, unique and/or uncommon materials in librar-
ies, seminaries, special collections and archives.” It is a testament to 
the CRRA’s persistence of vision that this goal goes back to the begin-
ning of the Alliance, which was really launched at a meeting of library 
directors from six of the eight founding institutions at Georgetown 
University in November 2004. Following that session, Jennifer Younger, 
then library director at Notre Dame and the current CRRA Executive 
Director, noted in a December letter to the directors at Association 
of Catholic Colleges and Universities schools: “we agreed to focus an 



252  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

initial project on making special collection materials, defined as rare, 
unique, or infrequently held materials in print and non-print formats, 
findable and accessible by scholars working in Catholic Studies. Our 
job is now to move forward with further definition and discussion 
with other libraries and archives.” (Jennifer Younger, email message 
to author, December 22, 2004). This drive to make uncommonly held 
Catholic Studies materials widely accessible has continued to this day 
even as the Alliance adds additional resources apart from the Portal, 
such as the Catholic Newspapers Program.

During the next year and a half or so, participating institutions 
locally discussed and investigated possible means of building such 
a portal. “Team Catholic Portal” at Notre Dame initially envisioned 
a directory of websites related to particular special collections or 
archives, but we soon realized that many such collections were not 
discoverable online and those that were listed were often scattered 
across a larger, institutional site. Even at that time, however, we were 
also discussing the challenges of collecting metadata records and 
making them searchable.

There followed a series of three meetings over the next four years, 
which helped to define the direction of what was called until early 
2007 the Catholic Research Resources Initiative (CRRI). In November 
2006, representatives from five institutions met at Notre Dame, and 
discussions produced the agreement that, in addition to increasing 
the number of MARC records for published works in the Portal, each 
school would submit five searchable EAD files for collections dealing 
with American Catholic social action and/or American Catholic intel-
lectual life. This represented an early recognition that the inclusion of 
archival material would be a key component in the Portal’s develop-
ment. It also represented the introduction of subject “themes” into 
the Alliance’s collection scope considerations.

The recently “rebranded” CRRA met at Boston College in Novem-
ber 2007, and this meeting produced two results which would help 
the effort’s progress: first, the insistence that there be straightforward 
standards and guidelines for the submission of records; second, the 
emergence of subject themes as a way of encouraging contributions, 
as six more were provisionally added to the two introduced at Notre 
Dame.1 The CRRA meeting in the summer of 2009 at Loyola Univer-
sity in Chicago featured two new members, Loyola and Villanova, as 



Listen and Learn Sessions  253

well as a new Digital Project Librarian, Pat Lawton. The meeting was 
also assisted by the contributions of a “scholar participant,” Profes-
sor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, an accomplished American Catholic 
historian at Notre Dame who helped us in our discussions on the goals 
of the Portal’s search functionality. This meeting also set the direction 
for the Alliance in other ways as we shall see.

In looking back at the CRRA’s “pilot phase,” six important areas of 
progress may be identified which allowed the project to gain traction 
and make progress in the world of Catholic higher education.

 1.  Defined	the	subject	scope	of	the	Portal (2009)—The Loyola 
meeting approved the twelve themes which are listed in the Alli-
ance’s Collection Policy Statement.2 These are not intended to be 
prescriptive, but rather a way of encouraging the consideration 
and classification of resources which may be suitable for the 
Portal. Over time, the themes will hopefully help build a “critical 
mass” of materials in these areas and thus the Portal’s reputa-
tion as well.

 2.  Identified	schools	and	archives	with	special	collections 
(2006)—A January 2007 Prospectus on the CRRA notes that an 
online directory of directors of Catholic colleges, university and 
seminary libraries, archives, and library schools, drawn from 
the ACCU membership list, had been created.3 A clear require-
ment for the CRRA’s work is the identification of institutions 
whose holdings largely constitute the content for Catholic Stud-
ies research in North America.

 3.  Developed inter-institutional leadership for the project 
(2008)—As early as 2006, the CRRI Steering Committee (drawn 
from all eight founding members) established the Metadata and 
Collection Committees, with members from different participat-
ing schools.4 By early 2008, a Board of Directors had replaced the 
Steering Committee, working with Digital Access and Collections 
Committees (Jennifer Younger, email message to author, Febru-
ary 14, 2008). Almost from the outset of the Alliance’s work, 
leadership has been broad-based, with the CRRA’S future never 
dependent on one institution. The emergence of multiple stake-
holders in the effort has given the project momentum and obvi-
ously heightened its chances of success.



254  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

 4.  Developed a Scholars Advisory Committee (2008)—A CRRA 
Board of Directors meeting in early 2008 identified scholars 
who would be invited to join this group; the committee had been 
formed by the 2009 Loyola meeting. The support and advice of 
the scholarly community is clearly crucial to the CRRA’s prod-
ucts becoming an indispensable tool for research in Catholic 
Studies.

 5.  Developed a methodology for contributing items to the 
Portal (2008)—As early as the summer of 2007, Notre Dame’s 
Eric Morgan had designed a technical infrastructure for the 
Portal. The Boston College meeting, as we have seen, called for 
record standards and in the summer of 2008, the Digital Access 
Committee issued minimum requirements for the submission of 
MARC Records, EAD files, and the Dublin Core elements to which 
CRRA records can be mapped. The articulation of these require-
ments is obviously needed in order for the Portal to “ingest” 
large numbers of records.

 6.  Developed an effective search interface (2009)—The Loyola 
meeting approved the use of VUFind as the Portal infrastruc-
ture.5 This open source application, developed at Villanova, 
features a powerful indexer (SOLR/Lucene) that statistically 
analyzes search queries and hopefully creates a positive user 
experience.

Since the end of the pilot phase in 2010, the number of CRRA 
members and partners has grown to fifty. The progress just described 
during this early period certainly helped lay the foundation for the 
Alliance’s subsequent growth; however, another major factor is the 
Catholic Newspapers Program, founded in 2011 and dynamically 
developed since then.

A 2010 member survey indicated, not surprisingly, that Portal 
users desired to see more full-text content in the Portal. CRRA realized 
the need to begin a digitization program, but exactly what should they 
target for digitization? We took the question to the Scholars Advisory 
Committee which identified three priorities: Catholic pamphlets, the 
Official Catholic Directory (OCD), and Catholic diocesan and national 
newspapers. Currently, several member institutions are digitizing 
their Catholic pamphlets and making them available in the Portal; 



Listen and Learn Sessions  255

Villanova University had begun digitizing the OCD, and the baton is 
being picked up by the Catholic Library Association, in collaboration 
with CRRA.

THE CATHOLIC NEWSPAPERS PROGRAM

The project embraced by CRRA as of the greatest need—and definitely 
the most challenging—became the Catholic Newspapers Program. The 
goal and scope of the Program, overseen by the Catholic Newspapers 
Committee, is to provide access to all extant Catholic newspapers 
published in North America. Program activities include: 

 •  Catholic Newspapers Online (https://www.catholicresearch.
org/catholic-newspapers-online): An ever-growing directory 
of North American Catholic newspapers in digital form, freely 
available to all.

 •  Collaborative digitization of priority papers with the help of our 
Digitizing Partners. Initial efforts are focused here while simul-
taneously providing encouragement, guidance, and support to 
others interested in digitizing Catholic papers. 

 • The Catholic News Archive (https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org) 

The Archive has thousands of newspaper pages, from different 
cities, over multiple years... and the collection is growing. The Archive 
has a robust search mechanism, allowing you to search just one paper, 
one year, or across years and papers, on any keywords, freely avail-
able to all.

Titles in the Archive include diocesan papers from Cincinnati, 
New Orleans, San Francisco, St. Louis, Newark, NJ, Philadelphia, 
Pittsburgh, Hartford, CT, and Miami. National titles include National 
Catholic Reporter and, thanks to generous grant funding from the 
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the full run of the Catho-
lic News Service newsfeeds, 1920-1970; and the visual complement to 
the newsfeeds, The Catholic World in Pictures. Digitization of The Catho-
lic Worker is in progress.

A sample page from the Archive (see Fig. 1) showing a search result 
for “Dorothy Day” illuminates the simplicity and power of the Archive.  
From this page, the user can download a PDF of the article, the issue, or 
just the text. Users can search any term(s), which are then highlighted in 

https://www.catholicresearch.org/catholic-newspapers-online
https://www.catholicresearch.org/catholic-newspapers-online
https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org


256  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

the results. The Archive includes a text correction module, which allows 
collaborative correction of the digitized text from which search terms 
are identified, thus making for more effective and complete results.

FIGURE 1 Article on “Dorothy Day” from the Catholic Transcript in the Catholic News 
Archive

The Newspapers Program continues to grow in support of the goal 
to provide access to all extant Catholic newspapers published in North 
America. With the work of the CRRA community and beyond, a rich 
resource for discovering firsthand news of the Catholic experience 
through its newspapers has been realized, along with a commitment 
to preservation of the content in perpetuity. In the meantime, CRRA’s 
continued commitment to its first project, the Catholic Portal, contin-
ues also to develop as a widely used and important asset in furthering 
CRRA’s mission to provide enduring global access to Catholic research 
resources. 

THE CATHOLIC PORTAL

The Catholic Research Resources Portal, or “Catholic Portal,” provides 
global, freely available access to rare, unique and/or uncommon mate-
rials in libraries, seminaries, special collections, and archives. By elec-
tronically bringing together resources in many formats from many 
collections, the Portal enables easy, effective, and global discovery of 
Catholic research resources.

The Portal is a core component of the CRRA’s mission and pres-
ently contains records to rare and unique member-held resources in 



Listen and Learn Sessions  257

all formats, with a growing number of resources available in digital 
form, or “full text items.” The Portal (https://www.catholicresearch.
org) is searchable from any page and includes (as of September 26, 
2018) more than 143,000 member-contributed records describing 
rare and unique holdings of all formats, including archival materi-
als, books, cassettes, and online materials.  Of those 143,000 records, 
46,000 or 32% of the total, take the user to the full text version of the 
item, by simply checking the “Limit to full text” box in the upper right 
hand corner of the page (see Fig. 3).

CRRA is fortunate to have a team of individuals working behind 
the scenes to make the Portal a truly robust and innovate discovery 
system. A special shout-out for being the creative geniuses behind 
the scenes goes to Demian Katz of Villanova University and Eric Lease 

FIGURE 2 Search the Portal from any page https://www.catholicresearch.org

FIGURE 3 Limiting to full text results in the Portal 

https://www.catholicresearch.org
https://www.catholicresearch.org
https://www.catholicresearch.org


258  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Morgan and Kevin Cawley of the University of Notre Dame. Two note-
worthy innovations include the ability to search the entire text of 
finding aids in the Portal by keyword, and text mining applications.

Within the Portal, all finding aids that are available from a linked 
URL are fully indexed by the Solr/Lucene indexer, and therefore any 
keyword in the finding aid is searchable and retrievable. The power of 
this innovation cannot be overstated and a simple anecdote illuminates.

Stephanie Shreffler, Collections Librarian/Archivist at the Roesch 
Library of the University of Dayton, conveyed the story of assisting a 
scholar in his research on an American mystic, Cora Evans. Material 
on Evans was not abundant, and the scholar had been unsuccessful 
in locating materials in the local catalog. When Shreffler suggested 
he try the Portal, he found that Dayton did have information about 
Evans (Figure 4). The finding aid was listed in the Dayton catalog but 
was only findable in the Portal, due to the power of fully indexing all 
words in the finding aid.  

Another Portal innovation, spearheaded by Eric Lease Morgan 
of the University of Notre Dame, is text mining. Taking Catholic 
pamphlets at the University of Notre Dame as his test collection, Eric 
provided text mining for the pamphlets. At a glance, the user can see 
what words are prominent in the text (see Figure 5), and where within 
the text they occur (Figure 6), making it an effective tool in helping 
users to grasp quickly the emphases of the document. 

FIGURE 4 Search for “Cora Evans” retrieves Dayton finding aid in the Portal



Listen and Learn Sessions  259

Figure 6 shows a mapping of the fifty most frequently used words 
in the text, shown with sixty letters around each term. The map in 
the upper right hand corner shows where within the text the words 
occur. As we can see from this map, the majority of occurrences of the 
word “work” appear about 70% of the way through the book. A reader 
interested in this particular topic could then immediately flip to page 
45 or so and be assured of finding material on the topic of interest. 

In addition to robust search, retrieval, and display of information 
within the Portal, there are carefully curated subject guides that focus 
on topics of interest (Figure 7). Ted Bergfelt of Duquesne University 
has created and generously contributed many of the CRRA guides. 
Guides include African-American Catholics, Catholic Social Action, 
and Digital Catholica, to name just a few.

FIGURE 5 Catholic Pamphlet The Gospel in Action and word occurrences in the text 
using text mining techniques

FIGURE 6 Word counts for The Gospel in Action by Dorothy Day



260  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

CRRA continues to grow its services and maintains its commitment 
to making its services and products freely available. Membership 
in CRRA provides a unique opportunity to meet new colleagues and 
participate in a vision to provide enduring global access to Catholic 
research resources. Explore our Portal and Catholic News Archive, 
and like us on Facebook! Drop us a note and let us know how we might 
improve our services and how to serve better serve the needs of schol-
ars and users of Catholic content.

ENDNOTES

1 “CRRA: Moving toward broader implementation. Joint Sessions 
Metadata/Collections Committees. Thurs., Nov. 1-Fri., Nov. 2, 
2007. Minutes.”

2 “CRRA Strategic Plan. Loyola University Chicago. July 14-15, 
2009,” 1.

3 “Prospectus on the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. Janu-
ary 2007,” 2.

4 “Catholic Research Resources Initiative,” Agenda, Wednesday, 
November 29-Thursday, November 30, 2006.

5 “Loyola CRRA Meeting Minutes. Location: Information 
Commons, Loyola University of Chicago. July 14-15, 2009,” 5-6.

FIGURE 7 Subject Guides in the Portal


