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“I’m Writing a Sermon…”
Reference and Instruction Services for Alumni 
at Pitts Theology Library
Brady A. Beard, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology
Anne Marie McLean, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology

ABSTR ACT “I’m writing a sermon…” prefaces most of the ques-
tions that come to the Pitts Theology Library Reference Desk from 
alumni. Candler School of Theology alumni regularly return to the 
library to inquire about the resources and databases that remain 
available to them through Emory University Libraries in their new 
ministerial settings. In addition to these one-off reference interac-
tions, Pitts librarians also engage with alumni through a variety of 
means, including outreach and events, instruction, and graduation 
preparation and celebrations. During the academic years of 2019–
20 and 2020–21, however, alumni needs and requests increased 
and transformed as public libraries closed in-person services and 
university campuses were limited to currently enrolled students 
and faculty. This paper will explore the evolving needs of seminary 
alumni brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which 
Pitts witnessed and managed an uptick in requests for access to 
collections, library spaces, and online databases.

INTRODUCTION

It is not unusual for theological libraries to have robust relationships 
with their institutional alumni. The professionalization that results 
from formal theological training necessarily results in close rela-
tionships between certain alumni, like clergy and community lead-
ers, and their alma mater library. This relationship comes from the 
information needs these users face as a necessity of their education, 
work, and increasingly, the chronic lack of funding for educational 
resources in ministerial and non-profit settings. Often the types of 
needs look something like the below:



Listen and Learn Sessions  261

• “I am preaching this Sunday for a Blue Christmas service and I 
need some Commentary and/or context information.” Dec 15, 
2020. 

• “How do I do biblical research online?” Feb 25, 2021.
• “Would it be possible for me to borrow books for a preaching 

class through the UMC?” April 13, 2021
• “When will the library be open to alumni (fully vaccinated)?” 

May 3, 2021

None of these questions are necessarily unique or surprising, but 
they all can be framed within different aspects of the services that a 
theological library might provide. Several of the questions pertain to 
the actual collections and circulating materials that someone might 
require. Others focus more on needs related to navigating the realm 
of information literacy or accessing space to read, do research, exist, 
etc. Under “regular” circumstances, these types of requests would 
have been handled like any other request that came in from students 
or community/affiliate visitors (i.e., requiring a visit to the library 
for access). Access restrictions due to COVID-19, however, inspired 
a new approach to alumni benefits not as resources they would lose, 
but as accessible tools they would gain post-seminary. 

This paper will discuss the former standard alumni services that 
were offered at Pitts Theology Library, identify challenges that arose 
during the COVID-19 pandemic, and offer a few reflections on what 
Reference and Instruction Librarians have learned and how we 
expect to move forward in the coming weeks and months. Our hope 
is that this discussion will open avenues of conversation for us today 
and beyond these proceedings by suggesting that in order to meet 
their own missions, theological libraries ought to begin thinking 
about alumni users—and not just their own alumni—as a distinct 
user base and resource within their own communities. 

FORMER PARADIGM

In previous attempts to support alumni, most of the library’s 
approaches were anticipatory and prescriptive. That is to say, librar-
ians spent most of their time preparing currently enrolled students 
for the transition to alumni status as commencement approached. 
This included warning them of access restrictions (especially as it 
relates to online resources), but also preparing them to think about 



262  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

what their own needs might be based on their trajectories outside 
of seminary. Ultimately, the goal here was to prepare graduates to 
function independently, apart from library support, while gently and 
subtlety reminding them that their library privileges extend beyond 
their graduation. This anticipatory support showed itself in three 
primary ways: through spring workshops, promotional material 
for graduation, and the subscription-based library newsletter that 
would advertise events, exhibits, and other library related news in 
addition to social media. 

The first workshop offered was not promoted at future alumni 
directly, but instead focused on ways that students and alumni can 
build their own personal libraries reasonably. Historically, this work-
shop focused on building a theological library for less than $200 
dollars, but more recently focuses on training students to think about 
what types of materials they will need in the future (commentaries, 
primary sources, pastoral care handbooks, etc.), and offering them 
strategies to go about building this library before they graduate. This 
includes making judicious use of syllabi, assigned and recommended 
readings, sharing purchases, learning to identify their public librar-
ies and services, finding alternatives to cost-prohibitive items, eval-
uating web-resources, and best practices for finding used books. 
Increasingly, however, students are interested in finding cheap 
or no-cost online alternatives, building professional networks to 
share resources/costs, and identifying avenues for finding good 
deals directly from publishers. Several have recently asked about the 
book review process and what it takes to get review copies through 
publishers. 

Increasingly we use this as a time to discuss a variety of open-
access journals and repositories, and to discuss other resources like 
Working Preacher, politicaltheology.com, syndicate.network, and our 
own LibGuides. This is also an opportunity for us to remind students 
about the necessity of thinking critically about online resources. 

The library’s “Accessing Alumni Resources” session is specifi-
cally designed for graduating students with the intent of generating 
enough interest and questions to continue drawing the users back 
to the library. In this session, we introduce students to the electronic 
resources and databases that will be available to them as alumni, 
explain borrowing privileges and processes, and, perhaps most 
importantly, explain the Kafkaesque process by which students get 
assigned an alumni number and card. Finally, we emphasize the 



Listen and Learn Sessions  263

limits of alumni privileges and encourage them to come use our 
services in person as often as possible. 

Additionally, Pitts provides promotional material to graduating 
students via the graduation packet given to each graduating student. 
This includes a postcard with instructions and websites for setting 
up their alumni account, accessing electronic resources, and getting 
materials from the library, in addition to a simpler bookmark with 
Pitts branding, images, and the main URL.  These cards are also avail-
able in the library throughout the year, and we incorporate them 
into our in-person workshops and freebie giveaways. 

Finally, throughout the year, but especially during the buildup to 
commencement, we encourage newly minted alumni to stay in touch 
with the library by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, the Pitts 
Prospectus, and following the library on social media. This newslet-
ter is one of the major ways that Pitts communicates to non-enrolled 
patrons and community members regarding upcoming events, new 
acquisitions, user services, and other library-related news. 

COVID RESOURCES

It goes without saying that the last year of pandemic lockdowns, 
restricted campus access, and the safety of library staff and patrons 
forced us to rethink our traditional alumni services. 

First, during the shift from in-person to digital platforms, we 
had to decide how to best preserve and reformat the two previ-
ously mentioned workshops. Immediately after spring break when 
students did not return to campus, we had a little under two months 
to sort, strategize, and redeploy this information. Knowing that it 
would be necessary to rethink our entire instructional approach as 
the pandemic heightened helped us to rethink not only what to do, 
but why, and to reconsider our instructional audience. With this in 
mind we revamped the entire workshop and focused on supporting 
the needs of all alumni and not just those recently graduated. This 
resulted in a distinct paradigm shift of moving from what resources 
alumni would lose to highlighting what they could gain through 
digital options, open-access resources, and other non-traditional 
workarounds.

Pitts spearheaded the adoption of a new, more robust webinar 
software, BigMarker, as an alternative to Zoom classes (from which 
the students were fatigued). When we first ran the (live) “Alumni 



264  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

Access” webinar, we had 80 participants registered, of which 35 were 
graduating seniors for 2020. Because we set up the webinar to be as 

“evergreen” as possible we were able to run it again this academic 
year. Between the first time we ran the webinar and the second 
time, the page itself has had 191 views. The most recent version of 
the webinar, which can be accessed on demand, had 20 registrants 
and 9 participants. The webinar is also available on YouTube, which 
allows us to distribute the webinar widely with a Creative Commons 
Attribution.

Previous in-person workshops on alumni resources were limited 
by space and busy schedules, meaning participation never exceeded 
more than 10-15 students. The dramatic increase of participants in 
our 2020 virtual workshop revealed that alumni around the nation 
and beyond could be a viable part of the instructional programing at 
Pitts if we could only figure out a way to bring the program to them 
instead of “welcoming alumni” back to campus. With this in mind 
we began to prepare all of our events with alumni in mind as a user 
group and became cautious of just assuming that alumni would 
participate as general “community members,” a point to which I 
will return momentarily. 

Finally, we’d like to note two additional resources that became 
increasingly important in providing services to our alumni during 
the pandemic. First, the number of alumni requests that came to the 
reference desk through LibAnswers or LibChat remained at compa-
rable levels to the years before the pandemic, but when adjusted for 
the overall numbers, they became a much larger percentage of our 
virtual support scaffolding. While we are still seeking evidence to 
explain the change, we suspect that this higher-than-average turnout 
was in part the result of closures and restrictions on public libraries, 
professional isolation, and other limitations. 

Secondly, we found that part of what alumni patrons were look-
ing for were guides and information services regarding where and 
how to find resources instead of just identifying the resources them-
selves. Having a robust set of resources from LibGuides to live webi-
nars to a video library on YouTube provided us with a quick set of 
materials to direct patrons to. These sorts of resources helped us to 
serve patrons when we ourselves had restricted access to campus, 
but they also gave us a touch point for continued engagement and a 
new approach to information literacy in the wider community.  



Listen and Learn Sessions  265

LOOKING FORWARD

As we look forward to what library services around instruction and 
reference will look like in the post-pandemic world, we’ve come to 
a number of considerations that will continue to affect our services 
for alumni users. First, alumni users will likely continue to engage 
the library from all over the nation and even the world. This presents 
unique challenges on a number of fronts. While Pitts has been able 
to secure some rights for e-books and other digital repositories, the 
alumni and libraries will continue to face significant hurdles in using 
them. Not only are e-books limited through publisher-determined 
access and high cost, but they’re also difficult technically to provide 
via proper authentication. Second, alumni face challenges navigat-
ing the information landscape as church budgets are tightened, the 
perception of “free” online resources proliferate, and ministerial 
and non-profit contexts continue to evolve in the gig economy. Third, 
the work facing faith and community leaders, the alumni of many 
of our institutions, continues to take place in the midst of growing 
religious and information illiteracy. Many leaders are simply not 
prepared to address the information concerns that they will face in 
their communities. 

We don’t intend for these issues to sound dire or overly dramatic, 
but to instead view this as an opportunity for theological libraries 
and librarians to meet head-on. As we at Pitts Theology Library think 
through these issues and what they mean in an era of austerity and 
dwindling library budgets, we accept the challenges as an opportu-
nity to demonstrate to our institutions and communities the mission 
and skill that we hold as libraries. In short, we believe that the chal-
lenges alumni face provide a unique opportunity to which seminar-
ies must respond, and libraries might be the best-primed wing of our 
institutions to contribute.

SOLUTION

There are four essential areas that we want to address in terms of a 
library response to the needs of our alumni patrons. As reference, 
instruction, and outreach librarians, we believe that the challenges 
that the last year raised to the surface are best met by expanding a 
vision of our work and service beyond the needs of our immediate 



266  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

students and faculty and to imagine our alumni users as a defined 
user group with distinct needs. 

1) Short of a miraculous windfall, either on the side of unlimited 
institutional funding or extensive changes from the publisher 
and access side of materials, there isn’t much that libraries 
can do to address the digital and electronic resource short-
age available to alumni. However, we can engage in teaching 
alumni, current students, and faculty about resources that 
may be available to them. Much of this work many librar-
ians already do on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Here, we can 
focus our efforts on publicizing open-access works like the 
journals Religions, Metatron, and The Journal of Hebrew Scrip-
tures. Likewise, we can find ways to incorporate open, schol-
arly websites like BibleOdyssey, Ancient Jew Review, syndicate.
theology, the Marginalia Review of Books, and Practical 
Matters. Additionally, as we engage with alumni, we can point 
them toward open-access digital repositories like the Atla 
Digital Library, OADTL, OA works through the ACLS Humani-
ties Ebook project, and the Internet Archive. By prioritizing 
these resources and embedding them within our teaching and 
instruction, we can continue to normalize their role beyond 
the seminary campus. Connected to this issue is the impor-
tance of continuing to champion OER projects with teaching 
faculty and to promote their open-access publications when 
we can. At Pitts, we are currently in the process of assess-
ing and building a single depository of alumni resources that 
contains open-access resources alongside curated digital tools 
and electronic resources that alumni continue to have access 
to through Emory University. 

2) We believe that one of the best things we can take advantage 
of after the pandemic is our attention toward digital webinars 
and online events. Both instances of our digital Alumni Access 
webinar were among the best-attended workshops in our 
records, and the first event with 80 registered attendees is our 
highest-attended “regular” event by a mile. Though it seems 
quite obvious now, we believe that one of the most effective 
ways to engage alumni is by continuing to offer digital events 
and services catered toward their needs. We are even in the 
process of exploring an occasional synchronous event as a 
way to provide the mutuality that comes by studying together 



Listen and Learn Sessions  267

in a library. Outreach is inherently anything we do to reach 
beyond the walls of our institution, and our product is not 
books but people, expertise, and service (Ford et al. 2009). In 
order to provide our product, we must first reach our users. 
This requires fostering relationships and building community 
beyond the seminary campus. 

3) Expand our definition of user groups to include alumni, and 
potentially alumni from other institutions, as a distinct set of 
users with particular needs. While they may not be students, 
seminary alumni are also a distinct group of users from a 
general community user group. Whether or not an individual 
attended Candler School of Theology, they likely have some 
recourse with theological research, a level of professionaliza-
tion that will likely require more than a Google search when 
accessing information, and an ability to navigate the deep 
world of theological study. But alumni also have needs distinct 
from those of our enrolled students. For instance, they may be 
several hundred miles from the nearest college or university 
library, let alone a theological library, and, if they serve in a 
rural area or small town, they may also be in need of a point 
of contact with the many resources beyond books that librar-
ies provide. By turning our attention to alumni as distinct 
user groups and working with advancement offices, alumni 
groups, and area denominations and clergy, libraries may find 
additional areas to justify their existence outside of relatively 
small student bodies. This, however, requires that we begin to 
reimagine our user groups and work actively to build connec-
tions beyond the instructional classroom. 

4) Finally, as we rethink the user groups, areas for collabora-
tion, and our own instructional and reference practices, we 
would do well to remember that many of our alumni, by 
definition of their time in seminary, careers, and needs, are 
lifelong learners. Rather than being like community visi-
tors who may use the library space in a more informal way 
for personal research needs, alumni are like adult virtual 
learners who require support for the learning and research 
process from places or in situations that limit their abilities 
to come through the library doors. One way is to think of our 
alumni is as lifelong learners, by which I mean adults within 
a workforce who are constantly adapting to a changing world 



268  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

(Nordin, Embi, and Yunus 2010). The needs of such individu-
als are not incidental, but relate to the deliberate attempts to 
access, understand, and synthesize knowledge. By connect-
ing lifelong learning to “mobile learning” (Nordin, Embi, and 
Yunus 2010, 132), the process of learning as it is mediated by 
computers or other machines, we understand that we must 
rethink how alumni access library resources and what they 
expect when they come to us. In other words, it’s not enough 
to simply treat their needs in the same mode as serving our 
enrolled students. By positioning our alumni as learners 
within a learning process, we can begin to understand how 
we have been responding to their needs (in the case of Pitts, 
formerly engaging in knowledge-centered instruction) and 
move toward other potentially better responses—a learner-
centered approach for instance (Nordin, Embi, and Yunus 
2020, 132-33). As digital learning continues to reform theologi-
cal education and provides access to those who would have 
otherwise been left out of higher theological learning, we 
must also rethink our strategies to engage those beyond our 
immediate on-campus populations. Technology can help with 
this, yes, but as we heard in this year’s Atla keynote address, 
from Dr. Safiya Noble, we aren’t going to click our way out of 
the challenges that we face; as people seek knowledge digi-
tally either in the classroom or after it, librarians must also be 
there to support that learning.  

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, it’s safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic forced 
us to do more than think about how we were addressing the learn-
ing needs of our currently enrolled students, but as the pandemic 
lingered and the traditional resources and supports became increas-
ingly unavailable, we found that we were poised to respond to the 
needs of a new patron base, namely our alumni, not by adding to 
our already full plates, but by rethinking what we were doing, for 
whom, and what the future of alumni engagement post-pandemic 
could look like. 



Listen and Learn Sessions  269

WORKS CITED

Ford, Emily. 2009. “Outreach Is (Un)Dead.” In the Library with the 
Lead Pipe (blog), September 2, 2009. https://www.inthelibrary-
withtheleadpipe.org/2009/outreach-is-undead/.

Nordin, Norazah, Mohamed Amin Embi, and Melor Md. Yunus. 2010. 
“Mobile Learning Framework for Lifelong Learning.” Proce-
dia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 7 (2010): 130–38. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.10.019.


