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PAPERS

A Collaborative Future within Atla
How Theological Libraries Must Work 
Together in the Digital Age
Richard Manly Adams, Jr., Pitts Theology Library at Candler School of Theology

ABSTR AC T: In a post-pandemic, digital world, collaboration 
between libraries and librarians is more important than ever. This 
essay argues that Atla members should look to the Association itself 
as a way of working together. I proceed first by outlining the great 
history of the Association as a collaborative space for its members, 
highlighting three past successes. I then apply the four causes of 
success from these past projects to the challenges we face in a digi-
tal age that has been disrupted by the pandemic. I explore how Atla 
libraries can collaborate on collection development, digitization, 
and information literacy instruction, and what the opportunities 
and limits of working together may be.

By now, Atla members are likely becoming accustomed to the name 
change of our organization. In 2019, the Atla board approved a new 
brand system and changed the name of the organization from the 
American Theological Library Association, its name when founded 
in 1946, to Atla (Bartholomew 2019). Regardless of what one may 
think about the name, the logo, or the new branding, I find certain 
logic to the name change. The former name, the American Theologi-
cal Library Association, is limiting and does not reflect the member-
ship and the work of the organization. “American” is not reflective 
of membership or the “diverse global community” the organization 
seeks to foster. “Theological” is a remnant of the past, when original 



16  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

members supported Christian schools of theology, and now members 
support much broader domains of learning. Even the term “library” 
is problematic, since membership includes museums, archives, and 
other information institutions. 

I want to pause for a minute this afternoon and think about the 
final “A” in the old name: “Association.” What do we mean by refer-
ring to ourselves as “an association,” and is that designation one 
that we want to continue, even in a newly branded world? How 
and for what purpose do we, the membership of Atla, associate? My 
argument in this essay is quite simple, perhaps even obvious: This 

“association” is more important than ever in this digital and post-
pandemic world. For us to survive and thrive as individual librar-
ies and librarians, we must work together. Fortunately, our shared 
association, Atla, has a long history of successful collaboration, of 
libraries and librarians coming together and uniting their unique 
skills, collections, and ideas, to tackle problems facing all libraries. 
And, therefore, my argument might be understood simply as a call 
to reclaim our roots, to double down on our collaborative nature.

My approach to explore this “association” in this essay falls into 
two sections, one descriptive and one prescriptive. I spend some 
time looking at highlights in the association’s past, with hopes to 
draw lessons from those who came before. Then I turn to offer some 
thoughts on the challenges now facing our libraries with sugges-
tions for how members can work together to achieve the same type 
of success. I frame our conversation around three broad areas of 
librarianship that have been and will continue to present some of 
our greatest challenges as individual libraries and greatest oppor-
tunities as an association: information literacy, preservation and 
access, and collection development. 

In telling the history of our organization from its inception in 
1946 to 1996, Elmer and Betty O’Brien note, “Within two years of its 
founding, seventy-six percent of seminary libraries affiliated with 
the AATS had joined, and a united attack on theological library prob-
lems had begun” (O’Brien 1996, 8). I like that phrase, “a united attack 
on theological library problems.” Such problems are very different 
now than they were in 1946 or even 1996. But given that we are in 
the midst of our 75th anniversary as an association, I would like to 
spend the rest of our time today looking at that development of our 
challenges and to propose a few ways we all can launch anew our 

“united attack on theological library problems.”



Papers  17

“ASSOCIATION” THROUGHOUT OUR HISTORY

Atla members are blessed to have ready access to the association’s 
history through several published volumes. I encourage all members 
to mine the treasures that are the two major publications on Atla’s 
history, both available as open-access e-books via Atla’s website 
(Graham 1996 and McMahon 2006). In these volumes, as well as 
throughout the proceedings of the annual Atla conference, members 
can learn about the origins of this term “association” and its histori-
cal meaning for member libraries and librarians.

The original constitution of the Association states a number of 
purposes for this first association: “The purpose of the Association 
shall be to bring its members into closer working relations with each 
other; . . . to study the distinctive problems of theological seminary 
libraries, to increase the professional competence of the membership, 
and to improve the quality of library service to theological education” 
(Proposed Constitution 1947, 75). As the constitution states, much 
of the early function of the Association was about professionaliza-
tion. This work of developing a profession of theological librarian-
ship was a response to earlier studies that had identified the need 
for a systematic approach to librarianship supporting theological 
education. For example, in 1934, The Institute of Social and Religious 
Research had issued a three-volume work entitled The Education 
of American Ministers, the third volume of which, written by Mark 
May, focuses on the institutions that train ministers (May 1934). In 
his essay on theological libraries, May offered six recommendations, 
all focused on credentialing of staff and the inadequacy of budgets. 
Early on, the work of the Association was to set the standards and 
to create language and practices that would define this emerging 
subspeciality: the theological library. 

What is so remarkable about the early history of Atla, though, is 
members acting upon the charge “to study the distinctive problems 
of theological seminary libraries.” From the beginning, the member-
ship did not merely study these distinctive problems, but they got 
to the work of solving them. The Association, as early as its second 
proceedings, shows signs of creating a collaborative workspace to 
solve problems that no single member institution could solve on its 
own. The Association became a meeting ground for libraries to work 
together to solve these problems that they were all experiencing. 

Reports from the history of Atla are filled with tales of collabora-
tion between libraries on projects that mutually benefit the member-



18  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

ship. For this essay, I spend some time highlighting three, in three 
distinctive areas of librarianship, with hopes that these past successes 
can teach present members something about collaboration in our 
current age, as they face new challenges in these same three areas.

PERIODICAL INDEXING

A first example involves information literacy. Perhaps the earliest 
example of the Association’s collaborative attack on problems was 
a solution to challenges librarians had been facing with research 
and discoverability: the creation of the index to religious periodical 
literature, the precursor to the well-known Atla Religion Database. 
This history has been told with great clarity in the 1974 essay by G. 
Fay Dickerson and John A. Pelz (Dickerson and Pelz 2006). The index 
was a collaborative solution to a need identified as early as 1937 in a 
survey conducted by the Religious Books Round Table of ALA. In that 
survey, 79 librarians agreed that better indexing of religious materi-
als was essential for their work of helping students and researchers 
absorb the growing body of literature in theology. The late nine-
teenth to early twentieth century was the true adolescence period 
of theological research, particularly in North America, and scholarly 
output had simply become overwhelming for students, pastors, and 
faculty. Despite the clamoring of ALA’s membership, there was no 
organization to take on this challenge, and as Dickerson and Peltz 
note, “a full decade passed and this need was still unmet” (Dicker-
son and Pelz 2006, 298). Ten years later, the new ATLA organization 
confirmed the need through their own survey. The Religious Peri-
odical Indexing committee was appointed at the first ATLA annual 
meeting, and the first volume of the index was completed within 5 
years of the organization’s founding. This work was the product of 
collaborative research across twenty different libraries (more than 
a quarter of the membership of the new organization), and it was 
completed with no external funding, which only came later. Since 
then, the index has continued to grow to keep pace with the output 
of scholarship, and leadership, participation, and hosting of the proj-
ect has migrated across member institutions. In the very first year 
of the Association’s history, members find a wonderful example of 
what I argue is a developing trend: members identify a problem that 
no single institution can solve on its own, and through collaborative 
effort, the membership solves it together. 



Papers  19

This initial collaborative spirit is evident in another challenge 
the membership took on soon afterwards: concerns about access 
and preservation, which were met through the ATLA microfilming 
project. The history of this project has also been well documented, in 
Myron B. Chace’s article in the fifty-year anniversary volume (Chace 
1996). Collaborative microfilming grew out of two great concerns 
shared by member libraries: how libraries might access expensive 
materials in a growing field and how the publication history of theol-
ogy might be preserved long-term. For many libraries, microfilming 
was initially viewed as a way for institutions to gain “on-demand” 
access to rare and expensive publications. Increasingly, though, the 
project was also viewed as a way of preserving the legacy of theologi-
cal publications, particularly those nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century publications often printed on brittle paper. From the 1950s 
through the 1990s, members collaborated to film over 1,800 periodi-
cals and more than 30,000 monographs, securing multiple rounds of 
funding, assessing and switching between technologies, and incor-
porating feedback from dozens of institutions. Key to the success 
of this program was the shared responsibility of selecting items for 
filming, so that the resulting repository reflected the diverse output 
of theology and met the diverse needs of researchers and libraries. 
As the coordinator Raymond Morris reported, “Every member of 
the Association is in some degree responsible for determining what 
types of material are required by our Association” (Chace 1996, 52). 
Chace summarizes the effort as follows: “In establishing the first, 
large-scale (for the time) ATLA microfilming project, Morris—consis-
tent with Association values—emphasized its cooperative, member-
directed character” (Chace 1996, 49).

The results of this member-directed project are remarkable. Most 
theological librarians have been the beneficiaries of this work, either 
in their own research or in their work supporting the research of 
patrons. Thanks to this collaborative effort, an entire generation of 
theological scholarship is preserved and accessible. 

A third successful collaboration was one focused on collection 
development. One of the consistent problems identified at early ATLA 
meetings was inadequate acquisition budgets. This was another 
problem that our association was successful at attacking collabora-
tively. Consider these stats, reported by Paul Stuehrenberg about 
library acquisition budgets in the 1950s and 1960s: “The average 
expenditure that year [1956/57] was $5,960. For 1961/62, the first 



20  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

year of the Program, the expenditures on books and periodicals of 
the twelve top participating libraries averaged $16,857; by 1964/65 
that average had increased to $39,710” (Stuehrenberg 1996, 61).

This “program” to which Stuehrenberg refers is the ATLA Library 
Development Program, a collaboration between ATLA and the Seal-
antic Fund, an organization that had already financially supported 
ATLA’s work. Spearheaded by Raymond Morris of Yale Divinity 
School Library, the program was designed to provide matching funds, 
up to $2,000 per year, to seminaries that grew their library acquisi-
tions budget. The response was overwhelming, and the full $875,000 
grant, planned for five years, was spent in just three, though it was 
eventually funded for an additional two years. The result of this infu-
sion of acquisition funds was a growth in acquisitions, but growth far 
beyond the amount donated by Sealantic. Indeed, the impact of this 
grant went far beyond the influx of acquisition funds. Such an inno-
vative program had the effect of opening up seminary administrators 
to the idea of building a strong library as a core part of the educa-
tional mission of schools. As Stuehrenberg reports, “During that five-
year period the level of institutional support for theological libraries 
was increased dramatically; irreversibly so, as it proved to be. … Not 
only had the libraries been enabled to purchase several thousand 
volumes they otherwise would have been unable to acquire, semi-
naries dramatically increased their continuing commitments to 
their libraries, both in terms of acquisitions budgets and in overall 
expenditures for library support. There was no going back” (Stueh-
renberg 1996, 64).

Offering careful reflection on this project, one of the most success-
ful in our Association’s history, Stuehrenberg offers four helpful 
lessons for ATLA members:

1) Involve as Many Members as Possible—Close to 100% of ATLA 
member libraries participated in the program;

2) Leverage Existing Resources—The program used the grant to 
raise local money;

3) Allow Decentralized Decision-Making—Member libraries 
decided what they needed to collect in their local contexts;

4) Know When Enough is Enough—Morris cut the program off 
after five years so libraries would not become dependent 
upon it for acquisitions (Stuehrenberg 1996, 65).



Papers  21

These three collaborative solutions to challenging problems of 
information literacy, preservation and access, and collection devel-
opment represent the hallmark of our Association. While Atla contin-
ues to provide a forum for defining and advocating for best practices, 
and while the professionalization function of Atla remains impor-
tant, it is this coming together, the marshalling of talents and human 
power across institutions to solve problems, that is the remarkable 
legacy of the Association. The heart of this organization has not only 
been the formulation of best practices around credentialing, budget-
ing, cataloging, etc. Members have also, from the beginning, iden-
tified problems the solution to which lies beyond the capacity of a 
single library, and they have partnered together to harness the capac-
ity and talent of members to provide solutions that benefit all. The 
martial language of the O’Briens, quoted earlier is apt: Atla members 
have attacked the theological library problems; and indeed collec-
tions, discovery tools, and joint ventures speak to these successes. 
The Association has been most successful in joint ventures when 
working with a diverse group of collaborators and being strategic in 
the form of that collaboration. This is key, particularly in the present 
context in which there is a lot of talk about collaboration. We know 
we are called as librarians to collaborate. The question is, “Why and 
how are we working together?”

To drive this focus on strategy, I return to these four lessons that 
Paul Stuehrenberg identified when reporting on the ATLA Library 
Development program. I argue these four serve as a key to develop-
ing strategic collaboration for Atla moving forward:

1) Involve as Many Members as Possible
2) Leverage Existing Resources
3) Allow Decentralized Decision-Making
4) Know When Enough is Enough

Each of these four could be applied to the periodical index work 
or the microfilming project as easily as Stuehrenberg applied them 
to the library development program. And so, as I turn now to look 
at future opportunities for collaboration in these same areas, I use 
those four as a heuristic device to outline how, in the face of real 
challenges to our work, we can best collaborate to succeed together. 



22  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

Given this past as our prelude, I turn now to argue for continuing 
Atla’s tradition of a united attack on theological library problems. To 
do so, of course, I have to start by asking, “What are the theological 
library problems that we need to attack?” There are plenty to choose 
from, of course. As we turn to look at the future, there are two domi-
nant disruptors that influence any challenge against which we will 
mount a “united attack.” Both disruptors may seem obvious, but I 
believe both need thoughtful and critical reflection.

The first disruption is the proliferation of digital technologies and 
the digital mode of work in libraries. The rise of the digital affects 
all aspects of library work, from collection development, with the 
growing demand and availability of electronic resources, to library 
instruction, with growth of evergreen content like LibGuides and 
virtual classrooms, to library outreach, with digital exhibitions and 
virtual events, to entire new areas of librarianship, such as digitiza-
tion and digital scholarship. In addition, patrons are increasingly 
more digital natives than digital immigrants, and thus they have 
certain expectations about access. Digital tools, texts, and methods 
provide opportunities for librarians to work together, but they also 
complexify the work, demand new skills in librarians’ toolboxes, and 
threaten to pull all librarians away from the core mission for which 
they were trained.

The second disruption is more immediate: the pandemic all have 
endured and continue to endure. All likely recognize that this past 
year of pandemic is a point of inflection for all aspects of our society, 
certainly higher education, and most certainly the work of libraries. 
As librarians have had to adapt just about every part of the patron 
service model, the question of what to keep from pandemic times and 
what to get rid of is one I fear many are making too quickly. That is, 
many are rushing out of the pandemic just as quickly as they were 
forced to rush in. 

I find it most helpful to think about the pandemic as a catalyst 
for change that was already underway. The long tail effects of the 
pandemic are multiple. Budgets, of course, which were already tight, 
will suffer from the pandemic. This is not only a short-term crisis, but 
I imagine few of us are optimistic about those funds ever returning. 
The change in instruction models, curricula, and modes of degree 
delivery are also accelerated due to the pandemic. What seminary 
is not considering an online or hybrid MDiv, and thus what library 



Papers  23

is not being forced to consider how to deliver high-quality resources 
to patrons spread around the country or around the world?

In many ways, the pandemic and the digital age present the 
perfect storm of disruption heading our way, and no aspect of our 
work will be untouched by them. In what follows, therefore, I take 
the three areas considered in the discussion of Atla’s history—collec-
tion development, access and preservation, and discoverability/
info literacy—and I look at problems librarians are sure to face in 
the coming years, particularly as the impacts of the digital and the 
pandemic become clearer. 

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

I begin where Paul F. Stuehrenberg was working: how librarians 
build collections in this digital age. The persistent challenge of build-
ing collections is exacerbated by both the digital and the pandemic. 
Building a library collection has always been a balance between the 
ideals of preservation and access, on the one hand, and the logisti-
cal limits of local budgets and capacity, on the other. The narrative 
of academic libraries in the twentieth century presents a struggle 
between these poles. Complaining about limited budgets is nothing 
new for modern librarians, of course. With limited budgets, libraries 
are forced to choose between collecting wide and collecting deeply, or 
between acting as preservation repositories or points of access. The 
understandable tendency in such situations is to prioritize current 
access and curricular need over historical preservation. That is, in 
the face of tight budgets, we build our library for the researcher in 
front of us, not the researcher fifty years from now. The result can 
be highly idiosyncratic collections. As a 2001 report from CLIR notes, 

“Research libraries, no matter how large, collect only a small portion 
of all the information created and disseminated at any given time. In 
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most academic librar-
ies were shaped directly by the research needs of their faculties. This 
resulted in some very rich veins of bibliographical ore, but it also 
generally produced holdings that were deep, but not broad, in cover-
age” (Nichols and Smith 2001, 83). Thankfully, libraries have in place 
systems to account for this challenge. Interlibrary loan, of course, is 
the shining example, affording libraries access to collections around 
the world. But the pandemic and the rise in digital access demand 
exacerbates what was already a troubling trend in collection devel-



24  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

opment. Sara Morris and Jenny Presnell start a particularly impor-
tant article on collection development, written pre-pandemic by 
the way, with the line, “The new realities of academic libraries are 
limited space, complicated access models, shrinking budgets with 
competing interests in print as well as electronic, and increasing 
demands by users for digital and instantaneous access” (Morris and 
Presnell 2019, 379).

It is this last point raised by Morris and Presnell that has me 
particularly concerned in the present context. Not only does the 
pandemic have the likely effect of squeezing collection budgets even 
more, if such a thing were possible, but the push for emergency digi-
tal access, accelerated by the inertia of remote learning and distance 
education, has forced many libraries into investing in electronic 
resources, often at the expense of purchasing fewer print collec-
tions. As more users demand e-books, and as increased demand to 
support remote learning presses us toward e-books, tried and true 
solutions like ILL may not be a sustainable. As Morris and Presnell 
note, “As we shift to more e-books, the magnitude of this problem 
will only increase. Some consortial e-book models do provide shar-
ing among the members, but nonmembers cannot borrow the title. 
Librarians must remember that what you do not own, you cannot 
control” (Morris and Presnell 2019, 381).

Demands on tighter budgets and a growing patron base spread 
around the country also places pressure on libraries to save space 
and processing costs by weeding physical collections, focusing capac-
ity on materials that serve the present patron or redeploying library 
shelf space as offices or classrooms. Few libraries are afforded the 
luxury of collecting for posterity. The 1970s reference book does not 
present the current state of research, so the librarian’s tendency, 
under tightened constraints, is to free up shelf space and get rid of it. 
I foresee this collection development challenge as one of the defin-
ing ones for our coming age. So, how is Atla to collaborate to attack 
this problem? 

It would be folly to propose a single solution that is going to solve 
these challenges. I do, however, find that running collection devel-
opment through Stuehrenberg’s four points helps us formulate a 
strategy.

First, in collection development, we should “involve as many 
members as possible.” With collection development, collaboration 
is going to be key, as we are increasingly reliant on one another for 



Papers  25

shared collections. Not only should we be sharing collection devel-
opment policies, but we should also be considering the sharing of 
resources when we make decisions about print versus electronic 
purchases. In addition, when weeding collections, we should recog-
nize that most theology libraries are weeding the same theology 
collections, and thus there is a preservation danger, particularly if 
we start to make weeding decisions based solely on recent use. One 
might imagine Methodist libraries ending subscriptions to Baptist 
print periodicals without a conversation with Baptist institutions 
about whether someone will be able to provide access to the title in 
question. We must broaden our conversations about our collections 
and shift our purview away from considering ourselves as isolated 
repositories, looking only at what we can provide to our patrons, 
and consider ourselves nodes of access in conversation with our 
Atla partners to know who is collecting what and how access can 
be shared. 

Second, we must “leverage existing resources.” This conversa-
tion about collaboration on collection development prompts an 
emphasis on the local collection. If we can move into a collaborative 
space on collection development, then those idiosyncratic collect-
ing habits actually work to librarians’ advantage. Collection devel-
opment should proceed at the local library level with some sense 
of the focus and strength of our local collections and that of other 
libraries. This is certainly true of special collections, where librar-
ies have a history of narrowly focusing our collections. As budgets 
are squeezed and collection practices change in general, though, we 
need to understand who we are and what we have traditionally done 
well, and to share that with other institutions for the benefit of all.

Third, librarians should “allow decentralized decision-making.” 
Collaboration does not mean that librarians give up the local for the 
sake of the whole. Instead, we have to recognize that our interests 
are local, and we have to support our patrons, but also recognize 
that we can do this collaboratively. In my own context at Emory 
University, for example, there have been significant changes to the 
curriculum, as the mode of theological instruction and the relative 
value of different areas of study are changing. New programs, such as 
an emphasis on Muslim/Christian dialog, force my colleague Caitlin 
Soma, our acquisitions librarian, to play catch up to build a collec-
tion to support new curricular interests. I argue that libraries must 
be nimble enough to collect in new areas, but we must also be aware 



26  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

of historical collections that may support us in this effort, and we 
need to be able to rely on our partner organizations to help us when 
budgets don’t support new collections.

Finally, following Stuehrenberg, in collection development we 
must “know when enough is enough.” This to me is the important 
limit in collaborative approaches to collection development. We 
cannot allow libraries to become too dependent on consortial lend-
ing. There are core resources that your patrons need, such as refer-
ence collections. Individual libraries should focus on those. This is 
one area, I would argue, where electronic resources may be most 
valuable in providing quick and easy reference materials to my 
patrons. While I work with other libraries to understand the land-
scape of resources that may be available, I still need to develop my 
ability to serve my local patrons efficiently.

Crises present opportunities, and I believe the effects of the digital 
age magnified by the pandemic presents an incredible opportunity 
for us to move away from thinking of ourselves as silos of resources 
for our local patrons to nodes of access for a broad set of patrons. 
This will only work, though, if we carefully collaborate with one 
another.

ACCESS AND PRESERVATION

From collection development, I now turn to consider access and pres-
ervation in a post-pandemic digital age. Just as the Atla microfilming 
project helped solve a crisis of access and preservation for libraries 
in the 1950s and 1960s, so a collaborative approach to digitization 
can help us all. Technology has changed away from the microform, 
of course, but our strategy should not change; we must work together 
to grow access to the incredible resources of our libraries.

The challenge of the post-pandemic digital age is the growing 
expectation of digital access and the increasing practice of curating 
research interest based on access. The first question many patrons 
ask, particularly with regard to special collections, is whether all 
materials have been digitized. During the pandemic, this demand 
for digital access has clearly increased, and the restrictions brought 
by the pandemic have revealed a sharp divide between those institu-
tions that have digital collections and those who do not, as research 
access to special collections was removed with little or no warning. 



Papers  27

The expectation of digital access is not going to go away. Travel 
budgets for scholars will be smaller, and habits have shifted toward 
an assumption of digital access, and so the old model of a scholar 
diving into a physical archive will be less and less prevalent. The 
onus now falls to the library and its digitization team to provide 
ready access to collections, complete with quality metadata to aid 
in discovery. Otherwise, collections will have less and less impact 
each year as the digital becomes the norm and the scholar’s expecta-
tion. The challenge for librarians is not only digitizing materials, but 
exposing that metadata for discovery, the challenge of advertising 
digitally what we have available. 

To date, digitization efforts, like collection development, have 
been too much of an individual library effort. Just as libraries have 
historically raced to build up the largest repository of books, acces-
sible to local patrons, so libraries have raced to build up the largest 
repository of digital assets, discoverable by those who know the 
proper URLs and know the idiosyncrasies of particular discovery 
layers. New technologies and the immediacy of the pandemic offer 
the chance to change that, to rethink digitization practices. So, let us 
consider what digitization might look like in the future, using Stueh-
renberg’s model.

First, digitization practices should “involve as many members 
as possible.” The most immediate barrier to entry into the space of 
digitization is funding. Libraries need funding not only to digitize 
their collections, but to improve metadata, build repositories, and 
increase discoverability. This barrier is most successfully overcome 
by external funding. But in an increasingly competitive funding envi-
ronment, cross-institutional collaboration is the most successful way 
forward. As CLIR noted in 2018, “Increasingly, inter-institutional 
collaboration seems to be the way funders want their constituen-
cies to do their work. … We believe that when collecting institutions 
jointly align digitization priorities and approaches, they can provide 
broader access and more consistent service to their communities 
of users, maximizing the potential impact of sharing their collec-
tions while minimizing duplication of effort” (Banks and Williford 
2018). So, I call for Atla members to work together and write grant 
proposals that bring collections together in the digital space. Atla has 
a terrific history of coordinating grant proposals, such as the 2018 
funded project “Digitizing the Records of Philadelphia’s Historic 
Congregations,” which resulted in thousands of church records from 



28  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

Philadelphia being preserved, digitized, and ingested into the Atla 
digital library. All members should seek natural partners across the 
Association that would strengthen collections, and the membership 
should approach external funding opportunities less as competitors 
and more as partners to create more competitive proposals. 

This collaboration should cut across institutions, joining large 
and small libraries. An institution’s size may say something about its 
internal resources to pay for digitization, but it says nothing about 
the import of its collections. I encourage large institutions to look 
to smaller ones as partners, and I encourage smaller institutions to 
raise awareness about their collections so that they can participate 
in grant projects, often led by larger ones. As Latoya Devezin of CLIR 
notes, “As funding resources become scarcer, the ability to work 
cross-institutionally between small and large organizations remains 
imperative” (Devezin 2017).

Second, in digitization efforts, we should “leverage existing 
resources.” Beyond working together to secure funding to grow 
digital collections, libraries should also recognize that there is in 
place the infrastructure to grow discoverability of existing digi-
tal collections. This is yet another place where the previous work 
of Atla really benefits all of its members. The Atla Digital Library, 
which I hope all members are aware of, is an incredible resource 
that all should take advantage of. This repository allows members to 
combine digital assets into a single presentation of “theology online,” 
giving researchers greater probability of finding our digital collec-
tions. In the future, Atla may also help those institutions without 
the technical infrastructure to present digital assets through the 
repository. Even those who are already hosting their own digital 
content should contact Atla about having metadata harvested. This 
is a great opportunity to direct patrons to all of the incredible theol-
ogy resources available online.

In addition to collaborating for funding and infrastructure, librar-
ies must “allow decentralized decision-making” with regard to digiti-
zation. Even as libraries move to centralize external funding efforts 
and potentially discovery layers, they should not lose the power 
of local knowledge of collections and patrons. Each library knows 
best what is in its collections, what presents a preservation risk, and 
what patrons are demanding in digital access. We should work to 
keep those decisions at the local level, but we should advertise those 



Papers  29

decisions so that we have increased awareness of what is available 
digitally and what needs digitization.

Finally, libraries should “know when enough is enough” with 
collaborative efforts at digitization. As with anything, the danger of 
centralization is overdependence on the consortium and the loss 
of local knowledge. As Raymond Morris smartly cut off the Library 
Development Program to ensure that local institutions were investing 
in their own libraries, so I argue that collaboration should not take 
the place of local investment in equipment and human resources. 
While not every library will have the resources to create its own 
digitization lab or hire digitization specialists, every library does 
have the capacity to gain knowledge of digitization and preservation 
best practices on staff. Catalogers can learn new metadata formats 
for the digital age. Staff can learn grant-writing skills. Overall, the 
push toward the digital should be seen as motivation to update our 
skill sets as library staff, and it makes imperative the need to argue 
with administration for growing and shifting local budgets to grow 
digitization capacity. We should use the Association as a gateway to 
doing that, but we should not overlook the importance of maintain-
ing capacity at the local level, which benefits us all. 

It is rather obvious to state that digital collections are an impor-
tant part of our libraries’ future. I believe that by working together, 
in the spirit of the microfilming project of years ago, we can have 
great success in ensuring continued access to the rare treasures of 
our local libraries.

INFORMATION LITERACY

I close with what I believe may be the biggest challenge, and there-
fore the greatest opportunity, of our post-pandemic digital world: 
information literacy. As I noted in my historical review, the earliest 
collaborative project in the Association was the creation of an index 
to periodical literature, an attempt to help librarians, and in turn 
their patrons, navigate the world of theological literature in a period 
of its tremendous growth. I shudder to think what those respondents 
to the ALA survey in 1937—those who complained about the inability 
to find quality resources in theology and religious studies—would 
say about the information environment that librarians are asked to 
navigate. There has been an exponential explosion in information 
available, since the advent of the internet of course, but increasingly 



30  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

with the growth of open-access journals, self-publishing, and schol-
arship on social media. My prayers are with the librarians who have 
to help patrons sift through the millions of results returned from 
their initial Google search on topics like “Augustine” or “Eucharist” 
or “preaching.” No index of literature, no matter how systematic 
and far-reaching, could possibly be comprehensive, and even if it 
did exist, it is unlikely that patrons are going to turn to it before they 
turn to their habituated Google search.

The pandemic, or at least events coinciding with the pandemic, 
have only made this more challenging, with the whittling of trust in 
traditional authorities, the destruction of the illusion of the objective, 
disinterested reporter or scholar, and the rise of misinformation. If 
we are operating in a post-truth world, how are we to instruct our 
patrons? What role can librarians play in leading patrons to reliable 
information in theology and religious studies?

As I noted, I affirm that this is our greatest challenge, the one that 
most demands our rethinking of our traditional practices, and the 
one most in need of that attack from Atla librarians. I am not so bold 
as to suggest I have a singular answer to it, but I see ways forward 
that may be most helpful. Again, I return to Stuehrenberg’s four prin-
ciples as a way of exploring what that way forward may be.

First, efforts to teach information literacy should “involve as 
many members as possible.” Collaboration across the Association 
feels a bit strange when we talk about reference and instruction, 
but cross-library collaboration is essential. To date, collaboration 
in this area has primarily focused on the production of reference 
materials that local librarians could use in their instruction, mate-
rials like the index of periodical literature. But the digital age opens 
up opportunities to shift this model to incorporate instruction itself. 
One of the great successes of the pandemic has been libraries moving 
to virtual instruction. In my own context at Pitts Theology Library, 
our reference team, led by Brady Beard and Anne Marie McLean, 
took their entire schedule of in-person workshops, converted them 
to livestream events, and then edited them for YouTube.1 Not only is 
the content now available for all, but using our BigMarker webinar 
system, they schedule watch parties for this recorded content, where 
they are available live to chat and answer questions as patrons watch 

1  See http://pitts.emory.edu/youtube. 

http://pitts.emory.edu/youtube


Papers  31

the recording.2 What this suggests is that the brilliant content that 
each library is generating in its own local context can be shared and 
made available, so that patrons now not only have access to their 
local reference librarian, but to content generated by reference 
librarians around the world. 

With this technology in place, I would argue that we need to work 
together to avoid duplicating content, and rather rely on one another 
to provide localized content globally. Why, for example, should we 
all run the same workshop on using Zotero, when we can coordinate 
the creation of digital content, and then watch it locally alongside 
our patrons and answer their questions as they arise? 

Second, in addition to collaborating on new content, we should 
“leverage existing resources.” Many libraries have on staff refer-
ence librarians who, while they excel at the art of being a generalist 
(so essential to the role of the reference librarian), also have strong 
subject matter expertise. Members should work together to catalog 
and advertise such local expertise for the benefit of the association. 
The same is true for the content our librarians create. If there are 
LibGuides that a library’s patron base finds particularly helpful, how 
can that library advertise that availability for other libraries and 
other sets of patrons? 

This sharing of resources is particularly important as the breadth 
of content for instruction in “theology” has so expanded. Many librar-
ians are not only being asked to teach patrons how to do research 
in theology and religious studies, but also how to take advantage of 
new technologies like text mining, geospatial mapping, and big data 
curation, as research in all areas, even religion, increasingly incor-
porates new skills. Our expectation should not be that each librar-
ian become a master of all of these trades. We do, however, have 
colleagues who can help. In my library, for example, we are fortu-
nate to have on staff a digital scholarship librarian, Spencer Roberts, 
who has wide-ranging technical expertise. We should work as an 
Association to catalog and communicate such capacities on our staff, 
with the hopes of using digital technology to leverage these existing 
resources to support our patrons.

Third, when collaborating, we should “allow decentralized deci-
sion-making.” As noted before, a push to centralize and collaborate 
should not get in the way of local decisions. With reference and 

2  See https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/pitts-theology-library/
conferences. 

https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/pitts-theology-library/conferences
https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/pitts-theology-library/conferences


32  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

instruction, our local patrons must come first, and so if there are 
needs at the local level, we should adjust our reference practices to 
meet those. For a Methodist institution, for example, local knowledge 
of the conferences in the UMC is not something that should be farmed 
out to the Association. As with collections, we must identify what it is 
our local patrons need and align our local expertise with those needs.  

Finally, librarians must “know when enough is enough.” Libraries 
must not only shift the mode of instruction toward a more collabora-
tive one, but the information explosion of the digital age demands 
new skills amongst our librarians, and collaborative efforts in 
instruction should not get in the way of cultivating those skills locally. 
The demands of our patrons, particularly student patrons, who are 
stumbling their way to learning in a world of Wikipedia, Google, 
and Twitter, are best met with local instruction, and I must admit, 
in-person instruction. So, just as Raymond Morris was concerned that 
the Library Development Program could have the unintended conse-
quence of creating a dependency that was not sustainable, so we 
must be aware that centralized and collaborative instruction has the 
potential of whittling down our local expertise and keeping us from 
reaching our patrons. Let us keep that from happening by collabo-
rating on the content we can collaborate on, but focusing also on our 
local patrons. Indeed, done properly, the shared content of instruc-
tion I have mentioned before should free up the time and capacity 
of our reference librarians to help our students. Increasingly, if we 
can rely on the Association to help with content, such as identifying 
basic resources for Methodist Studies, then local librarians can teach 
our patrons how to read, assess, and critique those basic resources. 
Critical information literacy is essential in this world of too much to 
know, and I believe this is the area our librarians should focus on.

CONCLUSION

I have outlined three areas—collection development, access/pres-
ervation, and information literacy—where theological librarians 
have collaborated before, and where they should collaborate again, 
but with a strategic vision. I hope I have outlined some of the chal-
lenges we face well enough to convince you that a strong association 
is exactly what we need. 

What I have not offered, of course, is a set of specific directives 
about how to do this. I leave that to those who are far more creative 



Papers  33

than I to find specific solutions. I will say, though, that these solutions 
are likely found within this Association, by working together. Our 
infrastructure is there. The Atla Interest Groups are doing incredible 
work in many of the areas discussed. Perhaps we need more or an 
updated set. The Atla association itself is providing us with resources 
to collaborate, from the Atla Digital Library, to grant support, to 
in-house expertise in areas like digital resources, scholarly commu-
nications, and metadata. As we rise to meet many of these challenges 
in a post-pandemic digital age, I encourage us to rely on Atla and our 
membership to meet them together. 

I return to where I started, the name of our shared association. 
Now more than ever, we need an association. Certainly, we need it 
as a way of professionalization. But in these challenging times, it is 
through collaboration that we will not only survive, but thrive. To 
finish out the branding exercise, I have in this process discovered 
new appreciation for the “subtitle” as it were in the new brand: 

“Collectors and Connectors in Religion and Theology.” While I have 
typically been thinking of that second term, “Connectors,” to mean 
that we, as librarians, are the key to connect our patrons to the 
resources they need, I hope you can join me in seeing that Atla plays 
a role in connecting us librarians to one another, to explore how we 
can work together to meet the significant challenges we face.

REFERENCE LIST

Banks, Joy and Christa Williford. 2018. “Collaborative Grants: Why 
Do We Care?” CLIR Issues 126 (November). https://www.clir.
org/2018/12/clir-issues-126. 

Bartholomew, Jennifer. 2019. “The Next Chapter: Realizing the Atla 
Vision.” Accessed June 1, 2021. https://www.atla.com/blog/the-
next-chapter-realizing-the-atla-vision/

Chace, Myron B. 1996. “ATLA’s Preservation Microfilming Program: 
Growing Out of Our Work.” In The American Theological Library 
Association: Essays in Celebration of the First Fifty Years, edited 
by M. Patrick Graham, Valerie R. Hotchkiss, and Kenneth E. Rowe, 
47-59. Evanston, IL: The American Theological Library Associa-
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Devezin, Latoya. 2017. “Building Bridges: Creating Collaborative 
Partnerships Between Large and Small Institutions,” CLIR Blog, 

https://www.clir.org/2018/12/clir-issues-126
https://www.clir.org/2018/12/clir-issues-126
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https://www.atla.com/blog/the-next-chapter-realizing-the-atla-vision/


34  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

February 16, 2017. https://rethinking.clir.org/blog/building-
bridges-creating-collaborative-partnerships-between-large-and-
small-institutions/. 

Dickerson, G. Fay and John A. Pelz. 2006. “The Index to Religious 
Periodical Literature: Past, Present, and Future.” In A Broad-
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ship, edited by Melody Layton McMahon, 298-305. Lanham, MD: 
Scarecrow Press.

Graham, M. Patrick, Valerie R. Hotchkiss, and Kenneth E. Rowe, 
editors. 1996. The American Theological Library Association: 
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American Theological Library Association. 

May, Mark A. 1934. The Institutions that Train Ministers. The Educa-
tion of American Ministers, volume 3. New York: Institute of 
Social and Religious Research.

McMahon, Melody Layton, editor. 2006. A Broadening Conversa-
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Scarecrow Press.

Morris, Sara E. and Jenny Presnell. 2019. “Collection Development 
and the Historical Record: Are We Forgetting Monographs as 
Primary Sources?” Collection Management 44, nos. 2-4: 379-388.

Nichols, Stephen G. and Abby Smith. 2001. The Evidence in Hand: 
Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections. 
Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Sources.

O’Brien, Elmer J. and Betty A. 1996. “From Volunteerism to Corpo-
rate Professionalism: A Historical Sketch of the American Theo-
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“Proposed Constitution: First Draft, 1947.” In Conference of Theologi-
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https://rethinking.clir.org/blog/building-bridges-creating-collaborative-partnerships-between-large-and-small-institutions/
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