Atla Annual 2025

Securing funding for Open Educational Resources (OER) and digitization projects can be a
transformative opportunity for theological libraries. The Scholarly Communications and Digital Initiatives Committee will hold a panel of successful past grant recipients to discuss their challenges and lessons learned in the process of both applying for the Atla grants, and successfully completing their projects. Together this panel will explore the complexities of navigating funding applications, institutional priorities, and project logistics.

Learning Outcome


Audience Engagement

The attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions from the panelists through the open Q&A and will also be invited to participate in some interactive polling to understand their familiarity with the Atla grants.

The Catholic News Archive (CNA) is a rich resource that offers valuable insight into a broad spectrum of research topics, ranging from theological and ecclesiastical studies to social, cultural, and political history. This presentation will highlight how scholars, students, and librarians can leverage Catholic newspapers to explore historical narratives, public discourse, and community dynamics.
Catholic newspapers have long served as platforms for religious communities to engage with pressing societal issues, including immigration, civil rights, education, labor movements, and international relations. By examining how these newspapers frame and respond to contemporary events, researchers can gain deeper insight into the intersection of faith and public life. The CNA’s extensive digital holdings provide access to primary source materials that reflect both localized and global perspectives, making it a vital tool for interdisciplinary research. Notably, the archive includes newspapers in non-English languages, which offer unique perspectives on immigrant communities and their engagement with Catholicism and broader societal issues.
This session will explore how scholars can utilize Catholic newspapers to investigate issues such as race relations, social justice movements, and Catholic perspectives on public policy. Additionally, it will provide practical guidance for navigating the CNA’s digital repository, incorporating it into coursework, and fostering critical engagement with historical media sources. Special attention will be given to the ecumenical slant of certain papers, such as the 'Catholic Worker', which engaged with broader social justice themes and interfaith dialogue.

Learning Outcome

An understanding of how the Catholic New Archive provides a unique Catholic perspective on historic events, social and cultural issues, and key community concerns.
How the Catholic News Archive can serve scholarly research needs of researchers from all denominations.
How the Catholic News Archive has changed and grown.
What the future of the Catholic News Archive looks like and how others can engage with its growth.

Audience Engagement

Through an examination of the information that can be found in the Catholic News Archive. The panel will ask the audience to connect with the Archive so they can explore different topics. It will ask the audience to consider the ways in which their researchers have had expressed needs and how the archive could support them now and in the future. There will be a discussion of where the platform currently is, where it might go, and how we can all help to grow the resource.

This listen and learn session approaches LibGuides within the history of research aids and seeks to understand the relationships between intellectual freedom, institutional identity, bibliography, and access. We begin by situating LibGuides within the broader tradition of readers’ aids, specifically the role of printed bibliographies and digital pathfinders to understand why LibGuides have become so common throughout librarianship. We also explore how their form reinforces function in terms of scholarly authority and information guide.
We then examine the conflict between institutional identity, as developed by standardized web content, the librarian’s own intellectual freedom, and patron access. In short, we seek to understand what assumptions librarians and patrons have about LibGuides and if those assumptions impact guide content, not just guide design. We take this question to be especially important for theology librarians who may be working within contexts that require doctrinal or confessional agreements between faculty, staff, and students. We seek to understand how the theology librarian maintains intellectual freed and access to information (oft expressed core values of librarianship) amidst the strictures that often accompany church politics.
Finally we close the session by identifying a series of practices that librarians can deploy and encourage others to share their own experiences and practices. Two main points, LibGuide creation should be approached with the same meticulous approach as would be granted to bibliographies and special attention should be directed toward the container collapse between institution and resource.

Learning Outcome

Audiences will be encouraged to think about the history and form of LibGuides, not just their content. We will end the session by suggesting best practices to create LibGuides in a theological setting.

Audience Engagement

During the session we will have multiple opportunities for group conversation and to hear how others have addressed the questions of intellectual freedom, institutional identity, and guiding users to information.

Join program officer Alyson Pope from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to learn more about their digitization regranting programs: Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices and Recordings at Risk. Available funding ranges from 10,000 to 300,000 USD for the digital reformatting of a range of eligible analog formats.

Learning Outcome

Detailed knowledge of available funding paths for the digitization of their institution's archival materials as well as more general tips on writing successful grant proposals.

Audience Engagement

Quick surveys regarding the types of materials they have in their archives that they would be most eager to digitize and their prior experience seeking grant funding.

The St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (saet.ac.uk) is a free online reference work dedicated to widening access to theological scholarship. With more than 200 peer-reviewed articles already published, the Encyclopaedia is a readily available resource for students, academics, members of faith-based institutions, and interested laypeople. In this session, a member of the SAET editorial team will share some reflections on the opportunities and challenges involved in building an open-access theological encyclopaedia for the 21st century. How has the publication’s online format and open-access philosophy shaped its presentation, rights management, and information preservation strategies (including metadata and use of the Text Encoding Initiative)? As a multi-author reference work with hundreds of contributors, how are articles managed and organized? The Encyclopaedia’s integration into the scholarly informational ecosystem has been an important consideration as well. What are the advantages and drawbacks of the encyclopaedic format for discoverability and indexing? Feedback and suggestions from attendees concerning how the Encyclopaedia can most effectively connect with library users and systems will be warmly welcomed.

Learning Outcome



The presentation will tell the story of the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology so far in a light-hearted and approachable way. The purpose of the session is not to give a tech demonstration or merely show a product, but instead to go deeper into the questions and considerations we’ve faced as an academic-led encyclopaedia project, inviting the perspective and expertise of the audience on the issues discussed.

The recipients of Atla’s 2024 round of digitization grant funding will share their experiences digitizing and describing items from their special collections and archives. Attendees will not only learn more about these new digital collections that are newly available for research, teaching, and other uses but also hear about the successes and lessons learned through their projects. An overview of the Atla Digitization Grant program, which will open up again in the fall of 2025 for applications, will also be presented.

There will be time for questions about the grant program and how it supports the digitization efforts of Atla members as well as opportunities for conversation with grantees about their approaches to digitization projects.

Learning Outcome

Attendees will learn more about how to plan for and manage small digitization projects and how to apply for funding from Atla to support these projects.

Audience Engagement

There will be time for conversation and questions.