An Open Access Information Service for Researchers in Theology

Tuebingen University Library offers a continuously improved next generation bibliographic database for theology and religious studies. The “Index Theologicus” database is available worldwide in open access. It is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in the funding programme “specialised information services”. The aim of this programme is to give researchers of all disciplines, irrespective of where they work, fast and direct access to specialised literature and research-specific information that are not available at every institution in the same scope and in the same quantity. Index Theologicus comprises currently about 1.8 million records of theological literature (monographs and articles) mainly in German, English, French and other European languages. The database does not only offer bibliographical records but also gives direct access to articles and facilitates access to monographs. To do this the University Library pursues different strategies: Cooperation with publishing houses: Important publishers (for example deGruyter and Brill) are delivering metadata and articles of journals which are subject to national licenses to be integrated into the database. Green Open Access: About 130 acknowledged German researchers in theology have agreed that their articles – according to German copyright law – may be scanned and made accessible via Index Theologicus. Digitisation: A large digitisation project of theological journals is currently in preparation. Some 60 editors want to cooperate. This project complements a previous project in which Tuebingen University Library digitised theological journals from the 19th century. In order to facilitate the access to non-open access literature, the database offers link-resolving and finding aids (via DOI). For monographs, there is a special service which helps to locate the book in the local library catalogues of users. Building comprehensive databases is a resource consuming activity, and the staff Tuebingen University Library can dedicate to this task is limited. So the Library is constantly improving the methods for widely automated metadata extraction. For printed journals there is an OLR/ OCR program creating structured metadata; for electronically available metadata Zotero translators have been developed (available for re-use via Github). The database offers search features for the specific interests of researchers in theology. Search of Scriptures is being supported by special algorithms which help to find articles treating a range of Bible passages even if a single Bible passage has been entered as a search term. The special information service in theology is constantly in dialogue with members of the theological faculties, the learned societies. A representative academic board has been installed.

The database attracts a lot of users – and cooperators. The theological faculty of Innsbruck in Austria, responsible for a well-known specialised database in biblical literature is currently migrating their data in Index theologicus and will use this system for further cataloguing. So do two theological institutes of the Universities of Muenster and Wuerzburg.

We consider the specialised information service theology as a best practice example for research oriented library services with a strong focus on open access and open data.