All Guides: Religious Studies: Primary Sources

Macalester Archives and Special Collections

Macalester Archives contain records of the college including materials from student organizations, college catalogs, the Mac Weekly and other student publications.

Special Collections contain illuminated manuscripts in Latin and in Arabic among other materials of interest. All materials are available to use by appointment.

Contact archives@macalester.edu.

Online Resources

AM Explorer This link opens in a new window A single access point for Adam Matthew collections. Search unique primary source content covering the 15th - 21st centuries. Includes themes like; Borders and Migrations, Gender and Sexuality, Global History, and War and Conflict.

Digital Library of the Middle East The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.
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Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window DPLA materials come from America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of these are freely available and include; photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, etc.
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Digital Shikshapatri
No longer actively updated, Digital Shikshapatri provides online access to a treasure of the British Hindu cultural heritage that is held in Oxford's Bodleian Library. This fragile Sanskrit manuscript, called the Shikshapatri, was written by Shree Swaminarayan, founder of Swaminarayan Hinduism, and outlines moral and spiritual codes for everyday life.
Europeana This site allows you to search across the digital archives and holdings of many significant European galleries, archives, libraries, and museums, including Judaica Europeana, Bodleian Libraries, EuroPhoto, the Natural Europe Project, and Museo Galileo.

HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window A digital preservation repository that provides access to millions of digitized materials from libraries around the world. For enhanced access to materials, log into HathiTrust using your Macalester email credentials.
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World Digital Library Contains primary source materials (books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films) from around the world presented in a highly searchable manner.
Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library is a free online digitized virtual library of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hundreds of manuscripts made up of thousands of fragments – discovered from 1947 and until the early 1960’s in the Judean Desert along the western shore of the Dead Sea – are now available to the public online through this project from the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
Papal Encyclicals Online
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Includes individual pages for each Pope, encyclical’s English titles, eReader files, a search engine, pictures of medieval Papal documents, and other more minor details added to help in research, for the search of individual documents, and ease of navigation.
Jewish Women's Archive
Digital collections focused on the experiences of Jewish women over time. Includes primary source materials from the North American pioneer experience, as well as Jewish women's history in North America broadly.

Local Archives and Special Collections

Upper Midwest Jewish Archives
"The Upper Midwest Jewish Archives has materials illustrating the American Jewish experience from a Midwestern perspective, chronicling the activities of the local Jewish population in creating and supporting ethnic/religious communities and advocacy organizations, as well as their efforts to promote social welfare and social justice." --Web Site
Church Records at the Minnesota Historical Society
Contains finding aides and records for a number of denominations in Minnesota, starting in the mid-1800s.