Building on a project begun by Theological Book Network, Scholar Leaders is excited to announce the arrival of a revitalized digital library: BiblioTech.

A growing need: BiblioTech meets theological schools’ need for high-quality digital resources by providing access to a set of carefully curated academic theological texts through an interface designed for Majority World schools. Accelerated by COVID, most schools offer an increasing number of courses online or in hybrid environments. However, access to digital resources remains limited. Furthermore, accrediting agencies increasingly want schools to provide digital resources for online courses or to enhance their physical libraries, which is costly.

A practical solution: Working with publishers, BiblioTech has assembled a collection of high-quality, recently published biblical and theological titles. For the price of one book per student per year, schools can subscribe to the BiblioTech collection that best fits their programs. Students can then download an unlimited number of books in an encrypted ePub format. These books can be used offline for two weeks at a time per reader.

New features: Over the last 12 months, we have enhanced BiblioTech’s interface so that it is more beneficial for students and professors:

• An intuitive design with enhanced features so that users can easily find books by title, author, subject, field, program, and key words.
• The ability to group titles so that professors can assign a set of texts to a class and so that students can create reading “shelves” that will hold titles they need for various projects.
• A subscription model with an affordable basic collection and the ability to add titles as needed.

Language Features: Thanks to technology, each ePub can now be accessed in multiple languages, allowing students to read in their own language, regardless of the language of publication (unless limited by the publisher). For example, students in Latin America can read English materials in Spanish, or students in the Middle East can read articles from a Ukrainian journal in Arabic. 

Upcoming Opportunities: Over the next two years, we are committed to incorporating high quality resources from the Majority World into BiblioTech by:

• Encouraging local and regional academic journals to make their materials available through BiblioTech. Coupled with the translation function, this expansion will allow scholars to share research in multiple directions around the globe.
• Inviting Majority World publishers to include their books in the BiblioTech collection. This activity will expand Majority World publishers’ and theologians’ reach, enrich the global theological discourse, and reduce the dominance of English-language resources.