The Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection

  We are pleased to announce the latest update in the ongoing inter-institutional endeavor to create the Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection. This momentous project aims to make Dr. Cannon’s archives and papers, which span from her elementary school days through her later career, publicly available online. With this digital collection nearly complete, users can […]

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An Internship Exploring the Missionary Research Library

  The Columbia University “Ask a Librarian” Internship had been presented to me three different times on three unrelated platforms before I decided to apply. The first time someone close to me reached out and thought I would be a good fit. The second time it appeared in my school email. The third time it […]

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Belonging As a Latinx Seminarian 

  Seminary was an unexpected “next-step” for my life. My recent Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) experience has pulled me towards exploring the world of theology at Union (UTS) as a first-year Divinity student. As I was reading through the UTS Student Digest newsletter, I saw a job that contained the words “Justo Gonzalez” and “Hispanic […]

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Updating Finding Aids: Improving the Discovery of Archives at the Burke Library

  Like many archivists at CUL and beyond, I’ve found working remotely to be an opportunity to address back burner projects. Chief among these is the conversion of Burke’s 400+ finding aids, which were originally created as PDFs, into Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format — an XML standard for archival finding aids. You may be […]

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Research During a Pandemic: Interview With Documentary Film Researcher Heather Merrill

As a librarian and movie-lover, I’m always excited to assist filmmakers with their research — and this Fall, the Burke received a request from a researcher working on a documentary film about the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church (the “Philadelphia Eleven”). The request came from Heather Merrill, an independent film researcher, […]

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The Eckley Sermons: a Manuscript Cataloging Mystery

Image of a handwritten sermon by Joseph Eckley, circa the late-1700s or early-1800s.

*NOTE: The Burke Library is currently closed and personnel are working from home due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak (see Columbia’s COVID-19 guidance page for more information and consult the Your Libraries Online portal for increased access to e-resources during this time). We are sharing this post, written a few weeks ago, harkening back to […]

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Mapping the Holy Land: a New Exhibit, by Jeffrey Wayno

Visitors at the Burke Library may have noticed our new exhibit, Mapping the Holy Land, which showcases two items from our special collections—one from the rare book collection, one from the archives—to highlight how scholars of the past have thought about, and visualized, one of the most historic and contentious areas of our world. The […]

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Greetings from the Archives: Leah’s First Big Offsite Project

Happy (mid) October, and happy American Archives Month! I’m Leah Edelman, the Outreach Archivist at the Burke Library, and though I started working here at the end of June, I thought this month would be a good one to introduce myself on the blog. With support from the wonderful library team, I manage all things […]

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Microfiche: the Nachlass Collection

Photograph of the exhibit case housing the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Nachlass microfiche collection exhibit

“Microfiche is cool” is a sentence one rarely hears any more, in the Internet age. Yet I am constantly reminded of the astonishing efficiency of microformatting, when researchers ask to see the collection of primary-source materials of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—noted German theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi dissident, and onetime student at Union Theological Seminary—preserved on microfiche, collectively […]

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The Burke Library Goes International

One of the great joys of working at an educational institution is the chance to meet and interact with students, teachers, and researchers from all over the world. At the Burke, that kind of interaction usually takes place when people come to visit us in New York City. But recently I had the distinct pleasure […]

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