What Is A Seminary Library?

Graduate School of Theology (GST) students on Redlands’ Marin Campus in San Anselmo, CA  need a wide range of resources to support their research, work, and ministries. From ordination exam study guides to spiritual direction handbooks, the collection at the San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS) Library is not a typical library collection because the students here at the seminary are not your typical students.

Not everyone graduates to get behind the pulpit. Instead, they channel their passion into chaplaincy, education, or in establishing non-profits or grassroots campaigns. Students often research, address, and speak out about traumas or problems they’ve witnessed in their communities. They want the academic background for designing solutions and healing processes. As their librarian, I’m proud to be a sounding board for their research topics and to introduce them to the variety of sources they can synthesize into innovative dissertations and projects.

One reason many students choose this graduate institution over others is the freedom to take a panoply of courses from all the member centers and schools of the Graduate Theological Union. These seminaries and centers merged their libraries to create one of the largest, most diversified theological libraries on the West Coast, the Graduate Theological Union Library. The San Francisco Theological Seminary library is a branch of this library, which means that all physical and electronic resources are shared between the libraries and their patrons. Moreover, Graduate School of Theology students get free walk-in access to the UC Berkeley libraries.

Studying amidst castles seems like a fantasy, but it’s daily life for the students here on campus. They enjoy views of the Hogwarts-like seminary buildings and Mt. Tamalpais as they roam the library’s halls and the labyrinth outside the library. Geneva Hall houses not only the library, but also one of the chapels, faculty offices, and a few classrooms. Functionally and geographically, the building is at the heart of the campus.

If library smells are dear to your heart, the book smell here will make you especially happy. There is a rich archival collection housed here, featuring artifacts, missionaries’ diaries, and rare books.

If you have questions about the library or find yourself researching an advanced religious or theological topic, please call, email, visit, or chat.

-Stephanie Miller
Branch Librarian
Graduate School of Theology - Marin Campus; home of the San Francisco Theological Seminary

Fanning the Embers of Knowledge

From September 1 to October 31, 2012, Armacost Library is holding an Intellectual Freedom Blogathon featuring posts on topics concerning censorship, the freedom to read, view, and express, and the connection these various freedoms have to individual life experiences and the state of society. The following essay is part of the Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon. 

All libraries do the first aspect of facilitation, providing access.... Where too many libraries fall short is in how they: see knowledge as a thing, overemphasize access, and support consuming knowledge instead of creating it. If our libraries are going to support our communities in the future, they must do a better job across the spectrum. 

~ R. David Lankes, 2012, Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World, p. 43

Lately I've been asking myself why I chose to be an academic librarian. This navel-gazing is not just because my faculty review dossier, including a reflective evaluation piece, is due in a few weeks. I've been asking myself this question mostly because I have been feeling a little...lost in the dark. I entered library school thinking that what I was studying to become, the profession I was seeking to be a part of, made a difference in the world. I still hold this opinion. Well, I cling to it. The daily tasks of emailing, organizing, meeting, reviewing, and scheduling have made me lose sight of what drew me to academic librarianship in the first place.

Finding my professional path

While thinking about my professional purpose as an academic librarian, I settled on Armacost Library's own organizational vision statement. Simply, it affirms intellectual freedom as our reason for being, our collective purpose, our heartfire. Intellectual freedom, in brief, encompasses two parts -- the freedom to access others' ideas and the freedom to express one's own. Both are important and rely greatly on the other. The freedom to access and to express, germane elements of intellectual freedom, are necessary conditions in a world where knowledge is dynamic, powerful, and constructed in the hearts and minds of people.

Thinking about the active nature of knowledge presents big challenges. Questions abound. If reading about some things only provides initial steps toward learning, how do we go further, especially with our shelves and shelves of printed books? Our continuous searching for and licensing of more, increasingly expensive, databases and digital content? How can we nurture active learning spaces, feed the carefully tended intellectual flames throughout the University community? These are some questions we are currently grappling with at Armacost Library in order to better facilitate knowledge creation within our communities.

Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon is a small spark of light. It does not offer comprehensive answers or assume final solutions. But it does open up a part of our library online space for wider conversation.

How can Armacost Library inflame the embers of your knowledge creation?

Melissa Cardenas-Dow
Outreach/Behavioral Sciences Librarian
Armacost Library, University of Redlands
melissa_cardenasdow (a) redlands (dot) edu
909.748.8089