From June 16-18, the Atla team successfully hosted its second entirely virtual conference. Working together, the Business Development and Production teams developed a presentation highlighting recent updates to Atla’s research tools and strategic initiatives. Below is a highlight reel of the top updates shared. You can also watch the full presentation on Vimeo.
New Facts & Figures
Atla Religion Database® (Atla RDB®) now includes more than 3.0 million records, with more than 1,100 journals currently being indexed.
Starting with just 50 full-text titles in 2001, Atla now offers more than 580 full-text journals from around the world. AtlaSerials® (Atlas®) includes about 375 of these journals, while AtlaSerials PLUS® (Atlas PLUS®), includes all of the full-text journals in Atlas plus an additional 200 or so that are exclusive to Atlas PLUS.
We now include content from 76 countries across all of our research tools, and our in-house team now has indexing capabilities in more than 40 languages.
All of the facts, figures, and title lists for all Atla research tools, including but not limited to, Atla Religion Database, Atlas, and Atlas PLUS, are now updated to reflect the most recent content available.
Depth & Breadth: Expanding Coverage
Our current title list now includes titles from Iceland and Iran, covering material in Icelandic and Persian. In addition, our content in Korean, Chinese, and Arabic continues to grow.
Here’s a great example of how expanding coverage in one geographic area had an impact beyond its intended effect: it led to adding more titles that cover literature and the arts, politics, and history with an Asian perspective. Learn more with our focus on Asian studies.
In the same vein, this past year we made it a goal to increase our Judaism and Jewish studies titles which resulted in new journals from Russia, Belgium, Italy, Israel, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and the US. This expansion also led to an increase in titles that covered literature and the arts, politics, and history from a Jewish perspective.
Diversifying Content Forms
The Atla team is working to include more open access content in our research tools, ensuring ease of content discoverability and information access. Learn more about recently added content in our Open Access Content Series here.
In collaboration with our publishing partners, our in-house team has been working to expand the indexing of essay collections and include robust metadata for this hard-to-find content in our research tools. Check out the latest highlight of recently added indexing for essay collections.
For many years now, Atla has been committed to seeking out full text ceased journals and ensuring their scholarly significance persists by including them in our research tools. See some highlights in our quarterly series of blog spotlights on full text ceased journals here.
Global Collaboration
We currently have 307 publisher relationships, with over 50% being publishers established outside of the U.S. These international publisher relationships account for over 60% of our total licensed titles across all our research tools.
Over the past year, our in-house licensing team has worked hard to build upon several long-standing publisher relationships to license dozens of new journals, adding to our geographic, linguistic, and content diversity.
Partner Products
In addition to Atla Religion Database, Atlas, and Atlas PLUS, Atla has collaborated with institutions, organizations, and individuals to co-produce and offer additional research resources.
The Old Testament Abstracts (OTA) are produced in partnership with the Catholic Biblical Association, and feature abstracts for religion and theology journal articles, monographs, multi-author works, and software related to Old Testament studies. OTA recently received its annual content update.
Similarly, the New Testament Abstracts (NTA) are produced in partnership with Boston College and are a research and bibliographic aid for religion and theology scholars, librarians, clergy, and students of the New Testament and its historical milieu.
Atla EBSCO Historical Digital Archives
We also partner with EBSCO on several historical archives collections, including the Atla Historical Monographs Collections, which contain content from the 13th Century through 1922 and cover many topics, including the World Parliament of Religions, the changing landscape of religion in 20th century America, global theological perspectives and religious traditions, and more.
We also offer the African American Historical Serials Collection, which was developed in partnership with EBSCO as part of an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture. This collection was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine.
Site Updates
The FAQ page on our website has been revamped with updated information and a more user-friendly search experience. Learn more here. Check out the new page here.
Coming Up
Available in 6 languages, the first of our training videos launched in September 2020 on Bible scripture citations. Additional videos are forthcoming. And, as always, we welcome suggestions from librarians and researchers.
We want to know, what else do you want to know? Research tools tips? Content updates? Do you have content suggestions for inclusion in our tools? You can let us know by submitting the Contact Us form.
Watch the full 2021 Atla Research Tools Presentation
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