The Director of the Divinity Library has direct responsibility for analysis, management and development of the Divinity Collection.

Since 1979 the structure of the Collection Development operation has been determined (more-or-less) by the programs offered by the Graduate Department of Religion, which are currently:

I. History and Critical Theory of Religion (HACTOR)
II. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel
III. Judaism
IV. New Testament and Early Christianity
V. History of Christianity
VI. Theology
VII. Ethics
VIII. Religion and Personality
IX. Homiletics and Liturgies

A graduate student working in each area as a bibliographer serves the program areas. Each bibliographer is responsible for several levels of collecting within his/her area, i.e. not only does s/he select materials for her/his own graduate program, but each must also select for the professional, undergraduate and continuing studies programs, mentioned above.

Faculty of various departments suggests bibliographers and appointed by the Director of the Library to work with the Collections Librarian, who directly supervises the operation and staff.

Appendix A is the current directory of bibliographers for the Divinity Library.

Courses Taught during the Current Academic Year:

The Divinity School Web Page  contains links to the on-line catalog of the School, where courses offered for the current year may be found.

See http://www.vanderbilt.edu/catalogs/divinity/course.html]

Widespread use of the Library of Congress classification schedule has more or less predetermined the organization of the Divinity collection. Although the system has many imperfections, continually lags behind events, and is not entirely sensitive to the disciplines, it is nonetheless the best and most widely used system of classification in use to date. Since other divisions of the Heard Library and most theological libraries us LC, its use in this document eases communication and comparison among collections and institutions.

Most disciplines of Divinity fall into the BL-BX range as follows:

• BL-Religions Mythology Rationalism
• BM - Judaism
• BP - Islam Bahaism Theosophy, etc.
• BQ - Buddhism
• BR - Christianity (general)
• BS - Bible
• BT - Doctrinal Theology
• BV - Practical Theology
• BX1-799 - Eastern Christian Churches
• BX800-4795 - Roman Catholic Church
• BX4800-9999- Protestantism

Beyond these bounds, the Divinity Library depends largely on other divisions of the Heard Library for most materials. It does however acquire some materials which may be classed outside BL-BX; generally, these exceptions are based on special needs, not otherwise met by the Heard system.

Memorabilia:

The Divinity Library’s rare books are housed in the Special Collections unit and are noted by use of the term Memorabilia with the call number. The policy statement for this collection may be examined in Appendix C.

Special Collections:

1. Within the Divinity collection, one special collection is held -- The Mary and Harry Zimmerman Judaica Collection (begun in 1945 with the gift of the Ismar Elbogen Collection). Materials in this collection are marked by the term Judaica above the call number and are housed separately in the Judaica Room. In the analysis which follows (page 80), the Judaica Collection is treated separately at the end of the document.