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Primary Source Collection : 6,376 authors / 109,659 titles / 148,535 vols.
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About the Post-Reformation Digital Library
Help Us Improve Our Findings

If you benefit from PRDL, you can help! All users are encouraged to contribute to PRDL in these ways:

  1. Donate to the Junius Institute. PRDL is a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research. Your donation will contribute in these ways:
  2. Improve existing bibliographic information. Use the edit icon next to any primary source to fill in missing information or to correct errors. We can use help especially in these areas:
    • Categorizing volumes by genre, topic, and biblical books (if applicable). To easily identify uncategorized volumes, browse sources by author and then sort the results by genre or topic.
    • Expanding bibliographic information. The default bibliographic data for each title is drawn from the digital library responsible for scanning the original text. In many cases, however, this information is incomplete, and the title, place, and publisher needs revision.
      • Use the Worldcat icon next to a primary source to look up further bibliographic information.
      • Compare the information on the original title page with the bibliographic information in PRDL.
      • Refer to the editorial guidelines for further advice.

  3. Report new digital books. Use the suggest new source form to submit a link (URL) to a new source. Some tips for finding new books:
    • Use the PRDL search digital libraries function to query author name variants on the major digital libraries. This is accessible when browsing titles by author.
    • In addition to Google Books, search smaller digital libraries for location and language specific titles. (e.g., search BSB / HAB for German authors/titles, BNF for French authors/titles, e-rara for Swiss authors/titles, and BUCM / BVA / BVMC for Spanish authors/titles.)
    • Use websites that search multiple website simultaneously (e.g., Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke or Europeana)
    • Google Books contains typos and can omit names and/or publisher information (e.g., Theodore Beza is erroneously catalogued as “Bleze”). Therefore identify and include such typos in searches.
    • Search by both common and Latin (nominative) name (e.g. “Ames” and “Amesius”).
    • Limit searches by date to 1500-1800 to find primary sources.
    • Search by early modern publisher to find new authors currently not in PRDL. (e.g., search “Chouet”, “Chouët”, “Girard”, “Crispin”, “Badius”, “Stephan”, “Stephanus”, etc. in the publisher field.)
    • Search titles for important key words. (e.g., search “Loci Communes”, “Theologia”, “Theologiae”, “Methodus”, “Commentary”, “Commentarius”, “Commentarii”, “Commentarie”, “Sententiae”, “Sententiarum”, “Scoti”, “Aquinatis”, etc. in the title field.)

  4. Report broken links. Send an email to [email protected] so that the editorial board can investigate (NB: in some cases Google Books are not available outside the United States, so that depending on location the link may be inaccessible rather than broken).

PRDL only links to trusted digital libraries and select corporate digitization projects with permanent links. Please do not submit PDF files directly or links to temporary uploaded files through cloud services (e.g. dropbox.com, box.net).

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