Search a set of religion databases

It's possible to do a very convenient search of four of our most useful religion indexes at once. We have created a set that includes the ATLA Religion Database, the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index, Old Testament Abstracts, and New Testament Abstracts. These are sold to us by different vendors and have different interfaces, but MetaLib allows you to search them all at once with one easy method ... you don't have to deal with the special characteristics of each program.

Let's find the records in the religion databases containing the name of Old Testament scholar and preacher Elizabeth Achtemeier. Enter her name in the search box, then click on the radio button beside Religion databases. Then, click the Go button.

It takes a few seconds for MetaLib to search all four databases. Then, it presents you with a summary of its results, showing how many records were found in each database : 199 in the ATLA-RDB, 18 in CPLI, 6 in OTA. (It will display up to 30 at a time from each source.) To see these results, click on View retrieved.

You get a list of the records in an abbreviated format. To navigate through a long list, click on Previous or Next. The records are listed in order of relevance ranking. But if you would rather see them organized by another criterion -- publication date, for instance -- you can choose this from the small drop-down menu labelled Sort by:

You can view the full bibliographic record for any of these works by clicking on its title. To return to the list of works, click on Table View.

Choose an article from the list : for example, "Preaching the Praises and Laments". Click on the article's title (or on the small underlined number on the left side of the screen). This will open the full bibliographic record for the article.

You get the full citation, showing exactly where and when it was published, its subject headings, and so on. Look at the bottom of the record. If you see the words FullText/Links: and then an underlined link beginning http://, then that means there is more information available online. If you click on the link, you can go directly to the full text of your chosen article.

In some cases, full text is not available, but there is a link leading to a book's Library of Congress cataloging data, the Table of Contents, or a description of the item. Please note : we are still working on the implementation of the MetaLib program, and sometimes these full-text links will be absent or dysfunctional. We hope to have these technical difficulties sorted out soon.

Once you retrieve the full text of an article, you can print it, save it, email it to yourself and so on. See Save or send your search results for help with this.