Shumaker Library at Central Seminary

Library Collection Access

Central Seminary Library Catalog and Resources

Digital Theological Library Access

Shumaker Library at Central’s main campus in Shawnee, KS is available for patron use on a limited basis. The Library is open Monday through Friday from 10:00a until 4:00p. Due to the continuing impact of COVID, all patrons to Shumaker Library are required to abide by the following guidelines while onsite:

• For persons who have been vaccinated and have proof of vaccination, masks are optional. For those not vaccinated, masks are required, as is appropriate social distancing.
• Persons exposed to COVID should not come into the Central building for five days after exposure.
• Persons who have COVID symptoms or have tested positive for COVID should not come into the building for five days after they are symptom-free and have tested negative.
• Extra precautions with masking and distancing will be required when entering the building after having COVID.

Library services for all current faculty, students, and staff unable to visit the campus will continue according to the protocols established at the beginning of the pandemic:

• Access to resources in the print collections will be handled by scanning content and sending PDF files. Copyright restrictions still apply. Requests should be submitted to the librarian with as much bibliographic information as possible to fulfill the request.
• Real-time chat assistance will be available at all times when the library facility is scheduled to be open. This supersedes the standard schedule for chat assistance.

The Shumaker library continues to provide assistance to patrons via phone or email. Additionally, a webform is available for submitting questions to the librarian.

About the Digital Theological Library (DTL)

Shumaker Library at Central Seminary is a member of the Digital Theological Library (DTL).

DTL is “a co-owned, born-digital library of religious and theological studies.” In other words, it is an organization that was formed and is sustained by member institutions (18 schools at present) who pool their financial resources to obtain access to digital resources that would be too costly to license independently. Indeed, the stated mission of the DTL is “to provide its co-owning institutions with the highest quality digital resources in religious and theological studies at the lowest possible costs.”

The principal value of the DTL for Central is the opportunity to participate in a library context of a much larger scale. For instance, the inclusion of DTL resources as part of Central’s collections more than tripled the digital holdings of the Shumaker Library. DTL holdings as of this writing are as follows: over 600,000 ebooks; over 37,000 journal and magazine titles with more than 66,000,000 articles and reviews; over 80,000 music recordings; and over 60,000 videos. This represents a value of over $1,000,000 USD in permanent access to ebooks alone. Another benefit of participating in a collective of a larger scale is the dedicated DTL staff focused on developing and sustaining the digital collections.

Another major driver motivating Central to become a member institution was the availability of Korean language resources to support our Korean programs. Korean-speaking students at Central now have access to databases hosted by the National Library of Korean, for ebooks and for articles, with a sizable volume of resources in their first language.

Current Central students, staff, and faculty are able to access resources in the DTL from remote locations. Those who are not members of the Central community are able to access these online resources by visiting the Shumaker library on the Central Seminary campus in Shawnee, where library staff will help them log on to the system.

About Shumaker Library

Shumaker Library is named for Ms. Dianne Shumaker, who gave the lead gift for the renovation and expressed her delight in having the library so named. “Philosophically,” said Shumaker, “my relationship with Central Seminary is ‘what God wants.’ I feel blessed to be a contributor to this greater good. Being part of the library is a special joy – I love books and have an extensive library of my own.”