Academics
Digital Theological Library
NSBT is a founding co-owner of the Digital Theological Library (DTL). The DTL is an independently incorporated non-profit educational institution composed of a number of co-owning schools, including NSBT, and it provides a full digital library supporting religious and theological studies. Students in a degree program of NSBT have access to all of the resources of the library, which includes databases for journals and digital copies of books. The DTL will also provide access to textbooks for NSBT courses. Students can access the DTL through their NSBT Populi account.
What the library holds
The library holds more than 1,000,000 electronic books, more than 100,000,000 articles, and more than 1,000 databases within its collection.
Reaching the library
The library is reached through the library link provided within each course, and moving from a course reading into the wider research collection does not require a separate credential or a separate destination. Access is available at any hour, which matters for a student body that is in ministry and distributed across time zones. The Populi account and access to the Digital Theological Library are provided for the duration of enrollment, and access to these systems ends at the conferral of the degree.
The Office of Student Services is reached at studentservices@nsbt.org.
Library instruction
MCM002 Library Orientation is the non-credit course in Populi that teaches students to use the library. Research support for NSBT students is provided by NSBT, in its own name, through faculty and academic leadership rather than through librarians. The three non-credit orientation courses carry the information literacy load that the degree courses assume, so that a student arriving from a ministry post rather than from recent graduate study is taught how to search, retrieve and cite before the first exegetical paper is due.
Within Populi, NSBT also maintains a library page that carries links to the Chicago Manual of Style and the Turabian manual and holds writing style tip sheets and video tutorials that support research and writing assignments.