What was added

Until this month the library was, in practice, a library of the public domain: the Fathers, the medievals, the Reformers, the devotional classics, and the modern writers whose books have passed into the public domain. A reader who wanted to know what Tim Keller, N. T. Wright or Alister McGrath had written, or who influenced them, found very little.

That gap is closed, at least on paper. Over the past weeks we catalogued about 130 living and recent authors, those whose books are still in copyright. In round numbers that added:

• about 4,100 works, each with a description, a type, a year and a rating where the evidence supports one;
• about 430 influence links between authors, with the reasoning behind each, so the influence map now reaches into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries;
• a few hundred edition links, and a set of resources for each author such as their own site, a bibliography or an archive.

The authors run from C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, A. W. Tozer and Karl Barth to Dallas Willard, R. C. Sproul, John Piper, Kallistos Ware, Hans Boersma and Fleming Rutledge, across the traditions and not only the Protestant ones. The same inclusion bar applies as for everyone else: for recent authors, where time has not yet judged, the question is substance, and self-help and prosperity teaching are left out.

What this does and does not give you

Most of these entries are catalogue entries, not free books. These authors’ books are under copyright. For nearly all of them we list the work, describe it, place it on the timeline and link it into the influence map, but there is nothing to read here. We found free, lawful copies for a small number, and these are links to the owner’s own site, never copies hosted by us. Hosting a copyrighted text would need the rights holder’s written permission, so the library’s reader will not carry these works.

So for this group the library is a map: who wrote what, in what order, and who shaped whom. It is not a place to read the books.

How the work was done

Each author was researched in a separate pass against a fixed set of rules: list every separately published book, give a source for any date or attribution that was not obvious, do not invent a title to fill a gap, and write down every doubt. The results went into the database through the same import tools that every other author goes through. We accepted the passes without reading each one line by line, because reading all of them first would have meant the library never shipped. Instead, every doubt the passes recorded was collected, and checking those is the work that remains.

What remains, candidly

This is the honest part. The catalogue is complete in the sense that every author in the list has been through a pass. It is not yet checked, and some of it is wrong.

Records that are not what they say. The existing catalogue already held some entries for these authors from earlier, rougher work, and the passes found problems in them. About 45 works are misattributed, duplicated, or cannot be traced to any source. Some examples of the kinds of problem:

• books credited to the wrong person (a biography of an author listed as the author’s own work; an anthology an author edited listed as one they wrote);
• omnibus and series records that duplicate the separate books they contain;
• a few titles for which no source could be found at all, which may simply be invented.

These are on a working list and are being fixed one at a time on the edit pages. Until then a few of them are still visible.

Duplicates to merge. Around 25 pairs of records are probably the same book under two titles. Both are still on the site until we merge them.

Fixes by hand. Roughly 40 corrections of titles, dates and roles remain, plus about 20 authors whose birth or death dates need confirming. Where a date is uncertain, treat it as a best estimate.

Judgment calls. Over 100 more are open: whether a borderline work belongs, how to describe a contested one, which edition to prefer. A further hundreds of items are only “research for later”, such as confirming a year, expanding a thin description or finding a free edition. Many minor-title descriptions are short because the sources were thin.

Ratings are lighter than elsewhere. The ratings and “who is it for” lines on these works come from the pass and were accepted without a person reading each one. They are marked that way in the data. Treat them as a first draft until we say otherwise.

One author is deliberately hidden. We have left one author’s record off the public site while we decide how to present a serious matter about his conduct honestly alongside his scholarship. We would rather say that than quietly omit him.

Some things we could not reach. Several sources were unavailable to the research (one large archive could not be opened at all), so some free scans that probably exist are not yet linked.

What you can do

If you spot a wrong date, a book credited to the wrong author, or a work that does not exist, the Report an issue link on every work page goes straight to us. For this group of authors it is the fastest way to fix things.

What is next

1. Work through the lists above, starting with the records that are not what they say.
2. Decide about the hidden author and the other presentation questions.
3. Confirm the open dates and thin descriptions.
4. Begin collections that include the recent authors, which we held back until they were in.

We will post again when the list is shorter.