Research Guides: Cardinal Newman and His Times: Home

About the Newman Collection

The Newman Collection at Saint Mary's College of California comprises over 5,000 items including about 1,200 tracts and 500 volumes of bound periodicals. About half of the Collection consists of Newman's own writings, and of books about him. The rest deals with the environment of thought in which he lived and with the history of religion in England and Europe in the nineteenth century. The divisions of the Collection include works concerning eighteenth century British Catholicism, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Oxford Movement, the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Great Britain, anti-Catholic or "No-Popery" literature, ritualism in the Church of England, Vatican Council I (1869-70), liberal Catholicism, the Old Catholic Church Movement and the Kulturkampf in German-speaking states following the Vatican Council.

Digitization Project

Collection Digitization Project

The Library's Special "Newman and his Times" Collection is part of an international collaborative effort to digitize research materials representing the life and works of John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Spearheaded by the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) located in Pittsburgh, this project is part of its "Newman Knowledge Kiosk" to serve the research needs of Newman scholars worldwide. The goal of the project, according to NINS website, is to "digitally scan the combined Newman resources of the Kelly Library at The University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, Saint Mary's College, in Moraga California, and St. John's Seminary Library, which is owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Boston. Each institution has developed a world-class Newman collection. Together, these sources will constitute a digital library that will be the finest Newman collection in North America."

NINS has provided funding for the scanning and cataloging of the collection, both of which are nearing completion as of 2015. The Library contributed staff time for organizing the project, evaluating, and packing the collection, reviewing the cataloging and quality of scans, importing catalog records and linking to the digital images from Albert.

It is a tribute to the work of former brother Thomas Loome and deceased Special Collections Librarian, Andrew Simon, who developed and organized this collection for the use of future scholars. The collection will be more widely used and acknowledged than they could have dreamed.