Over the past decade, the technical marketing term “cloud computing” has led users and organizations to enter into contractual agreements that sometimes result in the inappropriate use of content without their knowledge and additional risk for breaches of privacy. These agreements also can end up “vendor locking” organizations into services that take on a subscription model as opposed to true data ownership from self-hosting. While this shift occurred, processors evolved at a pace that allowed the adoption of smartphones which now equal pocket computers. Many smartphones run on the ARM based processor platform, that facilitates powerful processing and relatively low power consumption. With the arrival of the successful ARM processor based, educational microcomputer called the “Raspberry Pi”, a whole new market of credit card sized microcomputers has started to flourish. These microcomputers have the capability of running web server applications that can be used in libraries of all sizes. This potential “desktop datacenter” advancement is profound for small libraries like those found in churches and seminaries around the world. With low power consumption, these single board servers give the capability to service areas that have never had the opportunity to host application servers due to unstable electricity. This paper illustrates the use of the single board computing platform named “BeagleBone Black” running Ubuntu Linux, to host the institutional repository application Omeka. This work guides a small library to build an IR site, supporting Dublin Core metadata with Omeka, for under a $200 while assuring complete content ownership.

Online religious literacy education framed within metaliteracy in a congregational context is a little-researched topic. Congregational religious education often focuses on in-person educational opportunities regarding static religious content and facts or devotional materials and methods. As such it seldom provides members with the educational processes, tools, and frameworks needed to explore their faith questions and other theological and religious topics for lifelong learning from an integrative critical-devotional perspective. Available literature within the subject area of online religious and theological education generally focuses on the educational endeavors of seminarians, clergy, and students within K-12 educational institutions, thus leaving unaddressed the unique concerns and potentials of serious online religious and theological education for congregational members. The current study addresses this omission via qualitative and quantitative evaluation of an online religious metaliteracy course, Faith Thinking Foundations, at Liberation Christian Church in St. Louis, MO, through narrative research, interviews, and surveys of course participants and other interested parties in their attitudes and experiences regarding the course. The author examines available literature for online education within the areas of religious and theological studies, including evaluation and assessment of online courses, religious, and theological curricula. The author proposes that serious online religious and theological education is worthwhile for laypeople as well as seminarians, clergy, and other religious scholars. Such education allows people of faith to further discover, affirm, and live out the purposes to which they are called in God’s realm. This project, by examining the role that the Faith Thinking Foundations online course has in the lives of its participants, offers new insight on the potential of online religious learning for all of God’s people.

While the genre of reality television may not be considered as a new medium of communication, the way that some religious minorities found some innovative ways to use this kind of programming in the last 5 years is certainly of interest. In that regard, beginning in 2010 the members of various fundamentalist Mormon communities have chosen to open their lives to the cameras of reality television in an effort to spread a message close to their hearts : that polygamous families are in almost every way completely normal and share the struggles of the typical American family, and that since the scandals of Warren Jeffs, Tom Green and the Lafferty brothers made the news, the media depiction of plural marriage and those who practice it is not representative of the reality of the majority of practicing fundamentalists. The main message of these pro-polygamy activists is to convince the public of their inherent normalcy and they seem to work towards changing the minds of the American people by proving that most women enter freely and willingly into polygamous marriages and find great happiness living in plural families. In addition to disseminating their message through reality shows like Sister Wives (TLC 2010-), My Five Wives (TLC 2014) and Polygamy USA (National Geographic 2013), the families at the center the movement for decriminalization of plural marriage also use blogs to provide information about their unique lifestyle, and some turn to live tweeting during episodes as a way to interact directly with the public. This article describes the interactions between religious fundamentalisms, in this case in the form of polygamous Mormon culture, and information technology. Is also discussed the manner in which the various information transmission strategies used by advocates of plural marriage can lead to effective changes in laws and public policies.

Advances in technology allow for new modes of access to both secular and religious information. Historically, some religious groups seem to have been eager to accept technological developments, while others have done so reluctantly. Nevertheless, the sustainability of a religious tradition depends on the ability of its believers to continually access information in an evolving world. Modern technology has occasioned broader religious information landscapes than ever before, to the extent that religion can seemingly be practiced using entirely online tools. Is this possibility borne out in reality? Through a synthesis of the nature and historical development of Zen Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, this study identifies some aspects inherent in each tradition that have influenced each one’s religious information landscape. It then explores the extent to which each religion can be practiced without an in-person faith community. These findings suggest an opportunity for further investigation into the information behavior of technology-enabled believers as a means of better understanding the future of religious experience.

In this paper, we investigate religious information behavior by laypeople related to Christian religious belief, through a content analysis of questions posted to the social media Q&A site Yahoo! Answers. The emergent taxonomy of questions is similar to that developed to characterize Yahoo! Answers posts focusing on eating disorders—indicating commonalities of motivation and in the socio-emotional aspects of participation in Yahoo! Answers across topic boundaries. Regarding religious information seeking, the questions are particularly interesting in that they provide insight into non-factual information needs: for example, they illuminate the desire to understand another person’s understanding of religion (rather than to hear an authoritative statement of the tenets of a faith), and to communicate with others to develop an understanding of one’s own religious beliefs.

In academia the traditional literature review (TLR) is used to provide a summary look at what has been 'done before'. However, critics poiint to the potential for biased representation of topics when TLR are used. A large systematic review methods (SR) literature offers evidence that the shortcomings of TLR might be minimized. Moreover, SR methods themselves are evolving; “rapid reviews” and “scoping” are a new approaches for picturing the literature on topics. We report on our use of these methods to map the social science literature on the broad topic of “intolerance in religion”, and we discuss our experience to date with the rapid review and scoping methodologies. The literature of SR methods does seem a valuable resource for guidance that can serve librarians and researchers as they work on reviews addressing topics in religion.

This paper examines the process of a modern mission agency's transition from desktop and server-based systems to social media and cloud-based solutions. Mission agencies have existed since the 1850s and represent early implementations of globally distributed collaborative groups. This study examines the process of one mission agency working through the transition to modern social computing to create and share knowledge between the home office, missionaries, donors, and churches.

Zotero, known in academic institutions as a research tool for students, faculty, and other scholars, has tremendous potential for use in faith communities as a place to store and share nearly any type of digital information encountered in congregational life. This paper opens with defining the role of information in congregations’ lives, followed by a discussion of religious literacy within a metaliteracy framework. It continues with the use of Zotero at Liberation Christian Church, covering its benefits, including a more fully-integrated intellectual presence in the congregation’s faith life. It also discusses generating interest and skills within the congregation about Zotero through marketing and educational efforts, which provide congregational members greater opportunities to benefit from the resource. It concludes with the potential issues, such as ethical and copyright concerns, of using Zotero within faith communities, as well as a summary of Liberation’s current Zotero use.

The social context of religious knowledge includes many different aspects of an individual’s life, including the external structures, such as class and political environment, which influence social behavior and the social processes, such as attitudes and values, which provide a level of consistency in people’s viewpoints, including the way that they encounter, react to, and attempt to incorporate new knowledge. This study examines the relationships between specific expressed religious views and opinions about specific scientific issues. The data used for the study is based on a representative random sample of Americans in the 2010 General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The scientific issues examined are: global climate change, evolution, stem cell research, continental drift/age of the earth, the big bang, and nanotechnology. The religious attitudes examined are based on questions about: belief in God, “born again” experience, extent of religious feelings, religious commitment, Bible reading, and whether God should punish sinners. Chi square and correlation statistical tests were used to explore the relationships between the religion and science variables, leading to rejection of the hypothesis that there are no differences in the attitudes of those with positive attitudes about religion and those with little, none or even negative religious attitudes and their attitudes towards the specific scientific issues included in the study. Analysis revealed inverse relationships between strong, positive religious attitudes and strong positive attitudes about current scientific issues.