D. L. Moody Goes Digital!

Moody Bible Institute has launched the Moody Crowell Library’s first publicly accessible digital collection of D. L. Moody’s letters, dating from 1854 until just before his passing in 1899.

Hosted and searchable on CARLI’s Digital Collections site, almost 300 letters can be viewed so far. Corie Zylstra, Moody’s digital collections librarian, has been organizing, uploading, and improving the scans and transcriptions, which is sometimes tedious work.

“Moody’s handwriting can be hard to decipher!” says Julie Adamski, technical services head librarian. “Corie is also adding metadata to help users find letters they are interested in.”

With five boxes of more than 900 letters to upload, the process could take a couple of years. Corie digitizes 30–40 letters every month and is currently uploading letters from 1895–97. “Those are mostly focused on the Bible Institute Colportage Association—how his students helped with that. They would go out and canvass, trying to sell books,” she says.

The collection contains original and secondary resources, including D. L. Moody’s handwritten correspondence and sermon notes, newspaper clippings from his evangelistic campaigns, and photographs.

View the collection at https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/digital/collection/mbi_dlm

or search at https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/digital/collection/mbi_dlm/search/.

Additional letters are available in the D. L. Moody Digital Archives housed at https://archives.moodycenter.org.