Day Missions Collection

The Day Missions Collection developed from a core of materials donated by Professor George Edward Day in 1891. The collection originally focused on institutional histories, missionary biography, the annual reports of missionary societies, periodicals, and works prepared by missionaries for the use of the peoples of mission fields, as well as related literature in areas such as ethnology, geography, comparative religions, and linguistics. From its inception, the Day Missions Collection was envisioned as a resource not only for Yale, but also for the wider scholarly community, "for that expert outside constituency who will come here for special investigation and work." In this spirit, the Yale Divinity Library has engaged in a number of projects to digitize and make freely accessible online important primary sources from the Day Missions Collection:

Day Missions Annual Reports and Periodicals

Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012) and the Arcadia Foundation (2009) have supported the digitization of more than 5,500 volumes of annual reports and periodicals of mission agencies and church bodies.

International Mission Photography Archive

The Yale Divinity Library is one of several archival repositories from around the world that are contributing mission photographs to the International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) database. More than 10,000 photographs from the Divinity Library's collections are available via IMPA.

China Missionary Papers

Selected personal papers of missionaries to China have been digitized in response to patron requests and in collaboration with the Center for Christian Studies at Shantou University. Please contact the Special Collections Librarian for information about material digitized from the Abbie Sanderson Papers, Ellison and Lottie Hildreth Papers, and Foster Family Papers.

Archives of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia

With the support of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (UBCHEA), the Divinity Library is engaged in an ongoing project to digitize selections of the the UBCHEA archives that relate to the colleges and universities founded in China by missionary agencies.