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Goshen College

Students gather metadata on materials from Ethiopian church

June 6, 2023

Ruth Gelane, AMBS Master of Arts: Theology and Peace Studies student and AMBS library assistant, prepares to generate full cataloging data for the Amharic translation of John Paul Lederach’s The Journey Toward Reconciliation. Ruth noticed in her research for an AMBS course that MHL’s Amharic materials were not fully cataloged, prompting AMBS Library to contribute Ethiopian students’ linguistic expertise to cataloging unique MHL holdings. (Photo by Karl Stutzman)

As the Ethiopian student body has grown at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), an innovative collaboration has emerged between the AMBS library and the Mennonite Historical Library (MHL) at Goshen College. The MHL holds a number of resources published by the Meserete Kristos Church (MKC)–the largest Mennonite national conference in the world–but it has not had the Amharic-speaking staff to properly catalog them. Amharic is the most widely-spoken language in Ethiopia and one of the main publishing languages for MKC.

With the support of Karl Stutzman, director of library services at AMBS, Ethiopian students from AMBS are working to gather the necessary metadata for Amharic-language materials from the MHL, so that these resources can be properly cataloged.

Workineh Yami, an MKC church leader and Master of Arts in Theology and Peace Studies student at AMBS, believes it’s important to make these resources more accessible as he and other MKC students continue their seminary studies at AMBS. “Ethiopian students are flooding to [AMBS]. Especially as an Ethiopian student who sometimes works on research papers on our context, it is so important to have those Amharic books.”