Digital Collections
Our digital collections repository, Pearl, provides access to a growing number of digitized and born digital objects from our collection, such as images; publications; manuscripts; audiovisual materials, including oral histories; and websites of presbyteries, synods, national agencies, and related ecumenical organizations. The digital collections are particularly focused on themes related to overseas and national mission work, ecumenical and interfaith activities, education, and social and political issues and activism.
Pearl is named in honor of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China Caroline and Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl S. Buck also served as a missionary to China from 1914 to 1933 in Anhui Province, the region depicted in her novel, The Good Earth.
Read the Digital Collection Development Policy (or download PDF version).
PHS is the recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant to digitize 22,500 images, newspaper clippings, and related documents from the Religious News Service Photograph Collection.
Learn about the project and explore digitized RNS photographs.
