Welcome to the CCEL CD-Rom v4. This CD-Rom contains about 300 titles or volumes of the best public-domain and freely distributable Christian books of the ages, in English, formatted for a web browser, selected for your edification and study. The CD-Rom includes full-text search capabilities. You are encouraged to make copies of this CD and give them to friends, but you may not make copies for sale.

This CD-Rom is the product of eight years of my effort and the effort of many other volunteers scanning, typing, proofreading, and organizing public domain and freely copyable resources. All share a common goal: to make classic Christian books and other resources available for edification and study. Your purchase of this CD-Rom supports the further development of this library.

Although this CD-Rom is usable with any web browser, it works best with Netscape 6 or later or Internet Explorer 5 or later. Java must be enabled to use the full-text search function.

What is the CCEL? The Q&A page answers common questions. The vision statement describes our goals and gives more background. A story describes the origins of the CCEL.

Scanning, OCR, formatting, proofreading, and other work for this library is done by volunteers. The help wanted page lists ways you can contribute. One easy way is to work on a digital facsimile edition: images of pages of books are put on line and a database-driven system allows you to easily correct pages one at a time. You can even see what people are working on.

Bibliography development system. We are planning to form an ecumencial bibliographic committee to pick the best books for study and edification for a future CD-ROM. The bibliography will also determine priorities for future book digitization projects. This bibliography will be developed on-line with the help of lots of people. You can try out the bibliography development system yourself, though you won't be able to make changes if you are not an authorized

The CCEL uses Theological Markup Language to represent documents. Think of it as HTML with added support for scripture references, indexes, tables of contents, bibliographic information, and other digital library needs. The information goes into a database for automatic generation of index pages. ThML documents are automatically converted to HTML, HTML zipfiles, text, Open EBook, Palm DocBook, and Microsoft Reader format for convenient use. To download the other formats, go to the "About" page for the book, listed in the Table of Contents.

The World Wide Study Bible organizes scripture versions, commentaries, sermons, study guides, and book references according to scripture passage. Are you studying a particular passage? You'll find many relevant references here.

There is a mailing list for CCEL volunteers called the ccel-list. Traffic is light to moderate. The list discussion is on the details of preparing texts for the CCEL as well as announcements of work that needs to be done and other ccel-related discussion. list archive that was initiated on 5/7/01. To subscribe to the list, send the message subscribe ccel-list to [email protected]. To unsubscribe, send the message unsubscribe ccel-list.