Christian Classics Ethereal Library

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The Christian Classics Ethereal Library is a volunteer-based project to provide free electronic copies of Christian scripture and literature texts.

It was founded by Harry Plantinga in 1993. The project is supported by Calvin College.

The current project includes an Internet web site for processing documents. Books are scanned and run through OCR. Volunteers can then edit and correct the texts through a web interface. This is similar to (and predates) Distributed Proofreaders.

The purpose of the CCEL is simply "to build up Christ's church and to address fundamental questions of the faith." According to their website, the doctrine that is expressed in the documents of the library sometimes conflict with those of Calvin College, from which they are headquartered. They are continuously looking for more public domain documents (whether they are sermons, books, essays, etc.) that they can post on their website. They recommend that if a book or author you are looking for is not on the website, that you should try Google or going to J. Ockerbloom's online store to see if they have this resource.

Reading large documents can be easy, and can be done in a variety of ways--either through reading on screen using HTML or PDFs, or printing a book on paper, or using your PDA to read it either on the Palm Doc format or Microsoft Reader. Their version of XML, called ThML, or Theological Markup Language, will eventually be used to create every other type of document that will be available on their website.

The director of the CCEL is Harry Plantinga, who is a professor of computer science at Calvin College. Sales of the CD-ROM that is sold on the website provides most of the support for the project. Calvin College provides support in the form of equipment, space, network connections, and a student assistant. Dozens of individuals have also contributed. A couple of Calvin College students are helping with the programming and development of the next version of the library.

As of 2005, the server was logging about 600,000 "hits" per day from a 600,000 distinct users per month, providing about 500 GB of information in a month. That's equivalent to about a half million books per month.