The Southern Baptist Periodical Index (SBPI) was begun in 1965 by the Historical Commission, with the encouragement and support of the Inter-Agency Council of the of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Lynn May believed an index would be helpful to researchers and others needing to access articles in Southern Baptist periodical literature. Each entity was responsible for indexing its own publications with guidelines provided by the Historical Commission. The Commission staff would develop the BIRS (Baptist Information Retrieval System) to index about 30 periodicals produced by Southern Baptist related entities and institutions. Due to technology changes and funding, the Commission ended its management of the SBPI in 1984. The indexing project was then assumed by Southwest Baptist University. The project then included not only a printed index, but also an online index from 1985 to 2020.
The online index for years 1985-2020 is available here.
This digital effort is to provide access to the printed volumes of the index from 1965 to 2000. An additional volume indexing Baptist Sunday School Board publications, years 1962-1964, compiled by staff of the Dargan-Carver Library, is also included in the digital project. All of these indexed years were scanned with OCR added for searchability. Each volume shows the indexing by author, title, and subject. Prior to 1985, book review citations were incorporated into the main index with subjects, authors, and titles; beginning in 1985, book review citations were separated into an index at the end of each year’s volume. The Commission staff developed a thesaurus to provide subject entry guidelines for the indexes. These digitized indexes cover the years, 1965 to 2000.
The SBPI for the following years are available.
