The Puffenberger Collection Project

On January 28th, 2016, Dr. Bill Puffenberger, Professor of Religious and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College, donated over 250 artifacts to the school hoping that the artifacts would aid students’ education when studying traditions from around the world. After the collection was donated, Dr. Jeffery Long, Professor of Asian and Religious Studies and Caryn Zwart, an Elizabethtown College alumni, labeled and cataloged each artifact onto a spreadsheet. In order to make the artifacts more available for the students of Elizabethtown and beyond to explore, Hannah Ciocco and Amal Ismail, under the supervision of Dr. Richard Newton and Carol Ouimet, created the digital curation of the Puffenberger Collection. The project’s main focus is to digitalize many of the artifacts onto an accessible, interactive online website. With the creation of the website, we hope to make a database where students and faculty can reference the broad collection at any time when studying world’s religions or to admire the various artifacts and their significance to their correlated traditions. In addition to the images of the artifacts, the website also includes descriptions, sacred texts links, and High Library and external resources associated with each specific artifact. The website also houses videos of Dr. Puffenberger’s and other professors’ commentary and background on specific artifacts seen on featured items. The “William V. Puffenberger Digital Collection of Religious Artifacts” is an ongoing project to archive artifacts from Dr. Puffenberger and other faculty in order to illustrate their importance in religious traditions and their role in education.

The website was created by Elizabethtown College students in the summer of 2018 and is an ongoing research project. For any questions or comments, please contact DHHub@etown.edu.