Abstract

The arrival of the digital age has deeply changed also the religious studies and, on the side of the research tools, it has been possible to observe over the last thirty years fundamental evolutions. If the simple scanning of library files and the creation of OPACs has revolutionized the research activity, the subsequent digitalisation of immense corpora has opened research possibilities that had seemed impossible just a few years previously. The spread of the virtual world raises the question of a radical rethinking of the work method of the historian involved in religious sciences and of the impact of his research: the same concept of book and, as a consequence, of the library as a place for its conservation has changed forever. There is still the question of the identification of the problems and of the definition of a work method that it should not be necessarily the fastest, but the most suitable for their solution.