Congregational Library

Tech Tuesday: Favorite Links

As Jess mentioned last week, we decided to share with you some of our favorite links we use at the Congregational Library. Since we each have different roles and responsibilities, we hope that from these postings you'll find something useful.

One site I visit frquently is the Internet Archive. This site is a collection of digital books, music, web sites, movies, and images free to all. We are contributing to this collection through our digital projects in a relationship with the Boston Region Library System. You'll find many Congregational yearbooks and titles here. I've used this site to locate digitized sermons from certain eras.

Another site I use in both cataloging books, responding to the "do you have this book," and other research is Worldcat. Here you can seach all the cataogs that have contributed to OCLC. If we don't have the book you need, search here and you may find a local library or your seminary or college library that has it. It is also helpful if you can't quite remember the title of a book but know some of the words.

Since I began offering workshops for church librarians, I've found some great information on the web site of the National Church Library Association. They have a newsletter and chuch librarians may want to become members.

Other frequent used sites are those of the Library Associations: American Library Association (ALA), Special Libraries Association (SLA), and American Theological Library Association (ATLA). 

Finally, you can link to me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

-CLAUDETTE

A successful collaboration

image from the NEDCC web site

Here's a little vignette from the act of getting a new collection into the archive and dovetails nicely into last Tuesday's links post-

Most of our collections are from local New England churches. There are times when we will get a church farther afield that has 1. closed and 2. has heard of us. Part 2 is clearly an important detail and sadly not as guaranteed as we would like. In this case, the church was a middling distance of upstate New York. By a twist of fate, a nearby local library, which had been temporarily holding the church's records, had to come to Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) to pick up a restored map that was too big to ship.

The New York folks had no idea when we started talking that I have a close working relationship with NEDCC. Originally they thought they'd have to fit driving from Andover to Downtown Boston. What a surprise for them when I successfully negotiated to have my new collection left at NEDCC.

It felt good to be able to help out someone who was really doing me a favor in the first place by hauling my new collection. Also, I'm grateful to be an active member in a helpful community. Finally, I had the pleasure of visiting an organization that I rely on and I'm quite fond of. I probably could have spent all morning talking to the conservators about their projects, the building, the view from their windows, the history of the town- you get the idea.

-Jessica

Predestination and Small Pox

One of the benefits of working in a library is that you can grab a new book before it gets on the shelf.  I picked up Peter Thuesen’s new book on Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine, and I’m enjoying thoroughly—and this isn’t just because I was raised a Calvinist (sigh).

 

Admittedly, this is a book for people willing to wade through some fairly deep philosophical questions.  Did God predetermine history, or did God just know what was going to happen in advance? Did God mean for Adam and Eve to sin in the Garden of Eden, or was this “plan B”? It’s not always bed-time reading.

 

What’s makes this book fascinating, though, is the importance of these ideas, not just to theologians but to people on the street. It’s kind of a truism that Congregationalists haven’t been true-blue Calvinists since the early 1800s—that tribe is and always has been pretty small—but that doesn’t mean they didn’t care about theological debates.

 

For example: in 1721, when an infected ship brought a smallpox epidemic into Boston, Cotton Mather (the pastor of the Second Church) enlisted physician Zabdiel Boylston in an inoculation campaign. Mather had learned about the technique from his African slave, Onesimus, and though the technique was risky, he tried to urge it on the populace.

 

The citizens of Boston responded with a flood of anonymous letters, even a primitive grenade through a window (“You Dog, Dam you; I’l inoculate you with this”) warning Mather against tempting God. If smallpox was a divine judgment, as some people apparently believed it was,  did human beings have a right to resist?

 

Mather agreed that the epidemic was an act of God but he insisted that inoculation was too. Did not the Scriptures (Acts 16:28) command, “Do yourselves no harm?” Often caricatured as a smug Puritan, Mather was, as Thuesen argues, much more “modern” in his understanding of human catastrophe than most of his fellow Bostonians, and far more “American” in his refusal to submit to blind religious authority when God-given remedies were right on hand.

-Peggy

Tech Class on October 3

Hey Boston-area folks:

Are you curious about some of these newer tools that are available online these days, but perhaps you either don't get what their point is, or you'd really prefer to have a bit of a guided tour, well- I've got the answer for you. I'm teaching a class that discusses some of the new technologies that have become so popular in the past few years. Given our mission and patron-base, I put it into the context of using them in conjunction with churches and their activities. However, all these tools are extremely flexible and can be used for just about any setting in which you need to interact efficiently with other groups.

The class is here at the library, 14 Beacon Street, Boston (2nd floor) on Saturday October 3 from 10am-noon for the reasonable price of $10. Here's a link to the original event flier. Attendees may bring their laptop with them to try out what we discuss, but it is not required. We can accommodate up to 10 participants, so do sign up soon. If you are interested, please contact Susan Thomas to register.

-Jessica

Tech Tuesday: favorite links

We thought our audience might like to see what our favorite links are- the ones we use on a regular basis to get our work done answering reference questions and the like.

The first set is a group of three, actually- People will ask me about finding churches, which may or may not still be active. I'll check the 3 denominational sites to see if they're listed there: UCC, NACCC, and CCCC. If they're not listed there, I look in Richard Taylor's books whenever possible to see if the church closed. Most often his New England Churches book. 

When dealing with preservation and conservation matters, a regular resource is the Northeast Document Conservation Center. They have an astounding number of pamphlets available on topics such as how to handle types of documents, the best way to store archival items, disaster planning, and so on. The complete list is here. 

At least for the moment, I feel like I'm living at the Camtasia learning center site while I put together my screencasts for the records management class. At least on that front I'm making progress.

Finally, our very own web site is probably one that I visit most often.

-Jessica

More History about our serials collection

From Advance of September 1, 1941, page 542

Consider the record:

January, 1929. The American Missionary merged with The Congregationalist as a monthly magazine number. The merger was not popular with the readers of either paper.

March, 1930. Merger of The Herald of Gospel Liberty with The Congregationalist, and the adoption of the unwieldy name The Congregationalist and Herald of Gospel Liberty. Many in the former Christian Church were resentful of what they regarded as the loss of their paper, while Congregationalist readers did not take kindly to the long dual name.

March, 1934. Unscrambling of The American Missionary -- Congregationalist merger, the effect of which was to cancel entirely the substantial denominational subsidy that The Congregationalist had had prior to the merger.

April, 1934. Adoption of the name, Advance the paper to be a 16-page weekly, with one 32-page number each month.

October, 1935. Change of Advance to a 52-page monthly.

...

Of the last, the change to the name Advance and the change to the 52-page monthly, it is too early to judge.

These titles can be found in our online catalog. Just click on the tab on our web site.

--Claudette

History Friday: Female Clergy and The Congregational League of Church Assistants

In1921 the National Council (the national body of Congregationalists) received a report on “Ordained Women, Church Assistants, and Lay Workers.” The report was commissioned in 1919, to “secure information” about the number of Congregational women ministers, their “standing and efficiency,” and whether more female clergy were needed.

In some ways, the report was astonishing—in other ways it was not. According to the Yearbook for 1919, out of a total of 5695 Congregational ministers, only 67 (or 1.2%) were women. Only 18 of that 67 were pastors of churches; all of the rest were either unclassified or serving as church assistants of various types, often alongside their husbands. “So far as your Commission has knowledge,” the report concluded, “no scandal or seriously unpleasant incident has grown out of the ordination of women in our denomination. The service which these women are rendering is for the most part a quiet, inconspicuous service and one to which they appear to have been called.” The Commission did not envision this small number ever becoming a trend: “Our ordained women are too few in number and too modest or at least inconspicuous in their form of service to appear at present to offer our denomination any serious problem.”

Instead, the Commission urged support for the Congregational League of Church Assistants, organized in 1915. By 1919 it had nearly 300 members, both men and women, serving as education directors, pastors’ assistants, church secretaries, church missionaries, visitors, and social workers. The early form of this work was through Deaconess Institutes, which trained women for work in hospitals and churches; these women sometimes, but not always wore distinctive dress. To this work the Council gave its “hearty approval.”

 

--Peggy

Intern Fair

I'm headed over to the Simmons GSLIS intern fair, which is held every fall. The program has an archive track- one that I went through myself. The two primary classes, 438 and 440 require an internship as part of the class. Looking back at my time at Simmons, the internships were the best practical things about my education.

They started having the fair in 2001, so almost the entire time I've been working at the library. I really enjoy the break in my routine to see colleagues and meet the latest group of students. I find that most who attend are new to the program and not sure what they want to do with their long term goals. That's a good reason to go to the fair, for sure. So, if you're in the archive track at Simmons and were wondering if you should go, perhaps you didn't even hear about it, I strongly recommend walking around. I even have chocolate this time. It's from 12:30-2:30.

-Jessica

New Online Resource

If you're interested in older Congregational churches, you may want to take a look at the PDF copy of An inventory of the records of the particular (Congregational) churches of Massachusetts gathered 1620-1805by Harold Field Worthley (former director of the Library). This work published in 1970 details the extent and locations of Colonial-era church records. This file is very large and will take time to download. The book is arranged by town name in alphabetical order. Historians and genealogists will find this useful.

Claudette

Example of Records Management lessons in action

I mentioned earlier, that I'm working on my records management class in an online format. Well, as it happened, I was doing some meta/organizing around the office. As we prepare to do half a dozen small things with our church records microfilm/digitizing project, I labeled these files over the past two years, I didn't take into consideration the long-term view. But now we're at a point when I refer to all these files somewhat regularly making sure that we're all set as we microfilm and scan more. It's a good thing I usually use pencil and almost never use labels when creating these files as this photo montage will demonstrate:
Please note- you may click on any picture to see a larger version-

Here we have the initial set of files and all the material I needed to add into it with an artfully arranged pencil and eraser:

 

A close up of the file names-

Next step: clean up the work space. I like to use this open ended Princeton File for small stacks of files like this-

 

And here's how I chose to relabel. 

This naming protocol will blend with my existing collection files (each collection ought have a file, so I have close to 1000). They won't be added to that part of my records. They'll stay separated while they're all so active. This is why I added a bit of extra information that gives me a quick reference to each collection's status on microfilming, digitizing/scanning, and so on. 

That last bit really is a bit much for my usual labeling. I went over the top since I was in a hyper-organized mode when I re-did it. It should make keeping track of all the stages much easier, though. Sometimes you don't want to sift through email and wiki pages to get an answer. You just want to open the file drawer and know.

If this sort of lesson was particularly useful and you'd like to know more, sign up for a records management for church collections seminar. The next one will be in October. Check out our events page for more details. If you're not local, we will be offering my webinar/ screencast version starting next year for our members. Stay tuned!