Beacon Street Diary

Reminder: Connecting to Collections Survey

Here's a quick reminder for any of our readers who are 1. In Massachusetts and 2. Work for a library / archive.  We have until April 23 for people to participate. Our coordinator, Gregor Trinkaus-Randall reminds:

"However, while we have been fortunate to have been able to develop an extensive statewide preservation program over the past two decades, the results of this survey will go a long way towards setting our course for the future.  We have received around 200 completed surveys so far from the list of 1,816 institutions we have compiled, but we really need a significantly larger number to be able to obtain as complete a picture of conditions statewide as possible. Therefore, I really hope that you will be able to take the time to complete the survey in the next couple of weeks."

The original post we published is here.

Thanks.
-Jessica

Twitter

Some of you may know that the library has a Twitter feed. We haven't done too much with it, but after attending the Digital Commonwealth conference last Thursday, I've determined we should be more deliberate.

For those who do not have and do not want their own account but are interested in our posts, you can use an RSS feed to see all public tweets. That does mean that you cannot reply to our posts.

-Jessica

An Intern's Perspective of Old South Church Archives

This has been my first foray into the world of archives and so far the work at the Old South Church in Copley Square has proved to be quite an introduction to the profession. We have come across many objects from the mundane photocopied receipts to the unique manuscripts handwritten by former ministers of the church in the late 18th century. As a record of the church the sermons strike me as something extremely valuable and useful. They essentially document and record the public voice of the church in one of the most direct ways possible. From these sermons one can tell what topics were important to the Church at that time and also what the Church's perspective was. All in all pretty important historical documents for the Church's record and institutional memory. Here are some pictures of some manuscripts we found randomly in a nondescript box. These were in a box I was going through and were the first, clearly important and old documents I found and it was exciting, for a first timer.

There are more documents similar to these as well. I imagine these will be useful for research and I hope that someone is looking forward to using them. Hopefully, we will get them to the library soon where they can be studied.

These discoveries also had me thinking about how the current sermons would be preserved. We have found sermons of one of the more recent ministers, James Crawford dating up to 2001. I am sure by this point they are being composed on a computer and are therefore “born digital” documents. It will be interesting to see how these born digital sermons will be preserved and if, once lost or stored indefinitely, they could ever be found and read as these manuscripts have been. This does not even begin to address the issue of e-mail. We have found box after box of correspondences dating back to the 19th century. Right now, after surveying an extensive aggregation of records, I can say that they have a rich historical record. However, all the effort and foresight it took was to throw old papers into boxes. With the new "born digital" documents that is not possible.

There is an old computer lying in the basement that we have not even considered looking at.

 

If this is the future of the records then how useful would this be if another batch of interns comes across it in fifty years. It is good that the Church is doing this survey now and I look forward to continuing the processing work of the collection and perhaps this will help to understand the new issues with the current documents.

-Derek Jackson

Local Activism

I attended the spring meeting for the New England Archivists this past weekend. There are two meetings a year, and this is the one in which leadership transitions. Last year I had been asked to run for the vice president position, and gratefully lost. This year I volunteered to run for representative at large and won! So over the next many months -- possibly years (it is a 3 year term), I will share some insights with how the governmental structure of a wholly volunteer organization works. So far I do not know what the reality of being a rep-at-large means, but I am quite certain it involves attending board meetings and helping make sure various committees run.

-Jessica

Member section orientation

Many of you may have heard about our Members Section on our website. I have put together a brief video that may help some of you get started either as a member or after in the section itself.

-Jessica

International Visit

Last Friday we had a visit from a group of 8th graders from the Doshisha School in Kyoto, Japan. We took this video of them singing for a small group in our conference room.

An Illinois Pastor in the 1920s

This past month I discovered a trove of journals in the archives, written by William Harvey Young, who pastored several small churches in rural Illinois in the early part of the last century. They provide a fascinating view of parish life a hundred years ago, as Young copes with hospital visits and fractious church members without the aid of a cell phone or a Blackberry.

What interested me most was Rev. Young's dogged commitment to improving himself through reading. In December 1928 he gave an evening talk entitled "Is Man Thinking?" based on an article by social critic Joseph Wood Krutch, published that November in the Atlantic magazine. He read Sinclair Lewis's caustic novel Babbitt, Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture, the Christian Century, and of course The Congregationalist. Young often reflected on what he was reading — he had little good to say about Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, which depicted Jesus as a "go-getter" with a flair for organization. Jesus was "masterful enough, no doubt," Young wrote. "But there is something professional about the modern motif of business organization which makes it seem a sacrilege to apply its vernacular to him. He was too genuine, too largely interested in human values for the comparison to be quite in keeping."

Young also read Shakespeare — this after talking shop with another minister friend who went on at length about his study regimen and those of other successful clergymen, including one California preacher who read a play of Shakespeare every week for style and language. Within a few days Young was plowing through Macbeth, writing out quotations to use in an evening talk. Unfortunately, when he finally delivered it, the lecture was almost an hour long — and not well received. He did not record his feelings about this, but it’s not hard to imagine a bit of frustration.

But all in all I don't think this discouraged him because the next day he was reading again about Christian education — all the latest books by Coe, Hartshorne, and Soares — and dipping back into Babbitt, though I would guess with a deep sigh.

-Peggy

Dealing with Digital

When I teach my records management class, I spend more and more time on digital files. My mantra has been, "digital is about access, not about preservation." In my regular work, I spend time and energy wondering what are we going to do with our own born-digital files for the long term. This New York Times article does a very good job encapsulating the issue.

-Jessica

Improved Resource: Records Management Booklet

Four years ago I wrote a records management booklet and started teaching classes. Last year I created videos that will provide the majority of what that class offers for those who can't join us at the library. (Those videos are available in our Members section) The process of creating those videos helped hone my topics and overall lesson plan, which meant it was time to rewrite the original document.

Some of the improvements include an expurgated retention schedule, organization tips, and an overall restructure of the whole booklet. For those interested in my preservation booklet, it has been incorporated into this document.

The PDF is now available in our Records Management section of the site.

-Jessica

The History of Women in Sermons

Our current digitization project through the Internet Archive includes the digitization of the funeral or memorial sermons preached on the death of a woman. Often these were the wives or daughters of clergy, missionaries, or prominent citizens. Some were recognized in their own right such as this one:

The Christian teacher : on the death of Miss Laura W. Ayer, assistant principal of the West High School : a discourse, preached in the Congregational Church, Cleveland, September 9th, 1860, re-delivered, by request, before the Cleveland Teachers' Association, January 26th, 1861.

More sermons are in the process of being digitized.

If you wish to see a list of these sermons on women, please search for the following terms in our online catalog: funeral sermons women.

March is Women's History Month.

-Claudette