Beacon Street Diary

Website down

Please note: we are having technical difficulties with our website. We are aware and working on the situation. Thank you for your patience.

-Jessica

Congregational Library hosting meeting of Massachusetts Society of Genealogists

On Saturday, March 13 at 1:30 PM, I will be hosting and speaking at the meeting of the Massachusetts Society of Genealogists - Middlesex Chapter here in the Library. The program will include a presentation on the collections and resources of the Congregational Library of interest to genealogists. I will present an overview of the digitization projects that are providing access to colonial church records and personal journals. I will also demonstrate the library necrology database that provides indexing for basic obituary information about Congregational clergy and missionaries. A tour of the library and the viewing of unique resources is included for MSOG members.

Additional information can be found on the MSOG website or by contacting Lori Lyn Price at pricegenealogy@gmail.com.

 

-Claudette

Archivist / Conservator Humor

Anyone who spends any amount of time near me in a professional or personal setting will eventually discover my deep and abiding hatred for scotch tape and most commercial adhesives. This is not a distaste that is unique to me. Most people who deal with caring for older records for the long haul are with me on this. I talk about the detriment such adhesives can inflict in my classes on records management and preservation and therefore end up scarring my audience on the topic of Post-It notes.

A brilliant person has figured out how to market to this very small niche via a Cafe Press store front.

Without further ado: I may now purchase a mug or magnets with this on it:

-Jessica

Congratulations to Simmons!

BOSTON (March 1, 2010) — The Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) has received a grant of $138,182 from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the project "Building an Archives & Preservation Digital Curriculum Laboratory."

Through this NHPRC grant and an IMLS grant received in 2009, GSLIS will build a digital curriculum laboratory to enhance archives and preservation education. The Lab will enable students, educators and researchers to learn, instruct and experiment with digital materials in a digital environment. Goals built into this grant include building the infrastructure of the lab, and producing learning modules.

The Simmons Archives and Preservation Digital Curriculum Lab will be a controlled digital space providing integrated access to digital content, content tools, curriculum-based scenarios, and workspaces. Students will have opportunities to experiment with and implement a range of digital archival and preservation procedures from record creation through preservation and delivery. The Lab will allow educators and students to evaluate and gain practical experience with current software and standards and a variety of open source content management systems.

Curriculum development specialists from Yale University and Tufts University will work in conjunction with GSLIS faculty on scenarios and learning modules. The scenarios will be tested and evaluated in the archives education programs of New York University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and by students of Simmons College.

NHPRC, the grant-making arm of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources relating to the history of the United States.

The nationally ranked Simmons GSLIS (www.simmons/gslis) is one of the oldest and largest library and information science programs in the nation. It is also ranked as one of the top 10 Archives/Preservation Management programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report.

Communing with the spirits

I spent most of yesterday trying to get to know the Congregationalists of the 1920s. I came in to work, took off my coat, and then ran up into the stacks for an armful of books — I had determined that this was going to be a day fully devoted to research, with as few interruptions as I could manage.

And so I sat at my desk for hours, reading through old issues of The Congregationalist, taking notes or copying off articles that caught my eye. I quickly became engrossed in some of the controversies of the day. "King of Kings" had just hit the movie theaters and many church people were outraged and perplexed by Hollywood's take on the life of Christ, a story that they thought they still owned in some fashion. Another spate of articles took on the problem of religion at Amherst College, sparked by an openly atheist talk in the school chapel. The editors defended British churchwoman Maude Royden, who had been disinvited from an event by Chicago Methodist when they learned that she smoked cigarettes. Congregationalists also worried about prohibition, about war, and about race relations. After a while I began to feel like I knew some of these people, as familiar names and faces began to form a recognizable pattern.

Hours went by like minutes, and I was deep into 1926 when Suchesta, the tenant coordinator here at 14 Beacon Street, came in with news of something I needed to see on the sixth floor. It took a minute to come up for air, and I followed her a little bit reluctantly. What she showed me was well worth the interruption.

John and David, the trusty maintenance crew at Congregational House, had taken down the large square of painted plywood that had long served as a directory of the tenants on the sixth floor, and had uncovered the original marble one underneath. The marble hadn't seen the light of day for many decades. In fact, some of the old Congregational tenants were still listed in neatly painted gold leaf letters: the Board of Pastoral Supply, the Massachusetts Conference of Congregational Christian Churches, and at least one office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

But that wasn't the exciting part. As we looked at that old marble directory, we began to see other seemingly random shapes that gradually formed into letters, like ghostly figures materializing into flesh. There was the Boston City Missionary Society, the Church Building Society, and Anatolia College. The more we looked at the marble, the more names we could make out.

It was like all of those old Congregationalists I'd be getting to know while I was sitting at my desk suddenly decided to pop out from behind a bush and say "boo". They were not just figures in old periodicals, but real flesh and blood people who used to work here, who loved this building and all it stood for. It's not often that historians who study the past get to bump right up against it the way that I did yesterday — but perhaps they should. There's nothing better than reading about people who haven't gone away gracefully, but love a good surprise every now and then.

-Peggy

Massachusetts Conference United Church of Christ Minutes Digitized

We have digitized the minutes of the Massachusetts Congregational conference (under its varied names) from 1807 to 2003. We wish to thank the Executive Committee of the Mass. Conference for permission to digitize these reports. Links to the reports are accessible on our website. For a list of individual years, click here. Digitization is done by the Internet Archive Scanning Center at the Boston Public Library. The cost of this digitization is funded through the sale of de-accessioned books and pamphlets.

We hope to add more conferences, associations, fellowships, and other denominational organizations as our digitization program continues. Keep an eye on this blog to stay up-to-date. To see some of our other digital resources, click here.

-Claudette

Diving into the Old South Project

Sometimes a project comes together that you know will be somewhat sizable, but the magnitude of it may not hit you until you're in the midst of it. This past December I formulated one that I think I knew would be pretty epic. I think I was correct.

Old South Church is one of the very few collections we have at the library of a living organization. They deposited records dating back to 1669 up to the late 20th century in several installments over the years. Nevertheless, this is a big church with a lot of activities. They have as yet unplumbed depths in regard to historical documents still on site. They have had historians over the years that have kept things in check, at least. This is much more than many Congregationally-based churches can boast.

This is a moment of transition for the church, a changing of the guard. Previous historian, Susan Campbell, has retired and Jeff Makholm has stepped into the role. I am in a position to organize a group of Simmons archive students to help us determine exactly what's at the church and of that, what should be transferred to the archive here. I have done similar work with our other major living collection from Park Street Church, which is on the other side of the block from the library. In the Park Street case, I used two students at a time, but this time three seemed necessary.

We are taking full advantage of various 2.0 technologies to keep us on track and in good communication. I suspect working without a wiki would make our lives much sadder. Expect to hear more about this in the weeks to come.

-Jessica