Congregational Library

The Church in the Wildwood

Nashua, Iowa, is home to the Little Brown Church in the Vale. This church was organized in 1855, but the building wasn't completed until almost a decade later. During this period, William Pitts visited Nashua and wrote a song about a church he envisioned in this location. To his surprise, when he returned in 1864, he found the church completed and sang "The Church in the Wildwood".

The music for "The Church in the Wildwood" is printed on the above postcard. The music is written for four voices and appears to be in the key of B♭-Major. To hear renditions of this song, you can search YouTube for "The Church in the Wildwood", of which some follow the above music more closely than others.

--Abraham

Digital Archiving At Home - Helpful Hints

The issue of what to do with your ever-growing backlog of images, music, and files on all our computers sometimes feels like a time bomb: how long will they last? How can we save them from the fate of the files on the floppy disks we threw away years ago?  As an archivist, I still feel like we have a long way to go on perfecting this. My mantra is that digital is about access, not preservation. But that mantra in and of itself is flawed. We have to figure it out. From a personal perspective, I've not had a hard copy of any of my own pictures in over 5 or 6 years now.

So what do you do? I'd recommend reviewing what they have to say on these sites:

• Library of Congress's Guidelines for Digital Preservation
• Paradigm's Guidelines

I particularly liked the video on the LC site.

Thank you kindly to Abe for the pointers on these resources.

-Jessica

William James Bliss Batt

The following image is a portrait of William James Bliss Batt (1834-1930), a Congregational minister born in Fall River, Mass.

Batt was ordained in 1859 after graduating from Andover Theological Seminary the previous year. He also earned a B.A. at Brown University in 1855, the organization that would later award him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1930. Batt was pastor in Stoneham, Mass., 1859-1861 Bedford, Mass., 1861-1865, Leominster, Mass., 1865-1874, Eureka, Calif., 1874-1875, and Stoneham, Mass., 1875-1885. He was a Chaplain at the Massachusetts Reformatory in Concord, Mass., and was an advocate for prison reform.

--Abraham

Catalog maintenance

The company that hosts our online catalog will be doing some maintenance this evening (Tuesday, June 21), which may make the catalog unavailable or slow to respond. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Wecome new Associate Archivist, April Johnson

We are pleased to announce our newest staff member, April Lynn Johnson. April joined us today as the part-time Associate Archivist. Her previous experience includes positions at Baker Library at Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Historical Society, and Northeastern University. Her undergraduate degree is from Elon University in Communications with a minor in Religious Studies. April received her Master of Science in Library and Information Science with a concentration in archives from Simmons College in 2003.

April will use her skills and knowledge in all phases of archival work including processing, preserving records, creating finding aids, and providing reference assistance to those using the collections. She has experience with both large and small collections and creating exhibits.

April is married to Scott and has a daughter, Lily. She is a member of First Congregational Church in Norwood (UCC) and is the church archivist.

Near East Missionaries Portrait

One of the problems with cataloging graphic material is that the cataloger can get sucked in to the details while attempting to figure out the content and context of the image. This nearly happened to me with this portrait of ten American Board missionaries in Turkey. The issue was that the people sitting for the portrait were identified by last name, with only three listing initials. The four individuals standing in the back are, from left to right: Smith, Trowbridge, Hallack, and Livingstone. The six sitting individuals are, from left to right: Long, I.G. Bliss, A.L. Thompson, Wood, Z. Goss, and Parsons.

I began researching this print using the Vinton Books, biographical sketches of American Board missionaries began by Rev. John A. Vinton (1801-1877) and updated after his death. Use of the Vinton Books only caused me to ask more questions, since the information I could find led me to believe that not all of the individuals listed above were in the same place at the same time. For example, Amherst Lord (A.L.) Thompson arrived in Oroomiah (Urūmīyah), Iran, in 1860 and died a month later. Smith (likely John Frances Smith, 1833-1896) graduated from Lane Seminary in 1862, was appointed to the American Board subsequently, and did not arrive in the Near East until 1863.

Because I was unclear about the content of the image, I left the catalog record with the information that I could verify, leaving it to the researcher to answer my lingering questions. This might sound callous, but it is difficult to provide access to a wide range of materials if all of our attention is focused on the details of individual items. If you have any ideas on how to solve the question of who this individuals are, please contact the Congregational Library.

--Abraham

Liturgical music resource

While attending the ATLA conference last week, Claudette found out about a wonderful project undertaken by two groups at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and The Hymn Society here in Boston.

Hymnary.org is a repository containing over 5,000 digitized and indexed hymnals from denominations around the world. Their database contains almost 200,000 unique hymns and hymn tunes searchable by title, melody, meter, key, scripture reference, and more. They also provide related reference materials, a tool to compare the texts of different versions of the same hymn, and the ability to transpose hymns into different keys.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People" project, they are currently in the process of adding 500,000 more pages of scanned hymnals from the Louis F. Benson collection at the Princeton Theological Seminary library.

We are very excited to share this resource with our patrons. Hymnology has been an important part of the Congregational tradition, and we know that it will be very useful to some of you. Whether you're looking for the right hymn for this week's service or researching the role of religious music in American history, there is something just waiting to be found on this site.

We have also added a link to the Repositories section of our Useful Links page.

 

--Robin

New Archival Collections from Arlington and Cambridge, Mass.

We are pleased to announce that two more collection finding guides are up on our website. One is from Arlington, MA : Pleasant Street Congregational Church and the other is from Cambridge, MA : Pilgrim Congregational Church of Cambridgeport.

It is sad for a community when a church closes, as Pleasant Street did earlier this year and as Pilgrim did 19 years ago. Although it is the end of a community, it is not an end to the heritage and memory of the community and organization since they will live on through their records. With these two collections now open for patrons to view, it is up to the community to use these materials to preserve the memory of these, now gone, organizations.

Pleasant Street Congregational Church was formed in 1842 as the Orthodox Congregational Church of West Cambridge. By 1953, the Church had its current name. The records of the church contain organizational records, such as meeting minutes, annual reports, and financial statements, records from auxiliary groups, which organized events and the Sunday School, and photographs of the church and church functions. I would like to thank Stefanie Maclin for doing the initial processing of the records and the leadership of the church for transferring the records to the Congregational Library.

Pilgrim Congregational Church of Cambridgeport was formed in 1863 as Stearns Chapel and closed in 1992. The records contain materials that document the history and life of the church, from the early days as Stearns Chapel through the closure. The records include membership records, minutes, financial records, photographs, and historical information, such as from church anniversaries. We owe our thanks to one of our Simmons GSLIS interns, Helen Schubert, who processed the collection and wrote the finding guide during spring semester, 2011.

For more information on archival collections held at the Congregational Library, please view the electronic finding guides. For more information on church records, please search the Congregational Library catalog for “Church Records and Registers.”

--Abraham

Connecting to Collections: Published Resources

For those following along at home, you may recall that I have been working on the the Connecting to Collections project, which chose:

To undertake a statewide preservation needs assessment of the Commonwealth’s cultural collections. The ... survey subsequently developed was designed to assess the preservation needs of collections held by a wide variety of institutions. (source)

Gregor Trinkaus-Randall shared links to his listservs last week to the Final Report — this includes the complete report, the executive summary and narrative, individual sections dealing with specific types of institutions, the raw data by budget size and by type of institution, and the survey instrument itself.

Gregor also took time last week to point out that there are still spots available for the environmental monitoring program. Our library participated last year. It's an extremely useful tool for determining preservation improvements to HVAC systems or for disaster planning. There is no cost to sign up, but there are limited slots. Sign up today!

-Jessica

Civil War sesquicentennial exhibit at the Smithsonian

A lot of historical societies and museums are commemorating the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War this year. Congregationalists of the time were quite active in the Abolitionist movement, and many gave sermons to that effect.

While we do have some more general materials from and about the Civil War era, it's not really the focus of our collections. It is a significant part of American history, though, so we'd like to direct your attention to the Smithsonian Institution's exhibits on the subject. It includes significant artifacts from soldiers, civilians, and President Lincoln himself. There are letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and even recordings of songs that were popular at the time.

 

--Robin