Starting an Archives

The “Why”

When I accepted a position as the Director of Archives and Research for the International Pentecostal Holiness Church on the agreement that it would be part-time and that I would only work a few weeks each year on site, I really thought it would just be about cleaning up the three vaults and the office space and getting things organized. The former Director was following best practices for archival work, but I met with several other directors to get some guidance and learned that they leaned towards digitizing their collections for both access and preservation purposes. So, we did not need to keep three hundred copies of a program for an event, for example. They suggested we keep three. We were able to clean out a great deal of our collection, as well as the many boxes of trash and other items scattered throughout. My assistant and I filled up seven dumpsters.

Although we were completely new to archives, we were already making educated guesses on the value of certain materials, something I now understand as “appraisal.” I learned in a course at Louisiana State University that appraisal was not limited to monetary value. Also, we came to understand some files were “closed,” and others were open but only for certain people, and yet others were open to the public. As we went through box after box (there are 895 big boxes and about 500 smaller ones), we began to understand that we really had some separate collections. One was for administrative work. Another for teaching materials for pastors, leaders, Sunday School teachers, and others. Another was for scholars, consisting of copies of old dissertations and some of our books. But part of our collection was extremely interesting: an old pair of eyeglasses, an ancient typewriter, handwritten notes and letters, sermons glued together on a sheet of paper, name plates and gavels and pens and on and on. The items left to us from our former bishops and leaders were personal, unique to them, and a part of a human life that mattered.

To think like an archivist is to understand the full weight of your responsibility. It’s to be aware that you are to keep and to value the items that represent some important facets of a person’s life, and that part of your job is to help share a history that may have been lived out differently in various places but is part of a people who are united under one creed. The history of the IPHC has been shaped and reshaped over decades that have defined and redefined the practices of worship and preaching. Thinking like an archivist is to respect individuals who serve at every level of the denomination. It is to be friendly, to be accessible, and to be kind to users and to donors. As I digitized sermons and remembered the voices and personalities of those speakers, I was able to understand more fully our denomination’s character through the voices of its leaders. Those who express advice, who offer humor, who hear from God, who demonstrate compassion, and who hunger after a rich spiritual life are to be admired, yes, but to also be understood in terms of how those who preach to us help to shape us as individuals. Every pastor matters, but we –the congregation — also matter.

Part of understanding my work as an archivist is understanding the role of the various types of users. When we use items from an archives like ours to remember, we co-author a history that explains why we choose to be good. Why we strive to work so hard. Why we stretch a hand towards others to clothe, to feed, to counsel, to walk alongside them. After all, much of our archives is made up of the men and women who sit with us a while in hospital rooms, in hospice, and in our homes. They walk with us all the way to the end. These are also the men and women who speak the words that establish a marriage, and that set forth the precious commitments that we make and honor throughout our lives, such as when they commission or ordain one of us. These are the men and women who express a vision that inspires us and opens the doors God wants open to do great things to help others. They baptize us, counsel us, shepherd us, disciple us and teach us to disciple each other. They encourage and they correct us. Some of us let a pastor feed into our families for many years. To think like an archivist is to see the value of your work as an opportunity to cherish the lives of those who have served.

Archivists think about outreach. We should be explaining and contextualizing relevant histories. We should be providing opportunities for historians to share their knowledge and for scholars to show us how their work is based upon, or intertwined with, the items in our collection and the people they represent. When a user accesses an item in our archives, that person needs guidance for how to make sense of that item. Granted, to become an expert in Pentecostal history and theology takes many years of study, but every user can be given help in interpreting the people and the events and the texts and the music that expresses our spiritual lives and to understand how things, how our history, how the unique character of our shared faith, emerged over time.

An archivist, I have learned, shapes identities through careful descriptions and the choices we make in what we highlight in a collection and what we allow others to explore. Thinking like an archivist means noticing whose voices have been left out or what has been hidden because at times, it is a matter of social justice to include others or to share the truth about an event. Whereas archivists used to only preserve the collections of wealthy families or the documents of a government, today there are many different types of archives that share the experiences of many different groups. The IPHC’s archives reflects the theology and experiences of Pentecostals, who are stereotyped as poor, uneducated, and charismatic. While the stereotype doesn’t hold true these days, it was fairly accurate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because we were not of the elite classes, our history would not have been valued if we did not have G. F. Taylor who had the foresight to start at archives in 1921.

To sum up, thinking like an archivist is about reaching out to others in as many ways as possible in order to allow users to understand Pentecostal history, culture, and leadership and to contextualize their place within it. It is seeing history as a work in progress, based upon discovery. It means you conduct interviews and work with donors to add to your collection. It means you look for ways to engage users and to educate them. Being an archivist has become one of the most important and meaningful aspects of what I do in my work life, and I hope to be able to continue learning so that I can be more effective and benefit others.

The “What”

What should you keep?

• Video, photos, old films, advertisements, items that represent a person’s life-clothing, eyeglasses, a typewriter, sermons, notes, bulletins, programs, music. Anything that represents the life of a person, church, or group that will help us to remember their experiences.
• Also, the stuff of business. Reports, records, finances–all of the things that show how we ran our organizations. While these might not be shared with the public, they should be kept as part of our history.

What should you not keep?

• Every single program printed for that event. Trim it down!
• Things that do not connect to the theme for your archives. Maybe they can stay in a personal collection? Maybe they might be better sent to another archives? For example, you may have an item relevant to the Assemblies of God archives. You can inquire with them.

Here’s a great list from another archives.

Create your materials. Get interviews. People will not be around for forever. Get those histories recorded. Here’s some advice on how to do that.

The “Who”

Collect items from people who have made a contribution to your church or to the IPHC. These might be paid leaders or volunteers. They might hold an important office in the church, the conference, or the denomination, or they might not.

Set up an archives as a team. Get help scanning in those materials and sorting them. Spend a couple hours once a month on the task with a group of helpers. Don’t leave this to just one person. Ask for volunteers. People will help if they are asked.

The “When”

Now. Ask for donations and sort out what you have into broad themes, but keep collections tied to one person together.

The “How”

Find some space and gather archival boxes. Photos need to be put into acid free sleeves. Don’t just stack newspapers on top of each other. To see what sorts of materials are available, try Gaylord Archival Supply. It is a “best practice” to keep older items in a room that is around 65 degrees and with low humidity. Sunlight will destroy your items. Block or shade windows. When you put items on display, don’t set them in sunlight!

Organize by decades or by a theme. If you get a collection from a person or with items all related to one person, keep it together. That old typewriter isn’t going to mean anything if no one can figure out who it relates to.

Here’s an example of how a Baptist archives arranged their collection into folders/sections:

1. Church Clerk. Arranged chronologically. Minutes; related documents.
2. Membership. Arranged chronologically. Membership directories; books recording additions and subtractions; letters of recommendation to and from your church; admissions regulations; membership surveys; card file of all persons known to have entered church-related vocations.
3. Deacons. Arranged chronologically. Minutes; reports presented by various persons and organizations to the deacons; card file of all deacons.
4. Trustees. Arranged chronologically. Minutes.
5. Finances. Arranged chronologically. (1) Current finances, budgets; annual audits or surveys; correspondence; some purchase orders. (2) Memorial funds; annual audits; correspondence. You will not include individual giving records. These are confidential, and you should neither want nor get them.
6. Building and Grounds. Arranged chronologically. One file folder for each year. Blueprints which are no longer current may be stored between plywood boards, with acid-free file folders between the plywood and the blueprints. Of course, current blueprints will be kept in the maintenance office.
7. Sunday School. Arranged partly chronologically and partly by classes. Minutes of officers’ and teachers’ meetings; attendance records; treasurers’ reports; at least one file folder for each class included in your collection.
8. Boy Scout Troops; Senior Adult Fellowship; Discipleship Training and Its Predecessors; Baptist Men; Royal Ambassadors. Arranged chronologically in each category. Mail-outs; printed programs; various internal records; news notes; correspondence; reports to the church or deacons.
9. Woman’s Missionary Union; Girl’s Missionary Organizations; Girl Scout Troops. Arranged partly chronologically and partly topically. Minutes; scrapbooks; loose papers; current missionary groups; yearbooks prepared by the church’s WMU.
10. Music. Arranged chronologically. One copy each of worn-out scores not currently used; printed programs; various internal records; news notes; correspondence; reports to the church or deacons.
11. Children. Arranged chronologically. General materials; Vacation Bible School materials; Day Care Center materials.
12. Youth. Arranged chronologically. Mail-outs; printed programs; various internal records; news notes; correspondence; reports to the church or deacons.
13. Committees and Other Leaders. Arranged chronologically. Lists of committee members; some committee minutes; lists of church leaders.
14. Newsletters and Church Bulletins. Each category arranged separately and chronologically. One copy of each known item goes into the master file and will not usually leave your room; all duplicates go into “dead storage.”
15. Names of Persons. Arranged alphabetically, with a file for each letter and also separate files for some family names.
16. Miscellaneous Topics. Arranged alphabetically. Examples include the following: baptism and Lord’s Supper; blacks or other minorities in the church; books in the archives collection; charter/incorporation papers; church bus; church library; covenant/constitution/bylaws; employees; missionary apartment; churches organized by your church and various other Baptist churches related to yours.
17. Miscellaneous. Arranged chronologically. Items which do not seem to fit elsewhere.
18. Audio-Visuals. Arrange topically. Both photographs and slides should be organized using the same system; buildings (separate file folders for each structure); events; miscellaneous matters; musical events; persons (individuals and groups); youth and children.
19. Your Church’s History. Arranged partly chronologically and partly topically, with a file for each decade and also separate files for some important years, some topics, and financial expenditures.
20. Pastors. Arranged alphabetically.
21. Other Personal Papers. Arranged alphabetically.
22. Your Local Baptist Association. Arranged topically. Executive committee minutes; your church letters to the association. For some churches, separate storage cases should be maintained for state and national Baptist conventions, and/or other Baptist general bodies.

Collect eulogies, biographies, autobiographies, histories. These do not have to be “official.” Collect handwritten, typed, messy things. It’s okay! Let the collection share the history until you can shape it into a coherent narrative and timeline.

Digitize as much as you can. I use a vendor to digitize slides, cassettes, film on reels, and vhs tapes. Why? If the recording took an hour to make, it will take an hour to digitize. Also, the sound quality is important. Since many recordings on tape are deteriorating, it’s important to have a sound room where there is no interference with outside noise. You won’t get that at the library or another public space.

Share your materials, but check copyright laws first. Typically, if the item is 70 years old, you are okay. However, if an item has been donated to be shared, then a family or donor may have given you all the permission you need. Some texts are “owned” by your denomination, like a church bulletin. So you can share those without worry. Others are “owned” by individuals. Do your homework.

I use Dropbox, Tiny Cat Library, Flickr, and Omeka. This website is on WordPress. These are simple, inexpensive tools. I do add a copyright statement to discourage others from using our materials in published projects without permission.

I use a CZUR portable scanner. I keep one in OKC (which my assistant uses) and one here in South Carolina with me. I can take it anywhere and scan a book in as little as half an hour. I paid about $400 for each of these. They have been worth every single penny.

Label your items, but don’t go down a rabbit hole trying to convey every single detail.

Resources

Reach out! I’m available by email: kwelch@iphc.org

Check out the many resources on the Society of American Archivists website.

Here is a great website on how to start a church archives.

Here’s another called “How to Start a Church Archives.”