Attending ACWR at 25: Bridging Tradition with Technology
by Rebecca Skirvin, Archivist, Sisters of the Living Word
As a fairly new archivist who has been working for a congregation of women religious for two years, I was very much looking forward to attending the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious (ACWR) 25th Triennial Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. I am the archivist for the Sisters of the Living Word, a young congregation headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and celebrating the 40th anniversary of its founding this year. I came away refreshed and reinvigorated, with new professional contacts, new ideas about archival outreach and collection enhancement, and a stronger sense of my role as an archivist in a religious community.
After settling in to my hotel room on Thursday, I attended the new member/first time attendee orientation, which was an excellent introduction to the structure and goals of the event, and also a great opportunity to begin to meet new people. The opening Plenary Session by Nancy Schreck, OSF, entitled “We Have Become More Faithful, Not Less,” set the tone perfectly for the conference. I have attended many professional conferences but never one that combined faith and professional activity, and I felt Scheck’s focus on the maturation of women’s religious communities in the United States over the past 50 years struck the perfect balance between historical context and theological exploration. Her description of the archivist’s work as ministry, to document the journey of women’s religious communities and find the narrative thread for the stories that congregations tell about themselves, was intriguing food for thought that nourished me throughout the conference.
While the first plenary session was inspirational, the second was practical. In “Importance of Record Retention: Windows into the History of Women Religious – Some Civil and Canonical Points,” Rita Ferko Joyce presented the canon and civil law behind establishing and maintaining congregational archives. Kenneth White also presented solid practical information on the whys and hows of digital preservation that served as an excellent introduction to the topic.
Two of the breakout panel sessions I attended on Friday and Saturday addressed topics that I am also dealing with in my archives. “Lessons Learned from Oral History Collections” was a great discussion of how to do an oral history project and how to deal with legacy oral history projects. The information I gathered will be useful to me as I finish work on the SLW oral history project and look to have those audiotapes digitized. The “Archival Outreach” panel on Saturday was especially inspirational. It was galvanizing to hear from another archivist whose budget was in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars, and to see what he has been able to do with those resources to raise the profile of the community he works for. Because the SLWs have ministered all over the city of Chicago, the walking tours he discussed might not work, but I’ve suggested a bus tour with a complementary audio tour to our development director. I’ve also reactivated my professional Facebook account and started a blog on the SLW website thanks to the inspiration provided by this panel.
One of the unique things about the ACWR conference is that it’s very easy for attendees to get together and talk informally over meals and receptions or between panels. I really enjoyed the opportunities to talk with other archivists. The lay archivists tended to gravitate together, and we shared experiences and observations about negotiating both the archival profession and the communities we work for.
The last plenary session, “Where We Are Today: An Analysis of the Results of the ACWR Membership Survey” engendered some good discussion among my tablemates about the role of archivists for religious communities in encouraging the opening of archives to outside researchers and genealogists. Some of us tended to think of our archives as similar to corporate archives, in the sense that they function primarily for the benefit of leadership and the community. However, as the survey results pointed out, researchers and genealogists also seek out archives for information on individual sisters as well as the ministries in which women religious in the United States have served over the years. Also, some at my table found the comparison of congregation archives to corporate archives (such as those held by banks, businesses, and other institutions) discomfiting.
Both this discomfort with congregational archives’ association with business as well as the desire of laypeople to access the archives of women’s religious congregations made me think about from where we are drawing our ideas and practices about women’s religious archives. Nancy Schreck’s description of religious life as belonging at the fringe, at the point where social change first becomes noticeable, sounds to me very similar to the definition of the activist archivist, who works to “document the underdocumented aspects of society” and “move the archives profession, archives workplaces, and society in general toward social justice.” (See the full definition from the Society of American Archivists’ Word of the Week) It also reminds me of community archives, defined by Andrew Flinn as “the grassroots activities of documenting, recording and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control and ownership of the project is essential.” (The article from which this quote is taken, “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges,” is well worth reading.) When Flinn talks about “community participation, control and ownership,” his connotations are of the grassroots, bottom-up movements that take place at the social fringes where, ideally, communities of women religious dwell. Many of the panels at the conference mentioned the techniques of activist archivists and community archives, such as oral histories and crowdsourcing identifications for photographs.
Perhaps it is worth considering a change in perspective on women’s religious archives, continuing to include the administrative and organizational aspects required by law but also documenting the interaction of women religious and the people to whom they minister. Perhaps it is time to take advantage of technologies that allow us as archivists to create a fuller historical record rather than waiting for material to come to us. Perhaps “bridging tradition with technology” will lead us to a fuller realization of our ministry within emerging forms of women’s religious life.
