Fall Meeting at the Archives of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

For this year's Fall Meeting, we will be visiting the Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, where Archivist Joel Thoreson will give us a tour of the facility and collection. Here are the details:

When: Friday, November 6, 2015 at 1pm
Where: Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 321 Bonnie Lane, Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Parking available on site.
What: Tour of archives facility and collection

Space for this event is limited, so please send an RSVP to Jerice Barrios at cenacle.archives@gmail.com.

CARA AT 2015 ACWR Conference

Railroad bridge over the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, PA

CARA AT ACWR by Patricia Carroll

About 150 archivists gathered in Pittsburgh, PA, August 27 through 30 for the Eighth Triennial Conference of the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious (ACWR). The theme of the conference was Bridging Tradition with Technology. Conference organizers scheduled 3 plenary and 9 concurrent sessions along with field trips, a catered reception hosted at Saint Paul Seminary, meals, and plenty of opportunity to network and socialize.

CARA was well represented at the conference by Jerice Barrios, Patricia Carroll, and Sister Rebecca Sullivan, CSFN.

Jerice and Patricia presented a 90-minute educational program called Disaster Preparedness and Response for Small Religious Archives. The session was geared to the needs of early-career archivists and covered topics including the disadvantaging characteristics of small religious archives, sources of disaster threat, the disaster management cycle and free or low-cost tools and resources to equip the small archive without an existing plan. Jerice gave a detailed introduction to dPlan: The Online Disaster Planning Tool developed by the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), dPlan is a template that allows cultural institutions like archives to generate an individualized disaster plan.   

CARA Member News, August 20, 2015

Anna-Kajsa Anderson, Director of Archives and Special Collections
at North Park University

Congratulations to CARA Steering Committee member Anna-Kajsa Anderson on being named Director of Archives and Special Collections at North Park University, where she has served as Interim Director of Archives and Special Collections since 2012.

In further good news, Kajsa was recently awarded a grant from the Swedish Council of America for the conservation and digitization of the records of St. Ansgarius Episcopal Church. 

St. Ansgarius Church was the first Swedish congregation in Chicago, an Episcopal church established in 1849 in what is now the River North neighborhood. Its records from the years 1849-1896 are held by the archives in North Park University’s Brandel Library as part of the Swedish-American Archives of Greater Chicago. These records are significant to both the city of Chicago and Scandinavian American history for the role the church played in the fledgling immigrant community and because of their survival of the great Chicago Fire of 1871.

The fragile records are currently restricted from public use until they receive conservation treatment covered in part by the grant. For more information on this project, please see the North Park University website.