Online catalogs make it possible to find specific materials from anywhere in the world— but what happens when an item doesn’t have its full title in its catalog metadata? (How would you find The Great Gatsby, if the title was just “The” in the catalog? You might try searching for terms like “Great” and […]
Tag: Missions
Fitting in the Final Pieces of the Puzzle: an Interlinked Collection
This semester is the beginning of the end for a collection that has been meticulously processed, studied, and preserved over the past three years. By the end of 2014, every scrap of paper from the Missionary Research Library Collection – a vast assortment of papers are related in some way to Christian missionary work around […]
“These Are Bloody Times in Which We Live…”: The Journal of Mary Lewis Shedd
June 17, 1918 One of the first collections I processed at Burke was MRL2: Mary Lewis [Mrs. W. A.] Shedd Papers, 1918. This journal made an impact on me not just because of the first-hand account it provides, but also because this copy appears to be completely unique. The collection is comprised of a 42-page […]
The Value of Ecumenical and Missionary Records
Credit to: WAB: Foreign Missions Conference of North America Records, The Burke Library Archives (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York. I had the pleasure of working on the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Foreign Missions Conference of North America (FMCNA) collections this summer and the following highlights the materials that […]
The Messy Truth about Foreign Missions
Foreign missions. It's a pretty unpopular concept these days. Missionaries are associated with all the damage wrought by the project of subjugation, exploitation, displacement, and genocide of native peoples and cultures across the world. The criticisms are well-founded. Retrospect is a tricky thing though. History is often tainted by a touch of arrogance and a […]