Boston College Announces Religious Archives Conference

Religious Leaders, Archivists and Historians Meet to Face Preservation Challenges

Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College is pleased to announce a unique working conference, Envisioning the Future of Catholic Religious Archives. The meeting will take place at Boston College on July 11-13, 2018. Leaders of religious congregations, religious archivists, historians and other scholars who use religious archives will gather to discuss issues regarding preserving and providing access to historic records of religious communities so that they may be understood and valued by scholars and society at large.

The conference will be the first of its kind, bringing stakeholders together to explore the significant problems of saving an important part of history from future obscurity. For program details, visit the conference website: https://catholicarchives.bc.edu.

As a working conference, formal presentations will kept to a minimum, allowing participants to interact with one another during breakout sessions. The goal of the conference will be to identify issues surrounding the management of religious archives and take the first steps toward the development of a national plan to address them. The meeting will also provide valuable opportunities for networking and fostering collaborations.

Conference co-chairs are Christian Dupont, Burns Librarian and Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Boston College, and Malachy McCarthy, Archivist of the Claretian Missionaries USA-Canada Province. McCarthy commented on the importance of the meeting: “Religious communities face personnel and technology challenges that keep their rich histories hidden from historians who are studying areas as varied as health care, working class history, social justice and renewal of Catholic life post-Vatican II. If the archival collections of religious communities are not preserved and made available for research, the narrative of American history will be skewed.”

Religious leaders, archivists, and historians interested in participating or learning more are invited to visit the conference website or write to catholicarchives@bc.edu.