ACA Special Interest Section on religious archives
Hi Alex, Thank you for the link. It is definitely useful! One of the primary issues that has come up in my research to date is that, despite a growing number of religious archives, there has been a marked lack of communication between religious archival institutions and professional archival associations, societies, conferences, etc... This is in part due to conflicting religious principles that are inherently "non-archival". The fact that there is a special interest section of the ACA that exists to bridge that gap is interesting. For example, some of the goals of the RASIS are to: Education and inform the wider ACA membership regarding the uniqueness of Religious Archives with regard to a) types of records dealt with, b) types of institutions religious archives are a part of, and c) special archival needs; Act as a 'support group' for each other as religious archivists and encourage informal communication of questions or concerns as religious archivists; and encourage members to learn more about archives of differing denominations. I obviously have a good deal of work to do and this has helped to spark some ideas. See you tomorrow morning :)
Hi Jessie, I don't know if this would be useful to you, but the Society of American Archivists also has an "Archivists of Religious Collections" section: http://www.saa-arcs.org/. One of the resources on this page is a list of local, regional, and national religious archives organizations in the US (http://www.saa-arcs.org/resources/RelArch-orgs.html).
Katie
Oh, good! I'm glad it was helpful :) You may also want to consider adding something about access to records (perhaps under the policies section?) One of the articles we read for the class was "An Act of Faith: Access to Religious Records in English Speaking Canada" by Shelley Sweeney (in Archivaria 30)which discussed some of the issues religious archives face in granting access to their records. It might have some useful information as well. Minor typo in first paragraph: "any give denomination" should be "any given denomination."