[Oe List ...] The Archives and the Repository

Tue May 26 07:41:45 EDT 2009

Well done, Gordon! Put it in/on the Repository, please.

Thanks for your wisdom and help,

John

  _____  

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of Gordon Harper
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 3:38 AM
To: Colleague Dialogue; Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: [Oe List ...] The Archives and the Repository

Could there be, should there be, any connection between the archives and the
repository?

Randy Williams

---------------------

A good question at a time when we've started talking seriously about what to
do with our archives.  The topic may also be of some interest to the
archives team that will assemble this coming weekend in Chicago.  Things
that team will hopefully be addressing have begun to be discussed in our
recent online exchanges: how can we best organize, preserve, protect,
access, add to and make available for others' future use the legacy of our
OE, EI and ICA community?  This team that comes together this weekend now
has great stuff with which to begin to answer those questions.

I think the Repository relates to the archives a bit like a grasshopper
relates to an elephant.  And yet, the two significantly complement each
other.  

The archives--to the degree such a thing is possible--are our comprehensive
collection of what we did.  In principle, I suspect we'd like to see just
about every important existing artifact from our history be part of this
collection.  The Repository of course is and intends to be a selection from
that body of materials, along with things that are not part of that
collection.

If something is a part of our work, it probably deserves a place in the
archives.  The Repository, on the other hand, was always meant to be a place
for things that purely individual members of our community considered
important and felt were worth making available to all of us.  Some of these
items might also be found in a Kemper file drawer, but many others would
not.  

The reason for this is that the Repository invites people to post both old
and new materials, including personal reflections on their own experience of
being part of our community.  Many of these stories are being told--or at
least written down and made accessible to all of us--for the first time.
They shed new light on who we are, where we've been and what we've done.
Where the archives are more the products of our life and work together and
the primary documents that we produced on that journey, the Repository is
more a venue for us to share with one another particular snapshots of our
life and work and our uniquely individual perspectives on it.

Just a few illustrations: Marilyn Crocker's narrative of the work done with
McDonald's and its results; Joe Slicker's story of the move from Austin and
the early days in Chicago; Beret Briffith and Brian Stanfield's chronology
of the Order; Gillis on starting the movement in the Cleveland Region; the
Wegners' experience in Bayad; JWM's Maliwada talk on Integrity, etc.  All of
these are items not in the archives--at least not in this form.  Yet they
contribute, sometimes substantially, to our understanding of materials that
are there.

Another difference is that the archives cry out for professional and
institutional management.  There is so much there (and so much more
scattered around the world), that it is going to take serious funding and
organizational expertise as well as ongoing oversight to properly care for
it all.  It's not a matter of a few volunteers getting together over a few
weeks to sort it all out.  Policies and criteria will need to be
established, options explored and decisions made, contracts negotiated,
support generated and systems put in place.  It's going to take time, and
it's great that we're moving on it now.

The Repository continues to be a purely voluntary venture that will grow to
the extent that people use it.  Indeed, part of our objective, once we got
it operational, was for the three of us primary perpetrators to have to do
very little in order to maintain it!  It's intentionally designed as a wiki,
a user managed website, with the bare minimum of complexity or sophisticated
bells and whistles.  Everyone can browse and access its material, download
personal copies of anything they find to their own computers, as well as
contribute their own documents, pictures, even brief audio and video
clips--and all essentially without requiring professional assistance, having
to meet any criteria, obtain any permissions or go through a webmaster or
organizational gatekeeper.  It's a different kind of beast than the archives
will need to be.

I'm grateful to have a place to go to listen to us singing and hear audio
clips from lectures.  To see pictures from the places we've worked around
the world.  To read deeply thoughtful, sometimes painful, sometimes
wonderfully humorous accounts of events that people recall.  To make a space
for very different personal perspectives on our community (e.g., Len titled
the first page of the Year Index, "Decades of Glory," while Reinard Knutsen
titled his piece, "My Life in Cults").  The Repository is by its very nature
"open source," and therefore it's going to be just a bit quirky,
idiosyncratic and, I'm afraid, all too human--and I think that's the way we
want it.

We need our collective archives, on the other hand, to become a more or less
permanent and primary resource for scholars and researchers and perhaps
especially a legacy for future members of the League.  It will be tremendous
if we can also find ways for all of us in the coming years to see a full
picture of what's there, to access its treasures electronically, to help it
assimilate additional collections from individuals and national offices.
That's going to be a real piece of work.

There's also a lot that can be done on the Repository, and we welcome anyone
to our team who'd like to be a part of its further development and how it
might morph in new directions.  We have the advantage at the moment of it
being small enough that Tim Wegner has been willing to underwrite the modest
server costs, but if it continues to grow as we hope it will, we'll need to
come up with a sustainable model for supporting it longer range.

Last month the team decided on some ways to encourage adding items to the
Repository and to keep those of you who are interested informed of the
latest additions.  I'll get into that in a separate email from this, which
is already too long.

Maybe this is at least a partial response to your question, Randy --

Gordon

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