Records Management & Archives
Topic outline
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Notes from the October 2023 panel "Polity, Records, and You," part of the Polity Benefits and Mission conference, St. Louis, Mo.
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Two webinar sessions have been edited into a single presentation that combines portions from both sessions (without duplications). The recording has also been provided with a table of contents keyed to video bookmarks to ease access to specific portions of the presentation.
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A soup-to-nuts guide to maintaining paper records, and distributing them digitally, geared toward mid council leaders, and usable by congregations, individuals and families. [Note: This PDF file includes the slides with accompanying text of an earlier version of the preceding video presentation.]
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African American perspectives and experiences remain under-represented in the annals of Presbyterian history. This collecting initiative redoubles PHS's efforts to document Black lives, work, and witness in an increasingly multicultural Church—from the organization of the First African Presbyterian Church in 1807 to the election of the first African American stated clerk of the PC(USA) in 2016.
We are bringing human and capital resources to bear on collecting records of the Black Presbyterian experience--both the personal records of longtime church workers, and the original records of Black congregations. PHS seeks to represent in the archives the Black throughline: the integral presence of African Americans in what the authors of the historical volume Periscope called a “historically racist ecclesiastical body.”
Congregations are encouraged to use our deposit and digitization services. Historically Black congregations can have select volumes of their original session minutes and registers imaged at no cost -- up to 1500 pages can be digitized for free. For information about deposit and digitization, please email Records Archivist David Staniunas.
Our donors make this reparative work possible. Make your gift today to support the African American Leaders & Congregations Fund. For questions about making a gift, please contact Clorinda Moore.
Visit the African American History collection in Pearl.
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Forms and brochures for PHS at large, for our Heritage Preservation Grants, and for digitization orders [PDFs]