The Archives Edit: A Workshop in Arranging Your Church’s Archive

Name: The Archives Edit: A Workshop in Arranging Your Church’s Archive
Start: 2025-11-07T09:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-11-07T14:00:00-05:00
Location: 14 Beacon St Ste 206, Boston, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02108

Schedule

Fri Nov 07 2025 at 09:30 am to 02:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

14 Beacon St Ste 206, Boston, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02108 | Boston, MA

One of the core principles of archival theory is arrangement, the process by which archivists create physical and intellectual order out of a collection. Led by the CLA’s archivists, Zachary Bodnar and Billy McCarthy, this workshop introduced participants to the concepts of physically and intellectually arranging a church’s archive through a combination of instruction, demonstration, and hands-on activities.
While intellectual and physical arrangement are separate tasks with different outcomes, they are inextricably linked together and form the backbone of archival processing and accessibility. Physical arrangement is the process of safely housing, labeling, and ordering physical materials, while intellectual arrangement is the process of creating an inventory that maintains connections among objects and logically orders them into a hierarchical list.
The workshop was designed for those tasked with keeping, preserving, and making accessible a church’s valuable records. Zachary and Billy discussed core archival principles in detail and give examples of how those concepts may be applied to church records collections of all shapes and sizes. Topics covered included how to arrange a collection of seemingly disparate materials into useful broad categories, how to identify relationships among various items in your collection, and how to identify or recreate a collection’s original order.
Participants left the workshop with an understanding of the principles of arrangement and concrete next steps for how they may apply those principles to their own collections.
This program was part of our Church Stewardship Initiative (CSI). Find the videos of past virtual workshops and free resources on our CSI webpage.
Space is limited. Please register using the following link by Tuesday, November 4th: https://app.etapestry.com/onlineforms/CongregationalLibrary/editingarchives.html.
The cost to attend is $50 for individual and church members and $60 for non-members, and lunch is included with your registration. Limited funds are available as scholarships for those otherwise unable to attend.
After registering, you will receive an email with information about attending the workshop.
Email any questions to [email protected].

SPEAKER BIOS
Zachary Bodnar graduated with a Masters of Library and Information Science from Simmons University, with a concentration in archives management, in 2018. Prior to his work at the CLA, Zachary worked at the Bellamy-Ferriday House and Garden archive, the Vassar College Special Collections, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Harvard Botany Libraries. Zachary joined the CLA as an Archives Assistant in 2017, helping to prepare materials for digitization through the New England’s Hidden Histories program. In 2018, he took on the title of Archivist. His professional interests include metadata collection and management, digital archiving, audio/visual preservation, and archives management.
Billy McCarthy graduated with a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) at Simmons University with a concentration in Archival Management. He started working at the CLA through a graduate internship and was hired full-time as an Archivist in 2018. Billy is the Head of Reader Services, helping the CLA’s visitors with reference requests and facilitating in-person research. Billy also serves as the collection manager for the archives, working with CLA’s offsite vendor to protect and maintain the organization’s archival records. Some of his professional interests include increasing access, collection management, processing of complex materials, and facilitating research.