Archival Value
Archival value refers to the significance of materials with potential long-term preservation and future historical, legal, cultural, or research purposes. These materials often provide insights, evidence, or documentation to researchers, scholars, and the community that is valuable for understanding a group’s history and evolution.
Do my materials belong in the archives?
Are the items related to the Church of the Brethren and relevant to its mission?
Are the items unique and offer administrative, historical, and research value?
Might a researcher seek out these materials in 20, 50, 100 years?
Materials typically accepted
- Minutes, Constitutions and by-laws, correspondence, policy statements, reports and planning documents
- Regional, congregational, building and graveyard histories
- Published materials likely to have high reference use
- Materials that document landmark theological opinions, cases that have a high degree of inherent polity interest, and significant changes in the life of a congregation
- Materials that involve significant people or events, such as media reporting, scrapbooks, diaries, oral histories
- Personal papers of key Brethren figures documenting scholarly research, publications, sermons, speeches, song-writing and creative activities related to the Church of the Brethren
- Biographical information such as profiles, obituaries, professional photographs
Materials typically not accepted
- Routine correspondence with temporary or little research value (mass distributed flyers to weekly church potlucks)
- Externally generated business materials such as student papers, phone messages, or invitations to regular interfaith events (unless they become historically significant)
- Personal records not pertaining to or intersecting with Church of the Brethren interests and activities
- Unidentified materials (slides, disks, tapes, blank stationary)
Preparing materials for the archives
Do you wish for your materials to be exhibited in a highly visible space or preserved and stored for future use?
Please contact the BHLA to discuss your material storage goals before you send your items. Much time and shipping cost can be saved by determining early if the BHLA already has duplicate materials, as well as if alternate transport plans can be arranged. We do not accept materials that fall outside of the scope of our collections. We do want to help your items be as well cared for and showcased as much as possible.
Please label slides, photographs, records with as much information as you have. The best chance a records have of being identified accurately is at the point of origin. Who, What, When, Where is best: “Love feast, Maundy Thursday 1929, Joe Smith’s farm at 123 Elm Street in Muncie, Indiana”. Even labeling an envelope of photos as belonging to a particular Brethren theologian and as being taken in a broad date range (such as 1970s-1990s) can be helpful if no other identifying information exists. Unlabeled images in particular offer little research value as they can’t be indexed or catalogued, and neither current archivisits nor future researchers are able to identify subjects in the images by sight. Contact the BHLA for assistance.
Please convert, when possible, items in obsolete technological formats such as floppy disks and audio cassettes into more current, stable formats such as digital files.