Protecting and Providing:
A Guide to Reference Services for Church Collections

Zachary Bodnar and Billy McCarthy
Wednesday, January 24, 2024  |  1-2 pm EST  |  Virtual

Once your church records have been properly stored and inventoried, you are ready to take the next step and find a way to share those records with your community while securely preserving the collection. A church records collection is valuable to many audiences: from staff members researching old meeting minutes, to genealogists interested in building out their family tree. This work of connecting people with records is called reference services, and it must not be taken lightly.

In this online workshop, the CLA's archivists, Zachary Bodnar and Billy McCarthy, discussed what we mean by reference services and why reference is so important, provided examples of secure reading room policies, and explained how to manage visitors from initial inquiry to successful research visit. They also walked attendees through the steps and procedures necessary to start their own church reference desk.

This workshop was part of the Congregational Library & Archives’ Church Stewardship Initiative, a program devoted to empowering churches to steward and preserve their valuable records.

 

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 from Simmons University with a concentration in Archival Management. Billy started working at CLA through a graduate internship and stayed on a part-time basis until he was hired full-time 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.