Anita Lewis receives the Fr. Fred O'Brien, SJ award. With Sean Peragine (l) and Fr. Rob Carbonneau, CP (r).
Working at the Passionist Historical Archives A Reflection: August 1996 to November 2008
By Anita Lewis
Fr. Morgan Hanlon, C.P., the archivist at the Passionist Historical Archives (PHA), hired me as his assistant in August, 1996. The extent of my experience in the archival field was the few months I had worked part-time at PHA in 1991. My degree is in Medical Technology with additional courses in computer programming. Fr. Morgan and people working in other offices in the building helped me learn Windows and the Microsoft office programs which were new to me.
My initial duties were to type correspondence, keep the financial books, manage the office, layout the newsletter, and answer requests for information. I worked with Fr. Morgan who taught me how to process the small amount of material that was coming into the archives at that time. We determined what material was to be kept, put it in order if required, removed metal such as staples, and put it into acid-free folders and boxes.
Within a couple months of being hired, Fr. Morgan took me to a local meeting of the Archivists of Religious Institutions (ARI). The topic that day was oral history. Over the years I have gone to many ARI meetings where I have learned about the archival field and met people who have helped me. At that first meeting I was very quiet, trying not to let anyone know how little I knew.
November 6-8, 1997, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. I learned a lot from a day-long workshop on the basics of preservation and another session on accessioning and describing material. At other sessions I felt frustrated by discussions using vocabulary I did not know. The meeting of religious archivists which followed encouraged me again. The conference was an excellent foundation for the work I did in years ahead. I was off to a good start.
During 1997 Fr. Morgan went on vacation. Before he left he gave me an America Online (AOL) disk and asked me to install it and try it out. I told him that I saw no possible use for the Internet, but I did as I was told. We continued using AOL and I soon bought my own computer at home and got online there as well.
In January, 1998, a little more than a year after I was hired, Fr. Morgan had surgery and was not able to return to work at the Archives. He remained the archivist after his transfer to Holy Family at West Hartford, Connecticut, but his health did not allow him to be very active. Luckily, he had taught me a lot in that year we had together and was available to give advice on major problems. Thankfully, there were other Passionists nearby who could answer the many questions I had about the Passionists. The research I did to answer requests also taught me a lot.
Prior to my arrival, Fr. Morgan and his assistant had been looking into setting up a database to hold the information about the contents of the Archives. He had purchased a program designed especially for archives and had begun testing it. We determined after using it for a while, that it would be better to use a more powerful database which was relational, meaning that several tables of data could be linked together. The computer we had recently purchase had Microsoft Access installed. Access had the power we wanted, but there was one small problem—learning to use it well enough to actually create the database system we needed.
After Fr. Morgan had left, I continued to pursue making the database. I got a book on Access and studied it a few hours a week trying out each thing I learned. Russell Gasero, a computer-savvy member of ARI, made a trip to our archives to look at our collections and give me ideas about how to design the system. After several months, it took shape and I began entering data. It was functional by early 1999. It took much longer than that to enter data on most of the material we have. As new material came in, I had to judge whether it was more important to process that or continue with entering data. Much of the new material was very significant, so I decided to be satisfied with having all the boxes listed on the database and spend time processing new material and taking care of other things. Then as time allowed, more folder information was added to the database.
As I write this, we have over 18,300 entries on our folder listing. In addition there is a listing of our books and of the original archives of Fr. Clement Buckley, C.P. which is a separate collection and which has been an invaluable source of information over the years.
In June, 1999, I started the archives website. AOL provided a small amount of space to their subscribers for web pages and I thought it would be good to put up a little information including how to contact us. At this point in time I knew nothing about how to make web pages, but AOL had a gadget to do the job and I muddled through it. Soon it was time to buy another book—this one on making web pages. In the beginning, the pages were articles I found in the archives about the various foundations and missions. Later we would put much more on it.
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