Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Maria Mazzenga1, Guest Editor Introduction The practice of scholarly research is in a state of flux. On the one hand, more and more of the research materials we historians need to do our work are becoming available by way of the web. On the other hand, it’s difficult to keep up with exactly what’s going online for research, as there is no single “clearing house” cataloguing digital materials in Catholic studies as those materials become available. At the American Catholic Historical Association meeting in Denver in 2017, several archivists with expertise in Catholic historical archives held a roundtable to discuss some of the latest digital materials available on the web for research and teaching. Those archivists—Fernanda Perrone, Robert Carbonneau, and Marian Barber—here offer their comments on a variety of aspects of online Catholic history resources for readers’ scholarly edification. Fernanda Perrone’s essay, “Finding Sisters in Cyberspace: Digitization and the Archives of Women’s Religious Communities,” describes some of the digital resources that have resulted from increased attention to women’s religious order archives. In part, the raised awareness is due to the fact that women’s religious orders themselves are in a state of fluidity. Many orders are consolidating, [End Page 1] moving and/or closing, and are therefore compelled to think about where they will house their archives as well as how they will facilitate access to those materials. The attention is also due to the cumulative effect of the publication of illuminative works on women religious over the past two decades by scholars such as Carol Coburn and Martha Smith, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, and Maureen Fitzgerald, among others.2 Such works serve to underscore the importance of preservation, stewardship, and access to the records of women religious. For archivists of women religious records, an increased focus on preservation of archival material for researcher access has coincided with the increasing ability to digitize large amounts of material and make it available via the web. The comprehensiveness of the digital materials available varies by the different producers of the online resources, of course, and Perrone describes these differences and similarities across projects. Women’s religious communities use different models for making their materials available. The Providence Archives in Seattle makes records documenting the Sisters of Providence in the West and Providence Health Services available online, while the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are building a digital archive to bring together materials from disparate community archives. Two particularly consequential developments have taken place in the area of management of and access to women’s religious order archives. First, the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious created the Custodia working group in 2016 to study the effects of mergers, downsizing, and closure of women’s religious archives. More broadly, the member-based Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) was founded in 2008 at the University of Notre Dame to create a central location for digital resources in Catholic history. Initially comprised of Catholic higher educational institutions, the Catholic portal, as it is informally known by many users, now has several religious communities among its membership. Appropriately enough given the fact that many religious orders possess global histories, Perrone extends her discussion beyond U.S. borders, including a survey of resources in England, Canada, and Ireland. Robert Carbonneau’s essay takes us in a different direction, focusing specifically on the question of stewardship, memory, and reconciliation [End Page 2] related to the archives of his own order, the Passionists. Carbonneau draws upon his own experience as an historian and archivist for his order chronicling Passionist missionary work in China, arguing that religious order archivists should create a thoughtful plan of stewardship for their materials or risk destroying opportunities to use historical memory for purposes of reconciliation. As the Passionists were restructuring their archives, an offer to partner with the Ricci Institute of Chinese-Western Cultural History to digitize the order’s China Collection as well as its publication, The Sign, was made. Carbonneau’s piece describes the process of digitization and how the project transformed what he calls dead memory into living. Finally, Marian Barber, director of the Catholic Archives of Texas, approaches archives and digitization...