PROCESSING

billy graham center archives
2006 annual report

Click here for processing statistics

Click here for a list of the collections processed in 2006

According to A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Record Mangers, published by the Society of American Archivists in 1992, "processing," in an archival context, means "the activities of accessioning, arranging, describing, and properly storing archival materials." The staff did manage to do some processing during the year, despite the distractions of the renovations and other tasks. Eight new collections were completed and eight others were updated. In addition 4-1/2 hours of interviews were transcribed.

Among the thousands and thousands of documents opened to researchers in 2006:

Lou and Phil Palermo spent half a century as Youth for Christ musical evangelists. The Archives opened their papers, Collection 329, to the public in 2006. Click here to hear an excerpt from a 1962 meeting in which they described the conversion of their family.

A script of a 1956 radio interview of Billy Graham on the radio program Haven of Rest was added to Collection 74. The interviewer was Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision and Samaritan's Purse.

The newly opened papers of Clyde W. Taylor (Collection 597) include reports of a trip he and J. Elwin Wright made around the world in 1950-1951. They had both played important parts in organizing the World Evangelical Fellowship, an international association which met to provide a network of contacts and support for Protestant Evangelical Christians in many countries. In 1951, Taylor and Wright visited Evangelical Fellowships Asia and the Middle East. Their reports back to the WEF provide a snapshot of Evangelicalism around the world just after World War II, as a new generation of indigenous leaders were replacing the previous generation of missionary leaders.

First page of a draft of the Manila Manifesto, the document produced by the 1989 Lausanne II Congress. From Folder 6 of Box 220 of Collection 46, Records of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. This is just one of the tens of thousands of pages of documents added to Collection 46.