Smaller Archives and Professional Development: Some New York Stories

In 1987, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission funded a two-year project designed to improve religious archives in the New York metropolitan area. The Archivists of Religious Institutions, a regional group responsible for administering the grant, developed a coordinated program of workshops, consultation reports, and cooperative endeavors in order to address the peculiar problems of smaller repositories. The results illustrate the difficulties of interinstitutional cooperation, weaknesses in traditional archival training methods, and the profession's failure to address realistically the nature, role, importance, and uniqueness of smaller archives.