From Archive Box to Digital Access: A New Era at the FAHC Archive
Written By:
Finlandia Foundation
By J. Chopp, Archivist at Finnish American Heritage Center Historical Archive
Many people have reached out to the FAHC Archive since July with questions, requests for appointments, and research inquiries. First, I want to thank everyone for their patience as the Archive has been temporarily closed to visitors during this time. The process of preparing materials for our initial digitization pilot project has been more complex and time-consuming than first anticipated. It鈥檚 also been fascinating and rewarding.
We identified a subset of the records related to the founding of Suomi College and the Suomi Synod in the 1890s as the focus of this initial digitization project. They have significant historical value, a lot of potential for research use, and are in some danger of deterioration due to their age.
Photo: A “before” of an聽archive聽box of records.
Photo: An “after” of a box, now with new folders, new labels
This subset of the collection contains many types of records: Ledgers with meeting minutes from the Synod Consistory leaders, publications from the Suomi Synod pastors鈥� wives, correspondences from dozens of congregations across the Finnish-American landscape, early Suomi College yearbooks and student newspapers, photographs, and course catalogs. I even ran across a letter with Herbert Hoover鈥檚 signature on it, regarding his role with the humanitarian efforts of the Finnish Relief Fund in 1939!
Most of these records were last organized in the 1960s around the time that the Suomi Synod merged with the LCA and later the ELCA. Many of the folders have become brittle and imperil the documents they hold. I鈥檝e replaced them with new acid-free folders, then renumbered and relabeled each one. For those that need it, I鈥檝e also moved the contents into sturdier double-walled archival boxes and updated the container list for each box so that we can maintain the order and context of each box of materials. The before and after is quite impressive and will help in the preservation of the original documents even as we move forward in creating digital copies as well.
One aspect I have found particularly interesting in this preparatory work is the array of fasteners used to hold pages together. The earliest papers had a lot of strait pins simply shoved through the corners of letters. Some bundles were still being held together by strings. There were many, MANY typical paperclips as well, some of which were excessively rusty. But there were other paperclips too, in sizes and shapes I had never seen before. All of them need to be removed to make the digitization workflow more efficient, and to avoid future damage to the paper.
Photo: A collection of paperclips, pins, staples and other fasteners I’ve removed so far from聽archive聽materials set to be digitized.
This pilot project is just a tiny portion of the overall archive holdings. But it鈥檚 an exciting start to make the materials here, many of which can only be seen at present by physically coming to Hancock, accessible to anyone anywhere in the world.
If you have an email or voicemail that has not yet been answered, rest assured that I am working my way through the backlog. Sometime soon, many of these routine inquiries will be answerable with an online search. It鈥檚 the start of an exciting new era here at the FAHC.