Library: Archives and Special Collections: Archive Consulting

Save Your Congregation's History

Meadville Lombard’s archivists work with Unitarian Universalist congregations and UU organizations to create and maintain their own archives. By empowering communities to take ownership of their history in this way, we help to ensure that the richness and diversity of Unitarian Universalism will be accessible to future generations.

Meadville Lombard’s archivists can help you with:

Preservation: Teaching you how to use basic preservation techniques to stabilize fragile documents and implement low-cost solutions for climate controlled archival storage.
Organization: Assisting you in creating a plan to efficiently store physical archival materials and make them accessible to researchers.
Record Retention: Working with you to create systems to ensure the history currently being made is preserved and made accessible in an appropriate manner.
Born-Digital Documents and Digitization: Training you on how to handle documents that were created digitally and primarily exist as digital documents. In some instances, Meadville Lombard can also store these files on our archival server for you. We can also evaluate the utility of digitizing your archival materials.
Community Involvement: Partnering with your community to create an archive group that can be part of ongoing efforts to continue preserving and making accessible archival documents. We can help such an archive group create archival displays, oral history projects, and other forms of public history.

Most organizations work with Meadville Lombard through phone calls and web conferencing. For congregations and organizations interested in in-depth assistance, we may be able to send an archivist to you for on-site consulting, provided that associated travel expenses are covered.

If you are interested in consulting with the Meadville Lombard Archives and Special Collections, please contact an archivist.

Ask an Archivist

If you have any questions about the Meadville Lombard Archives and Special Collections, just ask!

We can help with...

Scheduling an archive visit
Accessing archival materials
Using our digital archive tools
Answering reference questions
Scanning selections of documents
Donating archival material to Meadville Lombard
Creating archives at your local congregation