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INTRODUCTION

billy graham center archives
2005 annual report

While each year stands on its own (as in this report we review 2005), each year also builds on those before it and looks ahead to those yet to come. Every year brings new challenges, projects, surprises, and maybe disappointments. Our goal as archivists is to preserve a record that will serve as memory and contribute to current or future decisions, understanding and inspiration, making memory accessible in an ongoing way. As one of our website visitors put it:

For archivists, keeping memory alive involves documenting the stories of people and institutions, showing God's grace and human fallenness and renewal. Time for archivists is a critical resource, in part because we are concerned with events and the lives of those that occurred at a given time, and also because we have to be good stewards of our time in order to effectively gather materials, care for, arrange and describe them, and then encourage their use.

We are also concerned with the spread of the living good news about Jesus Christ, who also lived in time and who launched his Church in time and space. These are great mysteries of which we seek to be good stewards. Our desire is that the Archives will function not for its own sake, but that it will be a part of God's will being done, something that only He can accomplish.

This report is our accounting of the activity and oversight of the Archives during 2005. Here are a few highlights that happened during the year with links to further information in other parts of the 2005 report or our website.

We launched our most recent online exhibit, featuring Billy Graham's 1957 New York Crusade.

Bob, at the invitation of OMF and Singapore Bible College, traveled to Singapore where he offered suggestions and conducted workshops to assist both organizations and others in establishing, maintaining and operating their archives.

We arranged and described 18 collections, some new and to some adding new materials materials, making them available to researchers, including additional Lausanne Committee records, Carl Armerding papers, a large update to the BGEA's oral history project transcripts, records of Christ's Mission, and records from the Trinary Consultation on Evangelizing World Class Cities.

We assisted 383 researchers to use our collections in the Reading Room, provided orientation on-site sessions for fourteen classes along with four more sessions outside the Reading Room, responded to 1,100 information requests about the collection (mostly e-mail), and were visited through our Web site by over 490,000 individuals (a 56% increase from 2004).

Paul gave a presentation to alumni and others during commencement weekend on the life and ministry of prison worker and chaplain, Mother Consuela York.

Staff contributed to creative planning for the 2006 renovation of the 4th floor office suite and expansion of the fragile storage area, and remodeling of the 3rd floor Reading Room as part of the Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections' relocation to the Billy Graham Center. In an effort to present a single public resource, the BGC Archives and College Archives & Special Collections will share oversight of the Manuscript Reading Room, along with contributing to and maintaining a joint database for online searching.

We welcome you jump into our report in the following pages that provide other highlights, and more description, pictures and statistics of what we've tackled and encountered in the past year.