by Bethany Pietsch
For many years, Lutheran Archives has been closed to the public on Wednesdays to allow our archivists the time and space to work on large collection management projects. Last month, the Archives introduced new opening hours of 9.30am to 3.30pm on Tuesdays to Thursdays.
There are two reasons behind this change. Condensing our reference services into three consecutive days will keep things simple and convenient for visiting researchers, particularly those coming from interstate. Our reference team will continue throughout the week to work on access requests received via email and phone and there should be no change to our level of service.
Secondly, condensing our opening hours will grant us an extra day to focus on collection management priorities, including processing the backlog of deposited but unrecorded material and working with your ministries, congregations and entities in determining what records to create and what permanent records to deposit with the Archives.
As always, if you would like to visit Lutheran Archives for research or to deposit records, we encourage you to get in touch and organise an appointment. Email lutheran.archives@lca.org.au anytime or phone 08 8340 4009 on Tuesdays to Thursdays, between 9.30am and 3.30pm.
MUCH-NEEDED RENOVATIONS
Lutheran Archives volunteers undertake a wide variety of projects including the digitisation of photographs, indexing registers of pastoral acts, transcription and translation of German records, and creating a searchable spreadsheet of all congregation records in our holdings.
Our volunteer workspace has needed renovation and, thanks to the generosity of members of the Friends of Lutheran Archives, these began recently.
SUPPORT VOLUNTEERS
There are currently 22 regular volunteers at Lutheran Archives who support our small team of 2.7 (full-time equivalent) archivists. If you would like to be involved but are short of time, or not located physically close to Lutheran Archives, you can support the work of our volunteers through a ‘sponsorship’ program.
We suggest a tax-deductible donation of $1080 to sponsor a volunteer for a year, providing the essential resources they need to carry out work on the records of your congregations and ministries.
Donations can be made by direct bank deposit:
Name: Lutheran Archives
BSB: 704 942 • Account no: 100846262
or the LCA Online Donations portal:
https://donation.lca.org.au/project?id=P21025
Bethany Pietsch is Lutheran Archives Reference Archivist.
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