What is meant by “collective memory”? How do archives like ours preserve it for the communities they serve? This episode explores answers to those questions. We also discuss the collections at The Mary Baker Eddy Library and how they tell the stories of our namesake and the Christian Science movement.
Podcast guests
Jeannette A. Bastian is Professor Emerita at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons University, Boston, where she directed the Archives Management concentration from 1999 to 2019. A former territorial librarian of the United States Virgin Islands, she holds an M.Phil. from the University of the West Indies and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently an honorary fellow in the Department of Information at the University of the West Indies. Her books include West Indian Literature, A Critical Index, 1930–1975 (Allis, 1982); Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003); Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory, ed. (2009); Archives in Libraries; What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work Together (2015); Decolonizing the Caribbean Record, An Archives Reader, ed. with John Aarons and Stanley Griffin (2018); and Community Archives, Community Spaces, ed. with Andrew Flinn (2019).
Sarah Schelde is Associate Archivist at The Mary Baker Eddy Library, where she processes and preserves historic materials within the Library’s Special Collections—including the Mary Baker Eddy Collection. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania and master’s degrees in library science and history from Simmons University. Her historical focus includes the colonial and early national period of American History, particularly the history of women and religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Allyson Lazar comes to the Library with a background in the museum field. As Senior Manager of Research and Collections she has the pleasure of engaging with archivists, records managers, researchers, editors, transcribers, transcription verifiers, encoders, and digital historians—all working to manage and provide access to a rich archival collection.
