Providing long-term and ease of access to records is one of our goals here at the Department of Archives and Special Collections. Did you know that digital records can be accessed from your home? Also a digital record gives you the ability to easily find only relevant information through key terms and subjects, opposed to searching a large cumbersome box for one piece of paper!
Lastly (and my personal favorite) having a digital record aids in preserving the integrity of the original record. Papers that are brittle and acid burned can now be handled worry free - without looming glares and the infamous “white cotton gloves” from the reading room assistant on hand. One item of particular interest is the Merced Seventh-day Adventist Church Collection. The collection consists of early membership records, church clerk reports, quarterly reports and official papers dating 1907 to 1988. Through keyword searching, you can search for long lost relatives, chart the growth of churches, follow families as they move across the state, and country. In May 1907, Ellen G. White spoke at the California-Nevada Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, held in the Merced, California area, and later writes about the only two Sabbath keeping families in Merced, one of which “lived some miles out of the city”[1]
An excerpt from E.G. WhiteThese papers bestow the researcher a fascinating look into the history and inner workings of a church AND provide a sigh of relief to the assistant! Visit https://cdm.llu.edu to see our digital archive!