History of the Archive
The archives of the World Student Christian Federation are held at the Yale Divinity Library Special Collections, and include reports and publications, correspondence, administrative records, and materials relating to affiliated national student Christian movements and collaborating secular and ecumenical organizations.
Women attendees at the WSCF conference in Zeist, the Netherlands, in 1905. Ruth Rouse is in the center with the large hat.
From the inception of the WSCF until 1940, John R. Mott was the primary person concerned with the archives of the organization. He kept as complete a file as possible through 1919, when he stepped down as General Secretary, and continued gathering materials through 1940. In the fall of that year, he had to move out of his offices at the International Missionary Council Building in New York City. In consultation with Rev. Dr. Clarence P. Shedd and Raymond P. Morris, he decided to deposit his “personal” collection of WSCF materials in the Divinity School Library at Yale. Those materials were catalogued by Ruth Rouse, and now constitute RG 46. Received with this collection were the books and periodicals that constituted the Library of the WSCF. In 1919, the Library of the WSCF (also called the John R. Mott Library) included some five thousand volumes, with documents in more than twenty languages. These volumes are now part of the Day Missions Library at YDS. A unique classification system modeled after the Dewey Decimal System was developed specifically for the archives and the library of the WSCF in the early part of the 20th century by Grace J. Livingston. Mrs. Livingston's classification system was updated and expanded by Ruth Rouse in the 1940s.
This letter to Robert C. Mackie (General Secretary of the WSCF) in 1941 outlines the already-existing challenges of the WSCF archives: a unique filing system for the pieces in New Haven (RG 46), Geneva, and Toronto. The author suggests that "some librarian of the future" will have to integrate the three systems...which is exactly what happened!
When John Mott donated his library and papers to Yale, it sparked a discussion about whether or not he was really allowed to do so. Did the archives belong to him, or to the WSCF? If his papers were at Yale, should the rest of the WSCF archive go there as well? Ultimately, it was decided that Mott’s library would go to Yale, and the WSCF would retain responsibility for the remainder of the archive. However, these conversations laid the groundwork for reuniting the collection at Yale later on.
The filing system for the WSCF offices from 1997.
The records from the WSCF Geneva offices were stored at 13 Rue Calvin as long as the Federation occupied their offices there. At some point in the 1950s, Adeline de Pasquier instituted the practice of transferring a number of years of past files from file cabinets to transfer cases. The contents were listed on the outside of each case, and the cases numbered. No weeding was done, and no paper record of the original box listings is extant. This formal practice appears to have been followed until approximately 1960, although some transfers did occur after that date. The records moved with the WSCF to the John R. Mott House, then to the Centre John Knox, where they were deposited with the World Council of Churches library.
Reports about the WSCF archives written by Laurent Mousson and Claire Medri, the interns who processed series 213.11 (Geneva Office, 1932-1945) and 213.12 (Toronto Office, 1940-1945).
A portion of the records (circa 1925-1980) were processed in preparation for the WSCF’s centennial in 1995. The project was commissioned by the History and Archives Committee. Processing was done by a series of interns in Geneva, supervised by Terry Thompson, General Synod Archivist of the Anglican Church of Canada. The collection was arranged into chronological series, with each series spanning two or four years. Additionally, there was a series for committee minutes, conferences, publications, and records from the temporary Toronto office (1941-1945). Its physical arrangement is reflected in the box numbering system; all boxes with numbers beginning “213.X” are from the Geneva archive processed in 1995. The original series are reflected in the second decimal place: e.g. 213.08 for records 1925-1929, and 213.12 for Toronto Office records. The third decimal place indicates the box number within each series. These records, along with those accumulated since 1980 until approximately 2010, were transferred to Yale in 2018 from their previous location in the library of the World Council of Churches.
The Geneva records were transferred to YDS in 2017, where they join John Mott’s collection to constitute the entire archive of the WSCF in one location. Elizabeth Peters processed the records, incorporating materials added since the centennial processing in 1995 and creating a single cohesive arrangement. These materials now constitute RG 46F.
The above photographs show part of the process of organizing archival collection. The original boxes help the archivist understand the contents of the records and how they might relate to each other. The archivist then sorts the papers into broad categories. Those categories are further broken down, and papers are placed into archival folders. The archivist determines a logical order for the folders based on the relationships of their contents, and places the folders into archival boxes.