The Council on Library and Information Resources, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded the Library a $92,125 "Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives" grant in November 2009. St. Catherine will be partnering with Marquette University, Catholic University of America, and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) on the Catholic Social Action Access Project (CSAAP). The project, which received a total award of over $149,000 from CLIR, brings together three significant collections documenting U.S. Catholic social action in the 20th century. Included is the Ade Bethune Collection, which documents the life and work of the world-renowned liturgical artist and social activist. As a result of collaborating on the grant proposal, the Library became a member of the CRRA.
Work on the CSAAP was begun in January 2010 and will complete in December 2011. For the grant, Deborah Kloiber, Ade Bethune Collection Curator is working with other Library staff and MLIS graduate student interns to process and catalog parts of the Collection. This project will make more widely accessible Ade Bethune's activities with multiple community organizations in Newport, Rhode Island, including some that she founded:
- Church Community Housing Corporation
- Point Association
- East West Point Committee
- Foundation for Newport
- Citizens Advisory Committee
- Star of the Sea / Harbor House
Her involvement with these organizations reflects Bethune's interest in and concern for improving the city in which she lived--through housing, transportation, the environment, intelligent development, and other areas.
Finding aids for the processed materials will be added to the CRRA's
Catholic Portal, which provides access to rare, unique, and uncommon materials in libraries, seminaries, special collections, and archives. By electronically bringing together resources in many formats from many collections, the Portal enables easy, effective and global discovery of Catholic research resources.
