2019 Election: Candidate Statements

Vice Chair/Chair-Elect Candidates

The following candidates are running for the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect (or Co-chair) position:

Adam Winters

Archivist, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Adam Winters has served as the head archivist at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky since 2014, having been introduced into the field through work as a part-time archives assistant in 2009. In 2017, he accepted an invitation from the Kentucky Baptist Convention to manage their archival collections on a part-time basis, focusing upon arranging and describing executive office files and answering research requests. Among his job responsibilities at Southern Seminary is the oversight of one of the nation’s largest repositories of Baptist association records as well as extensive manuscript and photograph holdings. Digitization progress of print and media resources can be publicly accessed through the Boyce Digital Library (digital.library.sbts.edu). He has been a member of SAA since 2014. Winters is a member and active participant in the Kentucky Council on Archives (KCA) and the Association of Librarians and Archivists at Baptist Institutions (ALABI). He holds the Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Divinity degrees from Southern Seminary, a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies from Union University, and he is a Certified Archivist through the ACA. He is the author of The Gambler’s Mission: Steve P. Holcombe and the Heritage of the Louisville Rescue Mission.

If elected to this office, I would do my best to encourage our Archivists of Religious Collections to appreciate how knowledge of our collections can benefit one another through greater accessibility of information and open channels of communication.

Steering Committee Member Candidates

The following candidates are running for the section steering committee:

Erin Louthen

University Archivist, Santa Clara university

I am the University Archivist at Santa Clara University, and am responsible for the management and coordination of activities in the University Archives, as well as the care and management of archival collections in the Archives & Special Collections (A&SC) department. I oversee the collection, organization, description, and preservation of archival materials, and provide assistance in the use of archival resources. My duties also include consulting with campus units, surveying materials, and providing training for records management, organization and retention. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Master’s of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

I believe I am a good candidate for the ARCS Member-at-Large position because of my experience working closely with women religious in the Bay Area and beyond over the past four years. In 2015, Archives & Special Collections began having conversations with women religious congregations about the possibility of making a home for their archives at SCU. Since that time, we have acquired the papers of Sandra M. Schneiders, faculty emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology, and will be receiving the archives of the Sisters of the Holy Family (Fremont, CA) in August 2019. Our goal with this initiative is to become the repository for women religious collections in the West. To that end, I attended the “Envisioning the Future of Catholic Religious Archives” conference at Boston College in July 2018, and most recently presented about the Sisters of Holy Family at the Association of Hawaii Archivists Annual Meeting in February 2019. It is my hope that SCU can work with as many women religious congregations in the West as possible before their archives and histories are lost for want of a safe place to house them in perpetuity.