In May 2025, Director of Archives Bob Clark, Associate Director Hillel Arnold, and Processing Archivists Darren Young and Katie Martin spent three days in Brussels, Belgium, packing and inventorying the RAC’s first collection from an international organization based outside of the United States: The Union of International Associations (UIA).

With remarkable preparation, coordination, and supplies provided by the Collections Management team, we packed 98 boxes on site at the UIA office and prepped it for transport to the US. After a long journey by sea, the collection arrived in Sleepy Hollow in July. Once it was at the RAC, the Collections Management team rehoused, inspected every box for preservation issues, and improved the initial inventory. After the collection was fully accessioned, Darren and Katie processed the material beginning in October 2025 and the collection is now fully open for research as of February 2026.

About UIA/UAI

For some background, the Union of International Associations - the Union des associations internationales (UAI) in French - is a nonprofit research institute and documentation center on the work of global civil philanthropy and society. The UIA promotes international collaboration, peace, security, and sustainability through documentation and networking activities. The organization is based in Brussels, Belgium, and it was founded in 1907 by Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri La Fontaine and a father of information science Paul Otlet. The UIA’s signature publication is the Yearbook of International Organizations which has been released annually since 1908. The collection includes the Yearbooks, journals, publications, correspondence, and files of UIA leaders and founders. The collection spans from 1892-2026.

Preparation and On-site Collaboration in Brussels

Reflecting on the purpose of the Union of International Associations, we want to highlight the enormous amount of collaboration involved in the acquisition and processing of the UIA records. Part of the preparation mentioned earlier from the Collections Management team involved guiding and assuring us as to what to expect when encountering the materials in Brussels and establishing a workflow. Assistant Director for Collections Management Suzie McDade and Appraisal Archivist and Records Manager Meg Snyder generously provided their expertise from similar collection packing trips.

After the collection’s arrival in Sleepy Hollow, Accessioning Archivist Erich Chang regularly reached out to us to ensure his team’s rehousing of the materials aligned and supported the intellectual groupings of materials we identified during inventorying in Brussels. The thoughtful and efficient work of Erich and his teammates Reuben Slater and Emeline Swanson enabled us to scaffold our series together in the collection’s ArchivesSpace resource record and seamlessly launch our processing plan when the materials were fully accessioned. Reuben’s inventory of the Yearbooks of International Organizations input directly into ArchivesSpace allowed us to open that series after a couple days spent enhancing the contents’ description. That was 55.1 cubic feet of materials fully processed and available to researchers!

We’re not sure if that description of the Yearbooks’ cubic feet adequately conveys the heft of these massive volumes, and we thank the Accessioning Archivists for lifting and rehousing these records as well as Bob and Hillel for lifting and packing them in Brussels. Bob and Hillel graciously bore the brunt of the physical packing and made space for us to use our processing knowledge to complete the inventorying and analysis of the materials. The UIA staff were also helpful in providing and setting up their office space for us to work. We truly feel like we had the best hosts in Brussels! (What is more invigorating for packing and inventorying than a supply of Belgian chocolates on hand?)

The RAC’s partnership and friendship with the UIA are ongoing, and we will continue to receive new installments of the Yearbook to make accessible for researchers. The RAC had the pleasure to host UIA President Cyril Ritchie during the fall of 2025 where Katie and Reuben were able to share some early insights into the collection from processing and accessioning it. Cyril also had the treat of visiting Sleepy Hollow on Halloween.

Processing Collaboratively

Lastly, we want to discuss the collaborative nature of the processing work itself. Although Katie and Darren have not completed an extensive collaborative processing project like this before, they have spent years processing the collections of similar creators.

Through this work, we have developed a dialogue where we understand the challenges we can each face when tackling a processing project and the tactics we use to overcome those obstacles. This communication was essential to us inventorying and processing the UIA materials together.

The archival processing and description practices of the RAC also assisted our joint processing of the collection. In order to expediate user access to materials, the RAC emphasizes processing aggregates of materials and using iterative description. We used the distinct series we identified during inventorying to divide the work, and we were able to open each series to research access as we completed them. Of course, our initial assessment of the materials didn’t identify every nuance. We had to make adjustments which we formulated through discussion. Iterative description gives archivists the grace for those adjustments, and grace and adaptation are vital for processing collaboratively.

Jointly processing a collection is like visiting a foreign country or working with materials in a different language. It requires respect, openness to the unknown, and appreciation, and from it we can gain growth, greater understanding, and many laughs.

Processing International Records

One of the most challenging aspects of processing the UIA records (aside from the boxes’ journey from Brussels to New York) is the international nature of the records themselves. Much of the collection is in French and English, but there are many other languages throughout. While processing, we encountered German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Esperanto. Publications were the main source of materials in languages beyond English and French, and we maintained the original titles when possible. We applied this approach for all other content in the collection, maintaining original folder titles in their original language, typically French.

Neither Darren nor Katie can speak French (beyond Katie’s 600+ day Duolingo streak!). This was usually fine with the assistance of Google Translate to prevent typos and make sure accents were used correctly. However, the challenge of deciphering difficult handwriting in another language was something we dealt with a lot during processing, particularly in the correspondence and UIA leaders’ files.

It is easy to fill in the blanks and use context clues for a potential word when dealing with this issue in English, but it takes more time and research to try and do so in a different language. It can be hard to know if you are looking at a proper noun, a potential misspelling, or just letters that would be unreadable in any language. In these cases, we have done our best to provide the spelling as best we can and describe the contents of the folder in English to provide further information to researchers.

The Power of Language

When processing materials in a different language, you can also encounter societal and cultural differences that don’t have easy translations or exact corresponding concepts. A group of materials described as circulaires were identified in our initial inventory. We researched this term to understand what these documents are.

The translation for circulaire is “circular” for circular letter. While circulaires and circular letters seem similar in that they are both distributed messages, the use of them in their specific origins suggests a difference that a translation may not convey. The circulaire concept in Belgium and France is tied to the civil law legal systems in those countries. The United States has a primarily common law system. We decided not to use the term circular letter in our English language description of the circulaires because of the potential inaccuracy in suggesting the two terms are the same.

In the context of the Union of International Associations collection, it seems especially important to not erase or obscure the unique frameworks of specific countries. Even just by processing these materials, we have seen the power of original language to expand understanding of different parts of the world. This emboldens us in our decision to maintain original publications and file titles in their original languages. As an institution dedicated to diversity and inclusion and to promoting the historical study of philanthropy, it is important that the RAC does not collapse the international history of philanthropy and the third sector into a single United States lens.

Increased Accessibility to an International Audience

The archival description within the UIA collection guide is written in English, but there are recent enhancements within DIMES, the RAC’s Online Collection and Catalog, to improve access for researchers around the world. Thanks to Patrick Galligan, DevOps Analyst on the Digital Strategies team, and his leadership on the DIMES UI Translation Project completed in 2024, DIMES navigation elements (buttons, headers, etc.) are now translated into other languages, including Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. With these access points, we hope that the cosmopolitan UIA records are accessible well beyond the walls of the Rockefeller Archive Center.