Special Collections and Archives is pleased to announce the availability of a revised finding aid for the Orthodox Christian Laity (OCL) records, made possible by grant funding from the Hellenic Foundation. The Orthodox Christian Laity was established in 1987 to advance the renewal of the Orthodox Christian Church in America. OCL’s mission and goals include advocating for the unity of all Orthodox Christians in the United States, ensuring accountability and transparency in Church administration and governance with the participation of both clergy and laity, and working toward a self-governing Orthodox Church in the United States.
The late Dr. Andrew Kopan, DePaul Professor Emeritus of Education and author of Education and Greek Immigrants in Chicago, 1892-1973: A Study in Ethnic Survival, was heavily involved in OCL, and hosted many of the early OCL planning meetings on DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. Andrew and his wife Alice Kopan established a relationship with Special Collections and Archives in 1994 when they began donating Andrew’s personal papers to the University Library, which documented the couple’s extensive involvement with Chicago’s Greek Orthodox community, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, and several organizations they helped to establish, including the Orthodox Christian Laity. In 2002, Andrew and Alice donated 11 linear feet of organizational records documenting OCL. This collection was processed in 2003 and 2004 and made available to researchers.
In 2006, OCL’s Board of Directors voted to donate the organization’s non-current records to DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives. Between July 2006 and May 2023, OCL Executive Directors and members sent an additional 24 linear feet of materials created or collected by the organization. Preserving the organizational records of an active organization can be a challenge, as each subsequent donation of records may duplicate, overlap, extend, or expand upon the records already boxed and described, and integrating new materials into the collection may necessitate reboxing and renumbering existing boxes, as well as rewriting finding aids. But until this time-consuming work is completed, those new records are inaccessible to researchers.
Fortunately, the Orthodox Christian Laity received a grant in 2023 from the Hellenic Foundation to support the arrangement and description of the entire OCL archives, including the materials originally donated by Andrew and Alice Kopan. Between February and October 2024, contract archivists from The Digital Archive Group (TDAG) and DePaul’s own Special Collections and Archives archivists reviewed the processed collection and the 2006-2023 additions to identify duplicates and integrate all the materials into a logical order in one collection.
A revised finding aid describing the Orthodox Christian Laity records is published in DePaul Special Collections and Archives’s ArchivesSpace database and a link to the finding aid is also on the University Library’s Community Archives page under the Religion tab. The OCL records are primarily paper documents, and researchers are welcome to visit DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives reading room or ask questions about the collection. Nineteen items digitized from the original media (VHS, DVD, CD, audiocassette) will be linked to the ArchivesSpace finding aid soon. Those items currently have their format (VHS, etc.) noted in the folder title in the finding aid. Special Collections and Archives staff can provide researchers access to the digitized media content upon request.
Special Collections and Archives is grateful for the active interest of the OCL Leadership in securing grant funding to preserve their materials and make them more accessible through this process, with special thanks George Matsoukis, Executive Director Emeritus, and to David Oancea, current Executive Director of Orthodox Christian Laity.
Wow. 30 years later, it has come to a real, supported collection. Congratulations to everyone who made this happen.