Scanning is becoming easier. The earliest scans in this archive were made in 2008 using a flatbed scanner. 18,000 individual JPEGs were later inserted into PDF files for posting. By 2013, when scanning at the Anglican Centre in Rome, I was able to use a photocopier directly to create a PDF, but these scans had only 200 dpi resolution and no colour or lighting correction.

As the IARCCUM.org website has developed, I have been adding little features that enhance the resources and assist people in sharing the material with colleagues and friends. A few years ago, I added social media links to each news post and, eventually, to each document as well. The social media links are supported by some back-end coding to ensure that Facebook, Twitter, and other sites can properly identify the titles and feature images for each page.

More recently, I have had misgivings about promoting the use of Twitter/X and even removed it from the site for a long period. I have now replaced it with Bluesky, a similar service that has no advertising and uses robust content controls.

On each page, there should be a Bluesky butterfly among the social icons. Clicking this link will open a Bluesky compose window where users can compose their own posts if they have a Bluesky account. Similarly, the Facebook, Messenger, Pocket, Email, and WhatsApp icons open their respective websites. These seem to be the most helpful icons at this time.

Note: Bluesky is still in development. One feature that does not yet work fully is the “compose link” that appears on this website. When clicking on the link a new window successfully opens, and the text box is populated with the URL of the target news story. However, Bluesky does not immediately convert this into a photo and a description or caption (known as a link card). However, if you type a blank space immediately before the URL, the search for the link card will initiate. Bluesky is apparently working on this.

I spent this week at the Anglican Communion Office in London. The staff were wonderful and very hospitable. I went to the ACO to scan documents from the ARCIC-II years. I was given full access to the file rooms and pointed towards the boxes containing the uncatalogued materials from 1999-2004, the end of the ARCIC-II mandate.

I have scanned hundreds of documents, many of which do not have any protocol numbers attached. This will present some difficulties when trying to identify the documents. Many of them will be new documents not included in the official catalogue. More on this later.

The IARCCUM steering committee has established a 30-year embargo on documents from the international Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogues. This policy corresponds to the practice at the Lambeth Palace Library and the Anglican Centre in Rome. This means that there are new documents coming available all the time. Of course, the policy does not apply to materials that have been published by the dialogues, such as the agreed statements and press releases. It also does not apply to materials published in other places, such as journal articles. As I work through the catalogue, I occasionally identify items that do not need to […]

As I have pieced together the ARCIC II catalogue, I have found some unusual gaps. The majority of the catalogue was provided as an Excel file by the Lambeth Palace Library. It provided the ARCIC II protocol numbers and the corresponding LPL file numbers. The LPL makes the following comment: “Unlike the ARCIC I series of papers, the ARCIC II referencing does not replicate the original numbering; but the original numbers of the papers are included in the catalogue descriptions.” The LPL has also included additional materials that may not have been included in the original sequence but which had […]

After seven years of work on this website, the complete archive of ARCIC I has been digitized and catalogued. Many thanks to our partners at the Anglican Centre in Rome and the Lambeth Palace Library. Each document has been identified by the original protocol numbers assigned by the ARCIC co-secretaries. Protocol numbers have been modified slightly because of the computer coding requirements. Blank spaces and slashes (/) have been replaced with a dash (-). There are also a number of preparatory and special commissions that have been digitized along the way. The complete list of commissions included in this archive […]

This website has now been in development for over seven years. The initial scanning of the ARCIC I materials in 2009 was a project of, at that time Msgr. Don Bolen, a staff member of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He was responsible for the Anglican desk at the PCPCU from late 2001 to late 2008. In the months before he left Rome, he collected the documents, borrowed some from the Anglican Centre in Rome, and took them to a quiet summer rental in Sicily where he proceeded to individually scan nearly 18,000 pages on a flat-bed scanner. […]