FOWM Brochure: Project 001 -- CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

I’ve never seen a digital collection like this one before. It’s a complete series of 181 colorful brochures announcing correspondingly numbered mission projects undertaken by the Friends of World Mission (FOWM) from 1965-2007. For me the collection has a sort of charming quirkiness -- a presentation of the evolution of graphic design and fund-raising prose and missionary priorities all wrapped up in tiny little bite-sized packages.

FOWM was started by the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) Board of Missions as a way to solicit financial support for the church’s humanitarian and evangelical projects. The collection begins with the organization’s initial project brochure: building a surgical-dental unit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country continued to be a primary focus of FOWM appeals. Fifty-five of the collection’s brochures describe church initiatives in the DR Congo, with Ecuador being the runner-up featured in 36 projects.

I’m able to easily tell you this because North Park University has tagged the brochures with controlled vocabulary country names and also helpfully included a “Browse by Country” search feature on the collection home page. The collection designers have also named the included items so that they will list sequentially and provided a “Browse by Number” search feature so that you can jump to a specific brochure. Very nice! This arrangement gives a chronological structure to the collection even though many of the brochures are undated. North Park has done a great job with this collection that augments their other offerings related to the ECC.

Written by Mary Rose, Metadata Librarian, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville