It is fascinating to look at the variety of documents connected with the early history of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. The guidebooks and historical accounts are, of course, interesting; but sermons preached there can also be highly revealing of how the meaning of the cathedral was envisioned. William Reed Huntington, an ecumenicist, says in his sermon ‘The Talisman of Unity’: ‘No place could possibly be more appropriate’ for an enquiry into the future of ‘Church Unity’ in the United States ‘than this place,’ going on to discuss the symbolic resonance of the design for the completed Cathedral (6-7).
It is a challenge to think of how to indicate in the metadata why this particular sermon has been included in the online collection. I tried to accomplish this through fields in the Dublin Core metadata, indicating the basic idea of the sermon in the DESCRIPTION and using a relevant Library of Congress Subject Heading (Ecumenical movement–History–Sources) in the SUBJECT field to put the sermon itself in historical context. This raises various questions for me. How will people be approaching this site? How do we ensure that it is something more than an idiosyncratic collection of historical curiosities? I think the answer is that each collection needs to be built with some kind of an overarching narrative in mind of the developing role and significance of the building or institution as it was perceived by people at the time. We are, in some small way, becoming historians, simply by deciding which materials to include.
