The Thomas Merton Center has four ongoing goals:

 -         Preserving the materials that comprise the Merton archives.

-         Facilitating on-site and remote access, as appropriate, to materials in the archives for scholars, students and the general public.

-         Promoting use of the archives and Center, particularly by faculty and students of Bellarmine University.

-         Acquiring additional Merton and Merton-related materials as they become available through gift or public sale.

 Once again achievements have been made in all of these areas:

Preservation:

 -         A project to re-house non-book secondary literature about Merton has been initiated.

-         The Center’s holdings of reviews of books by Thomas Merton are being transferred from newsprint to archival paper and indexed.

-         Security has been reviewed and security cameras have been installed in the Conference Room to aid in the monitoring of researchers. (At most archives researchers would be supervised in person, but with only two members of staff this is not possible.)

-         The project to digitally re-master Merton’s conferences to the Gethsemani community, consisting of over 200 tapes, has now been completed. The next stage of this project will be to create an on-line finding aid.

-         The FM-200 fire suppressant system is now serviced twice a year and staff training (including campus security) is provided.

Access:

 -         Development of the Center’s web site continues, in particular the creation of an on-line finding aid for the Center’s collections of Merton’s correspondence to over 2,100 individuals has been completed. This finding aid is available at: http://www.merton.org/Research/Correspondence/Correspondents-list.asp

-         Finding aids for Merton’s working notebooks are now available on the web and a finding aid for Merton’s recorded conference will be added shortly.

-         A database of non-book secondary literature about Merton is being compiled in conjunction with the project to re-house this material.

-         The Center continues to keep a running bibliography of new works appearing by and about Merton, and this is published quarterly in the Merton Seasonal.

Promotion:

 -         Statistics for the use of the archives continue to rise, with increases in the numbers of visitors 3,276 (3,046), telephone calls 1,282 (1,201) and long reference inquiries 845 (820). There was a significant increase in the number of short reference inquiries, rising from 1,731 in 2005 to 2,891 in 2006. The greater part of these inquiries are handled by e-mail. (Figures in brackets are for 2005.)

-         A wide variety of groups continue to come to the Center for tours or meetings, including two Merton Elderhostels a year.

-         The Center has also been involved in assisting in the publication of a number of books in the past year, assisting students working on academic projects as well as book and journal publishers requiring access to images or permissions. Most recently:

    o       Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton by Roger Lipsey. This book developed out of the December 2004 conference on Merton’s art and is lavishly illustrated with images from the Center’s holdings.

    o       The Merton Annual, volume 18.

    o       Signs of Peace: The Interfaith Letters of Thomas Merton by William Apel. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006. This book relies heavily on the Center’s correspondence holdings, it also includes images from the Center’s collections.

-         The Center has arranged and hosted lectures by:

    o       Dom John Eudes Bamberger.

    o       Tom Del Prete, Elaine Prevallet and Michael Sobocinski.

    o       Sr. Jose Hobday.

    o       Julia Butterfly Hill.

    o       Robert Ellsberg.

    o       Patrick O’Connell.

-         The Center was involved in working with some other organizations in town and in sponsoring a number of other events including the Merton-Gandhi Peace March from Merton’s Hermitage at Gethsemani to the Corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville in September.

-         The Center loaned the photography exhibit “A Hidden Wholeness – The Zen Photography of Thomas Merton” to Bluffton University, Ohio, and to Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City. Over the summer it was on exhibit at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia for July, and at the Sacred Box Gallery in Vancouver for August.  Finally, at Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago in the fall.

-         Paul is currently serving as the 10th President of the ITMS.

-         The Center is involved with planning the ITMS general meeting and conference in Memphis, TN. in June 2007.

-         The Center jointly sponsored and organized the first Spanish Merton Conference held in Avila, Spain in late October this year at which Paul was a keynote speaker and co-director of the conference. This conference was fully booked with over 350 participants from nineteen countries. The papers from the conference will be published bilingually as a volume of the Spanish Cistercian journal Cistercium.

-         The Center organized a conference on Merton and ethics held here at Bellarmine in March 2006 in cooperation with the Ethics and Social Justice Center. Both Mark and Paul gave papers at this conference. Feedback from the conference was excellent.

-         The Center has been involved with providing footage of Merton to the D.T. Suzuki film, A Zen Life which aired at the International Film Festival in Vancouver in the Fall.

-         The Center has also been an important resource for the development of a new film about Thomas Merton by local filmmaker Morgan Atkinson, Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton which had its first showing in Louisville in December.

-         The major donation of materials by Robert Giroux (donated in September 2005) received prominent coverage in the Courier-Journal when the donation was officially announced in Spring 2006. The story was subsequently syndicated through Associated Press and appeared in newspapers across the country.

Acquisition:

 -         Over the course of 2006 many new publications, including foreign translations, dissertations and other materials were added to the collection.

    o       Of particular note were a number of early translations of Merton’s work including:

§         De Berg Der Waarheid. Dutch. Ascent of Truth. 1953.

§         Tiempos De Celebración. Spanish (Chile). Seasons of Celebration. 1967.

§         Uw Naaste Als Uzelf. Dutch. No Man Is An Island. 1956.

§         The Waters of Silence. Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1950.

    o       A collection of Korean translations donated by Dr. Woo-Hee Park:

§         Korean translations of: Life and Holiness, Seoul: 2002; The Living Bread, Seoul: 2001; Love and Living, 1987; New Seeds of Contemplation, Seoul: 2005; Seeds, Seoul: 2005; Thoughts in Solitude, Seoul: 1993; and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Seoul: 1998.

    o       Nine new theses and dissertations.

-         A further donation from Merton’s editor Robert Giroux of the typescript of The Living Bread with corrections by Thomas Merton.

-         A major donation of materials from Abbot John Eudes Bamberger including over one hundred notes and letters from Thomas Merton.

-         Further acquisitions of digital images of Merton’s drawings and calligraphies held in other archives.

-         Copies of correspondence from Merton to José Eusebio Ricaurte, Naomi Burton Stone, Jonathan Williams and Francis W. Sweeney, SJ.

-         A donation of a painting of Thomas Merton’s Ordination.

-         Donation of 4 original letters from Thomas Merton to Catherine S. Smith dating from 1960 and 1961. Donated by the Alcuin Library at St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN.

-         Collage of “Young Thomas Merton” by Brad Devlin.

-         Photograph of Thomas Merton on his ordination day, donated by Father William Foley. (Former student of Dan Walsh.)

-         Four watercolor paintings by Owen Merton of Bermuda were purchased.

-         A letter from Thomas Merton to Richard Meyers was purchased.