‘The Plumbline gauges libraries and museums’

    

The Plumbline for Summer 2025.

I hope you enjoyed a fitting St. John’s Day celebration with your lodge (or other Masonic group), and made some memories. Yesterday also saw the publication of the summer issue of The Plumbline, the quarterly newsletter of the Scottish Rite Research Society.

In the skilled hands of Editor Chris Ruli, this periodical now begins measuring the libraries and museums that serve the Masonic fraternity, visiting the Grand Lodge of Iowa’s massive repository of books and artifacts on its first stop. Assistant Grand Librarian and Curator Julia Wells is profiled. She is known to some of us via the Masonic Library and Museum Association, but did you know she comes from a Masonic family going back generations?

The library itself is a renowned institution. I’m assuming that, because it’s not in a congested coastal city, it has the most square footage of any of the major research libraries serving the Masonic world. I hope to visit one day.

Elsewhere in the pages of the now digital newsletter, Ruli defines for us the Archive Maturity Matrix. This is a trestleboard archivists may employ to quantify the sufficiencies and deficiencies of their facilities, and to chart improvements where needed.

I’ll see if I may bootleg this for the MLMA’s newsletter.

Been wondering what will be this year’s bonus book? Look for Chronology of the Supreme Council, 1801-1859 soon.

To join the SRRS, click here.