History of WCC Library & Archives

In May 1946, two years before the official founding of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Dr Visser't Hooft launched the idea of an ecumenical library, which would serve as a centre for ecumenical study and research, as well as preserve the historical memory of the ecumenical movement. This is still the library's mission today. The WCC Library & Archives began its work with a few hundred books and a handful of documents, in the little conservatory attached to the «chalet» located at Route de Malagnou, Geneva, the first headquarters of the WCC. By 1949 it already had a collection of around 7,000 volumes.

In 1964 the library moved to its present premises, adjacent to the Ecumenical Center in Grand-Saconnex, donated to the WCC by Mrs Jeannette Watson, in memory of her husband Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM. Some five years later, in 1970, the collection had expanded to include 42,000 books and pamphlets, more than 800 periodicals and at least 5,000 boxes of archives containing well over a million pages of hand-written, typed or printed material.
More recently, from 2003-2005, the WCC Library & Archives benefited from a generous donation by a well-known financial institution in Geneva, and was able to carry out long awaiting projects, such as enlarging and renovating the library in Bossey, modernizing the technical equipment and furniture, cataloguing, digitizing and making available on the web part of its collections.
Today, the WCC Library & Archives holds more than 130,000 monographs, 2,500 serials, some over a century old, and more than 1,000 linear meters of archival boxes with millions of unique and irreplaceable documents, and offers to the worldwide ecumenical community a high profile documentation and research center in ecumenism, recently named in honour of Rev. Philip A. Potter, the third Secretary General of the WCC.

Library of the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey

Founded in 1952, the library of the Ecumenical Institute Bossey, was first located in a prestigious room of the Château, reaching in 1960 a collection of 9-10,000 volumes. In 1963, under the leadership of Heinz-Heinrich Wolf, the second Director of Bossey (1955-66), a lecture hall and a library were built in the park. Though closely connected to WCC Library & Archives, it developed and managed its collections rather independently and had it's own librarians, until in 2003, in the course of the renovation project (mentioned above), it merged with the former under a unified management. With its new facilities and enlarged capacities, it holds today about 35,000 monographs and a hundred current journals specialized in biblical and ecumenical theology, missiology, social ethics, and Third World theologies, the academic disciplines taugth at the Institute. Bossey library serves in first instance the students' body, run jointly with the Autonomous Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Geneva, the WCC and/or partner institutions, and finally the wider ecumenical community interested in doing ecumenical studies and research.