Bergin was a member and active participant in various education, arts, and community development organizations; these included all types of private, business, government, professional, and local, state, regional, national, and international groups. Bergin's most prominent roles were as chairman of the Indiana Arts Commission (middle-1970s) and as a member of the National Council on the Arts (late-1970s and early-1980s); however, Bergin was active in all the organizations represented here. Theses records consist overwhelmingly of mailings, meeting materials (such as minutes, agenda, reports, grant applications, etc.), reports, transcripts, articles, books, essays, clippings, press releases, membership lists, rules of organization, and the like: the rest of the files contain correspondence to and from Bergin, notes taken during meetings, drafts and ideas, and similar manuscript items. The files have been divided by organization as best could be done though it is clear that some folders and stacks of loose documents pertained to more than one organization: this was especially troublesome when one organization had frequent correspondence with another. Within the records relating to one organization the arrangement is ideally chronological, but frequently even such order is lacking. For this reason the dating of the files is tentative at best.