Category Archives: Archivy

Our Students – Rachel Sim

Posted on October 25, 2012 by | 2 Comments

The City of Vancouver Archives was kind enough to adopt me as an intern this summer. Never before has twelve weeks passed by so quickly! During my time at the Archives, I had the pleasure of dabbling in a number of aspects of archival work, including some unexpected outreach work acting as a researcher in the Archives’ new instructional video.

Rachel hard at work as Researcher #1 in the Archives’ 2012 how-to video. Still from video.

Artistic expression aside, I can now proudly say that I have processed a group of records from start to finish, appraising, selecting, arranging and describing the records of Richard Dopson, a prominent member of the Vancouver gay community and an important individual in the development of gay sports in the city. Organizing the records created over the last 30 years of passionate involvement on the part of Mr. Dopson was no small task! Vancouver hosted the Gay Games in 1990 and Dopson was co-chair of this international event. Continue reading →

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Our Students – Kevin Owen

Posted on October 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

There are a number of things which bring joy to an archivist’s heart: the tactile pleasure of (carefully!) handling an old and worn ledger, the completion of a meticulously-filled spreadsheet of file and item descriptions, rows upon rows of immaculate Hollinger boxes, and trays of homemade treats in the office. However, as an intern at the City of Vancouver Archives over the summer, I came to learn that it is often the many large and small discoveries which occur in the process of archival work that end up being the most gratifying and memorable experiences.

Kevin Owen with Major Matthews and Jack the Cat. Photograph by Rachel Sim.

Some of these discoveries are of the dramatic variety, such as when you are removing a piece of art from a frame for rehousing, only to find that the backing board in the frame is in fact a painted photograph from the 1890s. Continue reading →

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SAA 2012 Annual Meeting in San Diego – Beyond Borders

Posted on October 4, 2012 by | Leave a comment

My self-funded trip to San Diego to attend the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting was a fantastic professional experience. I met some great people who are working on inspiring projects.

The view from the San Diego convention center. Photo by Cindy McLellan

Keynote speaker Jon Voss of Historypin set an exciting tone for the conference with his thoughtful and passionate multi-media presentation. Not an archivist himself, Voss does enjoy working with archivists and started working with and thinking about linked open data back in the early 1990s. Continue reading →

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ACA Whitehorse 2012

Posted on August 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Whitehorse was the location of this year’s Association of Canadian Archivists conference. Archivists from as far away as Brazil and New Zealand joined Canadian archivists for three days of learning, sharing, networking and debate. The theme of the conference was ‘Archival Gold.’ We were privileged to have Dr. Ken Coates, who grew up in Whitehorse, begin the first morning with a wonderful keynote speech sharing his historical knowledge of Canada’s North, his appreciation of Archives as rich sources of much of that knowledge, and the importance of teaching history to children.

Jeremy Heil, Glenn Dingwall and Peter Van Garderen answering questions at the end of their session. Photo by Cindy McLellan

The City of Vancouver Archives was again well represented at the ACA conference. Digital Archivist Glenn Dingwall was part of the panel session Developing Digital Information Infrastructure for Canadian Archives and spoke about the policy and planning decisions made at the Archives that were necessary to transition from a digitization program to a full-blown digital preservation program. Project Archivist Cindy McLellan (self-funded) shared with fellow archivists the workflow we have developed for preserving video materials digitally, using the Yaletown Productions fonds as an example. Continue reading →

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DigCCurr 2012

Posted on July 20, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This past May, I was fortunate to participate in the DigCCurr Professional Institute on Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Led by UNC-CH faculty members Dr. Helen Tibbo and Dr. Christopher (Cal) Lee and taught by digital curation experts, the DigCCurr Institute brings together government, university, and private-sector information professionals for a week’s study of strategies and methods for the long-term management of digital materials.

DigCCurr 2012 instructors and participants on the last day of the Institute

Of the 35 participants in the Institute, I was the only municipal government employee; other participants came from institutions as diverse as the Yukon Archives, the University of Melbourne, the Silicon Valley-based Computer History Museum, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Despite our institutions’ respective differences in size, location, and acquisition mandate, the results of the pre-institute survey that participants completed showed similarities in both the nature of our holdings and the difficulties we face in caring for them. Continue reading →

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From Suitcases and Cigar Boxes – Or: How Do Our Holdings Grow?

Posted on December 9, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Here at the City of Vancouver Archives, we adhere to a Canadian archival principle called “total archives”. This means that we acquire, preserve, and make accessible records from all sectors of society—local government, private industry, cultural institutions, organizations, families, individuals, etc.—and in all formats. Also, because we are the municipal archives for Vancouver, our holdings must relate to some aspect of the history of our city.

The portions of our holdings that come from the City of Vancouver government come to us systematically through the City’s records management program.  Those parts that we acquire from the private sector (local businesses, families, associations, etc.) arrive here in a variety of ways, often unexpectedly and sometimes in surprising packages.

Just a few examples of containers donations arrive in.

In many cases, people with records to offer will either call or email us asking if we would be interested in what they have. When this happens, Continue reading →

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A Day in the Lives of 2 Archivists Gone Digital

Posted on October 6, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Digitizing video for preservation and access (Cindy McLellan)

 The City of Vancouver is an exciting city to be a part of at the moment for many reasons. Celebrate Vancouver 125 events have been taking place throughout 2011 all over the city to celebrate 125 years since Vancouver’s incorporation in 1886. The City is involved with the open government movement, with Vancouver’s open data catalogue, now over one year old being one open information source. Setting the goal of being the greenest city by 2020, Vancouver is asking its citizens to contribute their ideas and make lasting changes.

From my position at the City of Vancouver Archives I mention these broad City initiatives because they have important commonalities: collaboration, innovation, and interdisciplinary participation. Working as a Digital Archivist I see all three of these characteristics as key to any successful digital archives project. At the Archives we are involved in ICA-Atom and Archivematica development, both collaborative and innovative projects that require input from multiple disciplines. Multiple memory institutions, archivists, programmers, designers and researchers have all contributed unique and necessary input to these open source projects.

Hybrids: Approach with caution and other smart people

I was hired in March to arrange and describe the Yaletown Productions Inc. fonds, which consists of the records of a local film production company. The records date from company director Michael Collier’s university days in 1969, as a member of the Simon Fraser University Film Workshop, under Stan Fox, to 2001 television show proposals stored on a computer hard drive. In addition to having both paper and digital records (which archivists call a “hybrid” fonds), this donation includes hundreds of hours of film and video material consisting of raw footage, completed productions, and everything in between. It has been my challenge to appraise, digitize, preserve, arrange, describe, and make available to the public these materials in all their various formats. Much of this work involved the straightforward application of archival theory and practice.

Part rabbit part antelope hybrid

Photograph by Mark Freeman (Free-ers on flickr). Hybrids, at first glance may seem to be cute and cuddly creatures, upon further investigation however, these unpredictable monsters, born of uncontrolled digital environments are actually quite frightening. Approach with caution and a team of knowledgeable people.

In the detailed planning required for digital preservation, no one should labour alone. The atmosphere among those with this responsibility is one of sharing. Staying in touch through wikis, blogs, our time together at conferences, listservs, and simply being a small and active community, digital archivists need not, and should not, Continue reading →

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ARCHIVES 360°- SAA’s 75th Annual Meeting and Anniversary Celebration

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Archivists work alone most of the time. We at the City Archives are fortunate to have other professional staff in the same building, but our work is largely solitary by nature. This summer in Chicago, no archivist was alone for long at the 75th Annual Society of American Archivists conference, where over a thousand professional archivists came together to share knowledge and connect with each other.

This cake, in the shape of an archival storage box, was displayed at the opening gala event. It reads, “Congratulations SAA on 75 years.”

This year, three archivists from the City had presentations accepted at SAA: Glenn Dingwall, Cindy McLellan and Courtney Mumma. All three of us (self-funded with the exception of Mumma) attended the full conference in Chicago, so we’d like to share some of our experiences and highlights with you. Continue reading →

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CURATEcamp 2011 – Collaborative solutions through unconferencing

Posted on August 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Digital curation is an emerging challenge that applies what archivists already do

  • receive donations
  • decide which elements have lasting value
  • process and store them
  • provide access to researchers

to digital materials. This creates new challenges. For instance, we have to provide the digital materials in forms that are useful to many different communities, such as technology professionals, data scientists, librarians, and humanities researchers. Each of these professions (and more) are working in various ways to come up with digital curation solutions.

Professional conferences are typically a meeting of the minds of people from a single profession. This means that different communities are each coming up with their own digital curation solutions in a vacuum and missing out on the benefits of collaboration. The unconference format addresses this flaw.

Unconferences tend to be based around a topic area rather than a profession. I recently funded my own attendance to CURATEcamp 2011 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. CURATEcamp defines itself as “a series of unconference-style events focused on connecting practitioners and technologists interested in digital curation.” The themes of each session are provided by participants rather than set in advance: as of the first morning, the schedule was an empty slate.  First, we learned the informal procedure of the event, which was a challenge for some of us who are used to highly structured professional conferences.. After this introduction, the organizers asked us to go away for coffee, talk to each other and then come back with our ideas to fill in the schedule.

Meyer Library at Stanford (the columns were built to look like palm trees!) Camp events were held between Meyer and Green libraries, both part of Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources (SULAIR)  Photo by Manuel Gomez (autreche)

The blank schedule on the whiteboard was daunting at first and it changed several times over the course of the two-day event, but these are the sessions we came up with. If you follow the link, you’ll find that some attendees linked their notes from the session to the schedule grid. Continue reading →

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Vinegar: the scent of self-destruction?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by | 5 Comments

Cellulose acetate film, also known as safety film, is well-known for its tendency to chemically self-destruct. The cellulose acetate plastic film base deteriorates over time, releasing acetic acid, which leads to the embrittlement and shrinkage of the plastic base. The term, Vinegar Syndrome, is used to describe this chemical breakdown as the film starts to smell like vinegar. (Vinegar is a 5% acetic acid solution in water.)

Deteriorating negative in original envelope

Deteriorating acetate negative

The negatives above show the classic channeling and buckling associated with Vinegar Syndrome. Obviously, cellulose acetate negatives in this condition render the image very difficult to see and can result in losses to the emulsion.

Risky business: Stripping the emulsion

Emulsion stripping is a conservation treatment used to separate the gelatin pellicle or emulsion from the plastic film base. This is a risky treatment Continue reading →

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