WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT CANADA’S NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Check out this interview that explains to us why government records matter. Whether it is our grand parents’s letters or federal government’s records, after it is destroyed we will never know what happened. Future historians will have nothing to work with. And with the explosion of digital records, the evidence is ironically at even greater risk in the future. Check out this interview:
Local Efforts to Preserve the Record
Check out this YouTube presentation for The Hasting and Belleville Community Archives entitled “How To Access The Community Archives When They Are Closed”. Published October 2020, their archivist, Amanda Hill, describes the Archives facility which was established ten years ago. She shows people how to access the collections from a computer.
| The Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County is a service provided by the County of Hastings and the City of Belleville to help the municipalities of Hastings County preserve and provide access to their documentary heritage. https://www.cabhc.ca/en/about/resources/Transfer-of-municipal-records-to-the-Community-Archives.pdf |
Middlesex Centre Archives leads the charge
Although the Middlesex Centre Archives do not have the Municipal Records for Middlesex Centre, they do use a similar process. Each donor signs a Deed of Gift for their donation. The number for that donation is recorded on the Deed of Gift and every article within the donation. That is part of the processing work of donations.
When completely processed (number added, repairs completed), the donation is placed in the Archives on a specific shelf in a specific bay of shelving. The donation and its place in the Archives are then recorded. That donation can be found at any time with all its pertinent information. Access is easy and timely. If the donation has privacy implications, it is filed in the restricted files area.
All these policies are already in place at the Middlesex Centre Archives under the direction of paid Archivist. The processes were designed so that when Middlesex County establishes an archive facility, some of the work is already done and easily transferable.
Meanwhile, all of our little community groups take care of the written records as best we can without any help from the County of Middlesex. Even the City of London has no archives. We have been relying on Western University…
Mary Simpson