Category: Archivists

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Meet Lorna Condon, Senior Curator for Historic New England

by Anna Faherty

Lorna Condon, the Senior Curator of Library and Archives at Historic New England, was kind enough to meet with me this week and tell me about the collections and programs her institution offers. In her position of senior curator Lorna deals with archival acquisitions, and works on publications, exhibits, and grant writing, among other aspects of archival work. She says she finds it extremely rewarding to help connect people with historical and archival objects that inspire them.

Historic New England is a regional organization encompassing 37 historic properties in five New England States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The organization was started by William Sumner Appleton in 1910. Appleton hoped to preserve architecture and artifacts that would tell the stories of the daily life of New Englanders, and not only of famous historical figures. Collections that Appleton began are integral parts of the collection today, for example, the ephemera collection and the documentary photograph collection. The library and archives at Historic New England include photos, architectural drawings, postcards, books, periodicals, and manuscripts. Many collections of photographs have been digitized and are available on the Historic New England website. Explore the collections of Historic New England: https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/

Historic New England is focused on preserving, maintaining, and making accessible objects associated with the region’s history. Though the organization began in Massachusetts, it maintains buildings in all New England states except for Vermont. Historic New England has developed collaborative partnerships in Vermont through public programs, lectures on New England history, workshops for homeowners, loans of material to exhibitions, and a field school for preservation students and professionals.

An important group of stakeholders in Historic New England are those living in historic homes they would like to preserve. Through the easement program, Historic New England partners with these homeowners to help legally deed preservation maintenance into their ownership documents to protect their houses in perpetuity. By helping to manage the care of private historic homes, the organization can assist in the preservation of New England heritage outside of the traditional realms of public institutions like museums. Other users of the archive at Historic New England include historians, architects, students of all ages, filmmakers, and community members from various localities throughout the region.

Within the organization, the library and archives provide resources for staff members from various departments: marketing, exhibition, preservation, and publication, to name a few. The archive provides information and artifacts which are featured in exhibits at various locations, including online, in magazines, promotional materials, and books. There are also external groups and individuals which Historic New England reaches with various programs, workshops, partnerships, and exhibitions. Every year, the organization gives awards to authors of books of new research about the material culture of New England, and to collections of works on paper which make significant contributions to history. These awards serve to forge bonds between researchers, collectors, and Historic New England, in order to promote and recognize the value of historical scholarship.

Historic New England partners with various organizations in order to broaden their user base and expand their collections. Some of their partners in exhibit creation, programming, digitization, and grant collaboration include: The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), The Boston Athenaeum, state initiatives such as the Maine Photo Project, schools like Berwick Academy, and professional associations such as the American Alliance of Museums. The program Everyone’s History grew out of community involvement in events relating to the 100th anniversary of the organization. Everyone’s History partners Historic New England with community groups all over the region to tell the stories they are passionate about. Some of the outcomes of these projects are oral histories, books, exhibits, documentaries and ongoing programs. Partners include museums and historical societies, public school systems, religious organizations, LGBT groups, workers associations, preservation trusts, and even a yacht club! Learn more about Everyone’s History:

https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/everyones-history/

Everyone’s History has helped Historic New England reach potential users from diverse communities, and provides an ongoing connection to groups that represent New England daily life in the modern world and historically. A great example is the Haymarket Project, a collaboration between Historic New England, the Haymarket Pushcart Association, and photographer Justin H. Goodstein. The project documents the lives and traditions of vendors at Haymarket and the history, changes, and challenges of the market. The relationship between Haymarket and Historic New England has continued, and on October 20th, a program hosted by Historic New England and the Haymarket Pushcart Association called “Taste of Haymarket” explores its history and culture for interested members of the public. More information about the “Taste of Haymarket” event can be found here: http://shop.historicnewengland.org/HGO-HAYMARKET-2-9499/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Meet Bergis Jules!

Bergis Jules, University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside

by Jessica Purkis

Recently, I had the chance to catch up with Bergis Jules, the University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside. Bergis manages UC Riverside’s institutional records, political papers collections, and African American collections. While supporting the university’s administration and community outreach efforts, Bergis documents campus history and builds collections around local, regional, and state political organizations in California. As part of his work, he is constantly reaching out and educating to build better donor relations and more diverse collections.

Bergis views his work in archives as a way to build ties between communities and ties between community members. He believes that archives and cultural heritage materials can bring people together, especially when those materials are “put into the hands of those who teach.” Without enhanced accessibility, some users might never encounter these materials (or communities) at all. To build ties, outreach and advocacy are essential. By creating a space for conversation, an archivist can build trust and discover a community’s particular needs. The most important aspect of any outreach or advocacy project, Bergis reminds me, is “putting people and communities first.” No matter the medium, digital or old-fashioned face-to-face, conversation comes first. Bergis believes that collaborating and conversing with smaller communities holding diverse materials is the best form of advocacy that an archivist can perform at a large repository. The best way to do this, he adds, is to learn to listen to the communities that keep the materials.

Because listening facilitates collaboration, Bergis suggests that listening itself is a great way to find new strategies for outreach and advocacy. An archivist can learn a lot from other projects by asking about what has worked and what hasn’t, and then seeing what spaces may be left behind that provide new project ideas. Bergis has had a lot of success learning about new projects through networks of archivists on Twitter. According to Bergis, following the networks on Twitter is a really effective way to find out about and collaborate on all kinds of projects, including grassroots archiving. Bergis himself is very active on Twitter, and can be found at @BergisJules.

In the past, Bergis has helped build collaborative communities around collections from underrepresented groups. He has worked at the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago and also at the District of Columbia Africana Archives Project at George Washington University. At the BMRC, he was Project Director, and helped create a digital repository of collections documenting Chicago-area African American and African diasporic materials. Bergis wrote a grant to jumpstart the DC Africana Archives Project, increasing access to collections documenting the history of the African diaspora in the DC area. Both projects have been incredibly successful in enhancing accessibility to materials. More recently, Bergis has helped develop Documenting the Now, a tool for archiving tweets, to help document diverse perspectives on social justice issues.

DocNow is a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.

Bergis therefore brings a long-standing commitment to community-building and diversity to his work at UC Riverside’s Archives, located in the UC Riverside Library. The library holds more than 275 manuscript collections, including personal, family, and organizational records. The university collects materials that document a wide variety of experiences in the US, particularly in the Inland Empire Region, an area in inland southern California east of Los Angeles. Some of the strengths of Riverside’s special collections lie in the history and culture of the Inland Empire region, Latin American history and culture, and ethnic studies, which document African American, Native American, Asian American, and Chicano/Latino experience.

UC Riverside currently spearheads the Inland Empire Memories consortium, a group of cultural heritage institutions located in the Inland Empire. Bergis is the Project Coordinator there. He writes grants and manages the program day-to-day in conjunction with the other member institutions. Because the consortium was established recently, right now Bergis spends much of his time listening to the consortium’s members, gathering data along the way about their projects and interests, their resources, and their ideas for later programs. Bergis is currently helping to facilitate the Sherman Indian High School Museum’s project to digitize some of its collections and provide its users with new levels of access.

In future, the Inland Empire Memories institutions intend to collaborate to share funding, develop access tools and programs for digital collections, and build relationships with other community institutions. The Inland Empire Memories mission is “to identify, preserve, interpret, and share the rich cultural legacies of the Inland Empire’s diverse communities” by enhancing access to cultural heritage materials. It emphasizes materials documenting “peoples and groups underrepresented in the historical record.” Increasing diversity in the archival record, I have come to find, is something of a theme in Bergis’ work.

It’s through listening that Bergis has had such success collaborating with others to promote access to a more diversified historical record. I expect that the Inland Empire Memories Consortium will become as active as the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and the DC Africana Archives Project in enhancing access to new materials. I hope to hear about many more projects from its members in the future!

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Meet Ben Maracle!

Meet Ben Maracle!

by Allyson Sekerke

Ben Maracle is the former Outreach & Operations administrator at The Howard Gotlieb Center. The Center is a Boston University archival repository that specializes in contemporary public figures, and Maracle began working at the Center shortly after graduating from Cornell with a degree in communications. As a student, Maracle did outreach and administrative work for Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program. Because of his experience in outreach, Maracle said accepting the position at the Center seemed like the right move.

Although this position was historically administrative, Maracle ultimately became responsible for event planning and reforming the Friends of the Howard Gotlieb Center membership program. There are approximately 300 Friends of the Howard Gotlieb Center, many of whom have been members for over 30 years. One member even described this program as Boston’s best-kept secret, a notion that Maracle hoped to change. “If there’s one thing that I can do, it’s make something begin to get legs” Maracle said. According to Maracle’s statistical research, many Boston University students settle in the New England area after graduation. With that in mind, Maracle wanted to design a membership program that would attract students and keep them engaged throughout their professional careers.

Maracle has been restructuring the membership program and, with the help of an outside designer, developing new promotional materials. “In a sense, I have become an art director of the Friends program” Maracle said. Maracle has also introduced surveys to measure the success of past events and expressed his surprise that no previous attempts to collect data from event attendees had been made. “Just because you have 300 people, doesn’t mean you have 300 happy people” Maracle said. Having that data and understanding their return on investment, Maracle suggests, is critical to the continued success of the Center. The goal is not, of course, to make money, but to justify their existence to the university and ensure the university’s continued investment in the Center. As Maracle says, “our currency is people, people coming back.”

The Center, for example, is holding an event featuring Bonnie Timmermann, a legendary casting director, and at the same time, a Boston University communications professor is teaching an acting class. Ideally, Maracle says, the students in this course could come to the event and learn how “not to blow it” at an audition. “There’s a ton of students who would really get a lot out of it if they just new about it” Maracle said.

Unfortunately, educational institutions, Maracle says, are naturally the “slowest moving things on the planet,” and despite his vision for a reformed membership program, Maracle faced many roadblocks from the administration. The administration was resistant to change, and Maracle himself had little say over the Center’s programs, the majority of which are lectures and panel discussions. By the time they came down the “pipeline” to Maracle, the format of the event and the speakers had already been decided. Despite these limitations and despite the fact that Maracle left the Center in October 2017, he hopes he has made an impact on the Center’s future membership. “I’m really hoping,” Maracle said, “fingers crossed, that this actually works.”

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Meet Deborah Richards!

Deborah Richards, Special Collections Archivist @ Mount Holyoke College

by Julia Nee

Meet Deborah Richards, the Special Collections Archivist at Mount Holyoke College, a small liberal arts college for women in South Hadley, Massachusetts! A graduate of Simmons College with a MSLIS in the archives concentration, Deborah previously worked with the state legislature in Oregon. With a BA in History and Women’s Studies from Oregon State University and a MA in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, her interest in history, women’s studies, and activism still inform how she does her work as an archivist today. When she finally discovered archives, she realized she enjoyed research more than writing, and was hooked. Through her experiences as an intern at Houghton Library at Harvard University, student worker at Northeastern University, an archivist at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Assistant Archivist at the Smith College Archives, Deborah has nearly 20 years of experience working in archives.

For the last four years, Deborah’s day at Mount Holyoke College is always exciting because of her various tasks and responsibilities as one of two archivists. She never quite knows who is going to email or walk through the door. On an average day she could be providing reference services, accessioning new materials, supervising student workers, working with donors, performing stacks maintenance, or overseeing the oral history project for LGBTQ alums. Interestingly, Deborah commented that while a lot of professional focus recently has been on digital materials and resources, digital work is the least time consuming part if her job. Deborah is usually up and moving around, doing something new, and enjoys the range of work in archives.

Advocacy and outreach work is very important to Deborah. She believes that information is kept in an archives is not just there to be saved, but is meant to be used. To achieve that end, archives have to create openings for their discovery. For Deborah, advocacy and outreach are very similar because she wants to promote her archives and its material just as much as everyone else’s archives and their materials. She says that it is a disservice not to do outreach. The most exciting advocacy and outreach project Deborah currently has in progress is the LGBTQ Alum Oral History Project. Recognizing the limited representation of LGBTQ history related to Mount Holyoke in the archives, the archives has interviewed over 50 alums to document their time on campus.

Deborah’s archives offers a variety of other advocacy and outreach programs at Mount Holyoke. First, the Archives and Special Collection is very active on social media, thanks mostly to student workers. The archives uses many platforms to reach the most people, including Twitter, YouTube, tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. To further showcase some of their collections, the archive produces numerous exhibits, both online and in house. The archives hosts ‘Crafternoons,’ a monthly afternoon of crafts for students to get them through the door, make them familiar with the archives, and introduce history or archival materials. A recent craft was creating old-fashioned felt college pennants, and an upcoming activity is ‘Do It Yourself Tea Bags.’ The archives also has a project called Transform/Transcribe which involves crowdsourcing transcription of letters from the archives’s collections. This type of project shares what the archives has and tells volunteers and alums that the archives wants them to visit, help, and be involved. Additionally, Deborah involves the archives in other on-campus activities. The archives brings its button maker to campus activities like Mountain Day, to increase its visibility and network. The archives works closely with classes and professors and the Alumnae Quarterly for publications.

For Deborah, the best types of advocacy and outreach projects are those that involve the audience. She argues that if you let people actually get their hands on something or do something, they will be far more engaged. Some of her favorite projects from other institutions have been oral history projects, the CLGA’s walking tours, and the History Project’s Gayme Night (an evening of board games taken from the collection). She does recognize the challenges, specifically limited time, in creating a successful program. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes, time-consuming steps, rehousing materials for displays for example, so Deborah thinks it is essential to find small ways to do outreach, like the student directed social media and the traveling button maker. She is always inspired by what other archives are doing.

 

 

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Myron Groover and Activist Advocacy

Myron Groover (photography by Victoria Ostrzenski)

by Alden Ludlow

Myron Groover is the Archives and Rare Books Librarian at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He received his Master of Archival Studies and MLIS degree from University of British Columbia, Vancouver in 2012. He also holds a MA Honors in History from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2006). We spoke with him on issues of advocacy and outreach in a phone interview on September 29, 2017.

For Myron Groover, advocacy in the archives field is an overtly political project. Having graduated with his MLIS degree in 2012, he found the situation within Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC), at the national level, to be dangerously in disarray. With the appointment of Daniel J. Caron as Librarian and Archivist of Canada in 2009, government employees found themselves under siege, with budgets being cut and information professionals being fired.

Groover’s advocacy work grew out of budget cuts to LAC during the administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (in office 2006-2015). Defunding of cultural heritage institutions during the administration led to the firing of many LAC professionals, and those that remained were further pressured in their jobs, including requirements that they sign non-disclosure agreements, effectively muzzling them and preventing them from discussing their work in publications and at conferences.

“What I was experiencing was this incredulity that there was this systematic dismantling of knowledge infrastructure which was essential to the core functioning of government and its ability to be accountable to its own citizens, and hardly anyone was saying anything at all,” Groover noted in a recent interview for this profile. “The professional organizations were all afraid to say anything, and the people who worked in the institution were terrified to speak up.” He found himself taking on advocacy on behalf of an archives and library meta-discourse at the national level.

Groover has a broad and varied background which put him on the trajectory to taking up the cause on behalf of his fellow Canadian professionals. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he grew up in the United States; at fourteen he attended high school in Switzerland, and after that university in the United Kingdom. He left the UK for Canada in 2007 to attend library school.

Groover’s vision of advocacy is broad, yet nuanced. It looks beyond institutions, seeking to work within the social fabric itself. “The business of advocacy, if it is anything, is working together to build a shared narrative of a society wherein libraries and archives are valued and contribute to the well-being of the people that live in it,” he argues. “Advocacy is the process of building that shared narrative, or repairing it when it gets frayed, and making sure everyone can participate in it.”

His advocacy on behalf of LAC employees began to come to the fore in 2012. “I was desperately underemployed at the time, and I did that on my own without any institutional support from anyone,” he says. While in school, Groover had been maintaining a listserve to promulgate his advocacy ideas; in 2012, at the Canadian Library Association (CLA) conference, he took his fight to the top. Caron, “the hatchet-man the right wing had brought in to shepherd through the destruction of the national library, was the keynote speaker,” Groover recalls. The speech was not well received. “Later that day he had a Q&A panel, and I did the unthinkable thing and got up in his face, and asked him some detailed questions; he couldn’t answer them all, and it was a disaster.”

However, that was not enough. “What started out as this impassioned political project of getting people to care morphed into chronicling the decline,” he says. “I thought, we may not win, but I’ll be damned if they are the only ones getting their line of rhetoric out there.” While his message coalesced around issues of accountability, it was draconian LAC employee speech policies introduced in 2013 which drove him to take his advocacy to the next level. “The employee free speech issue ended up getting a lot of attention, because that was where it was easy to connect what was happening at Library and Archives Canada with regular people,” he says. “Everybody has some conception of what it would be like not to have freedom of expression. Everyone has an intuitive understanding that having your participation in mainstream politics curtailed by your employer is outrageous.”

Groover turned to social media to broaden his audience and increase awareness, and that turned out to be the missing piece. “Social media is a way of reaching people who can help you out, and who want to hear what you have to say,” he relates, adding, “what Twitter did was give me an opportunity to take those longer blog posts, encapsulate them, and get them into a broader sphere where you are able to interact with journalists and policymakers directly.” Members of Parliament were taking notice, and Groover was given the opportunity to shape discourse, noting that all the policy work he was doing was a “heavy lift.”

All that lifting paid off. Caron was fired in 2013; the pressure against him finally reached a peak, and what finally did him in was cheating on expenses. “It was a Pyrrhic victory,” Groover notes, adding, “there was never any accountability for any of the things he did in LAC. As I predicted early on, if they got away with it for long enough, then it wouldn’t be possible to rebuild, and indeed that’s exactly what happened.” Despite continuing issues at LAC, morale has improved; Guy Berthiaume was appointed in 2014. “Just by bringing in someone with a different personality, who is willing to take a more conciliatory rhetorical line, that has made a huge difference.”

Another casualty of this upheaval was the CLA, which disbanded in June 2016. In the end, they did not live up to their mission. “They never had vision on anything, never took to advocacy on these issues,” Groover says. “They gave no value back to the community at all.”

Advocacy on behalf of the profession has been taken up by several smaller organizations, and individuals like Groover. “We don’t have whistleblowers in Canada,” he notes. “There is no tradition of that here. You really do need rogue actors, or at least people who have the autonomy to say what they really think. I was lucky enough to be able to do that … I built my standing in the community through unremunerated advocacy work,” he jokes. A new advocacy and culture of transparency within LAC is taking root in Canada, led by professionals in the field, using social media as a tool to connect with journalists, politicians, and citizens.

“It turned into something I didn’t expect,” Groover concludes. “I think back on it, where it started and where it ended up, it is not always clear to me how I got from point A to point B.” This opportunism–addressing needs where they are most pressing–is at the very heart of advocacy.

 

Resources

McMaster University William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections – https://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/

McMaster Rare Books on Twitter – https://twitter.com/MacResColls

Bibliocracy blog – http://bibliocracy-now.tumblr.com/

Bibliocracy on Twitter – https://twitter.com/@Bibliocracy

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Meet Randall Jimerson!

Archives Power: Memory, Accountability and Social Justice
Randall Jimerson, Western Washington University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Hannah Yetwin

Randall Jimerson is the director of the graduate program in Archives & Records Management and professor of history and at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He is a past president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), as well as New England Archivists (NEA). He’s had an illustrious career in the archives and in education, and has been a part of many impactful programs, projects, and organizations. I spoke to him for about an hour about all things archives, particularly about his perspective and role played in outreach and advocacy.

Professor Jimerson was interested in history from a young age. As a child, he moved from Massachusetts to Virginia and was called a “Yankee” upon entering school. He was curious about the origin of that word, and that sparked his interest in historical research. Later, he earned a PhD in American History at the University of Michigan and began his archival career at the Bentley Historical Library. He continued to a full-time position there and was officially hooked on archives. Currently, his time involves teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, coordinating internships for graduate students, and research and writing of his own. He is presently writing an article about a fellow archivist for a dictionary of archivists.

For the first half of his career, Jimerson was an archivist at the University of Michigan, then Yale, and finally the University of Connecticut. He was the only archivist at UConn for an extended period in the 1980s, and outreach & advocacy were things he did in the rare instance of having free time. However, he found outreach to be essential: “If we’re not doing outreach, what’s the point of acquisition and trying to do reference service?” he asked. While he was at UConn, Jimerson completed 4 grant projects, one of which was a grant proposal for developing a records management program in the archives. He worked across departments surveying records and began a process of creating retention schedules, promoting the service of archives, and helping offices to access and file their own records easily. He created a 60-page pamphlet for assistance and advice for department heads to do their own recordkeeping.

When asked about what makes a good outreach/advocacy project, Jimerson pointed to the key elements, starting with defining an audience. He narrows it down to the following things: targeting specific audiences, clearly defining the statement you want to convey, and considering outreach to be a fundamental part of an archives program all the time, not occasionally. Jimerson has seen industry-wide improvement since the 1980’s, and although there is a lot of emphasis and concern on archival encoding over outreach and advocacy, he thinks there is a growing awareness and understanding of archives. In the 1980s, he was involved in the planning and development of a project providing basic archival education to people around New England with the NEA. This program was designed for librarians, town clerks, historical society professionals, and people that worked with archival materials but had no formal archives experience or training. The function of the program was to teach professionals what to do with archival materials to put into effect good management of archives for preservation and access purposes. This occurred in the form of day-long workshops, covering archival theory and concepts. These workshops happened in a dozen locations in every New England state. 6 weeks after each workshop, there was a follow-up that was essentially a survey of what those professionals had implemented in the time since the workshop and covering follow-up questions. Just being involved was a very rewarding project for him and seemed to have met some of the outreach and advocacy needs he thought the profession needed, and defended the needs of non-archivists who have responsibility for archival materials.

With regards to challenges in outreach and advocacy, Jimerson responded that getting recognition and understanding for archives from resource allocators is the most challenging; that people who control budgets often don’t think that archives need a lot of support. When dealing with stakeholders, defining who the audience is, making the importance of the records very clear, making clear decisions about which audiences are served, and then how to go about developing a centralized mission are crucial. Stakeholders look for a mission statement or a strategic planning process in mind. If an archivist doesn’t have a clear sense of what services one can provide, it’s going to be difficult to convince anyone that you’re doing anything important.

As for his current role in outreach & advocacy, Jimerson explained that he considers everything he does to be public programming and outreach. As the director of an archives and records management graduate program, he works for archival awareness from many different angles. He considers teaching to be outreach; by facilitating this kind of professional development in others, he is doing outreach on behalf of the general concept of archives. When it comes to the future of outreach & advocacy, Jimerson says it’s important for anyone working in an archive to have some engagement: talk about their work, post blogs, tweet, etc. Institutional cultures should be adjusted to allow people in all positions to participate in outreach to promote archival repositories. Jimerson’s current work focuses on the role of archives and archivists in society, including concepts of memory, accountability, social justice, and professional ethics; all themes which are supported by proper outreach and advocacy programs within archives.

To find out more, check out his book, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice 

 

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Meet Jill Shaw, Archivist and Records Analyst

 

Jill Shaw, City of Vaughan Archives

By Rebecka Sheffield

I was lucky enough to meet Gillian “Jill” Shaw in 2009, at the University of Toronto iSchool, where we were both students. We caught up again last week to talk about outreach and advocacy in the context of municipal archives. Since graduating with her MI degree in 2011, Jill has been working in the field of archives, museums and records management for both the public and private sector. She currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Municipal Archives Interest Group (MAIG) for the Archives Association of Ontario, a professional association that includes more than 300 members across the province.

Jill recently joined the City of Vaughan Archives as an Archivist and Records Analyst. Located in one of the fastest growing city in Canada, Vaughan Archives now serves more than 300,000 residents, city staff, and curious researchers. The archives houses all City records with long-term value, business, church and school records, directories, census records, and historic photographs, as well as maps, plan and land records dating back to the 1790s. In addition to municipal records, the archives collects personal papers and is the official records source for the Vaughan Township Historical Society, Woodbridge Agricultural Society, and the Burwick, Vellore and Maple Women’s Institutes. As you can imagine, Jill keeps busy! She is not only responsible for managing archival records, but also provides guidance to City staff on how to manage their current recordkeeping practices.

Over the past several years, the City of Vaughan Archives has actively sought to increase its community presence using  a variety of outreach strategies. The archives has, for example, invested in greater social media use, including its Facebook and Twitter pages, and the City of Vaughan’s blog, where visitors can learn about all of the programs and services that are available. The archives also uses social media to promote a number of physical exhibitions of materials from its collections that are on display at various locations throughout the City of Vaughan. A list of the archives’ social media addresses can be found at the bottom of this post.

Jill is particularly proud of the archives’ “mini-series” posts, which have been produced as part of the City’s community engagement program to connect citizens to municipal services. Over the past few years, this mini-series has introduced  visitors to new archival accessions, discussed preservation and conversation concerns, and provided information about outreach initiatives produced by the archives, including tours, exhibitions, and preservations to students. The mini-series posts also report on community events that have involved archival staff. Archival staff were available during Vaughan Culture Days and even offered samples of a cake baked with a 1875 recipe found in the historical collections;! They were also part of an event at a local public library that helped bring together children and experienced stitchers to in an old fashioned quilting bee.

In addition to “mini-series” posts, the archives also uses social media to showcase its collections to a broader and increasingly younger audience. Each month, Jill works with City staff to select an image, document or collection to feature in a series called “The Way We Were.” This series allows the archives to showcase both frequently used and lesser known collections held in the City repository, and to generate engagement with the collections in new an exciting ways. Jill has noticed that the use of social media has facilitated an increased interaction between the archives and the public it serves, as well as contributed to a greater awareness of the rich documentary heritage collected and preserved by the City.

Jill and her colleagues continue to develop new strategies for engaging the City’s older demographic. Over the past few years, staff have observed that seniors rarely contact the archives through email and are not as comfortable using the internet or web searching. As a result, the archives’ otherwise very successful social media outreach does not always reach the city’s senior population, which continues to grow. In response to this challenge, Jill has made sure that the archives takes part in events throughout the city and has even volunteered to be the Secretary of the Vaughan Township Historical Society, a local historical and charity group. This experience allows Jill to connect with folks who might not otherwise learn about the archives. As well, the archives has established a partnership with the Vaughan Citizen, a local newspaper. Each week the newspaper published an archival image of interest to the community a segment called “Vintage Vaughan.” Jill has found that this partnership has lead to a noticeable increase in the number of local seniors interested in donating their materials to the archives.

The great news is that reference and research requests have increased over time and donations continue to come into the archives. Jill has also noticed a steady rise in the number of people who access the archives’ blog or other social media. All of this demonstrates the importance of diversifying outreach strategies and meeting community where they are, whether that be at quilting bees, through social media, or in local newspapers.

You can find out more about the Vaughan Archives:

On the Web: https://www.vaughan.ca/services/vaughan_archives/Pages/default.aspx

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecityofvaughan

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/city_of_vaughan

On the Vaughan City Blog: http://www.vaughancityblog.ca/category/history/

Vintage Vaughan (through the York Region Media Group website): https://www.yorkregion.com/yorkregion-topics/5924534-vintage-vaughan/?q=&pageindex=2&pagesize=25