By Jessica Dunkin In the last post, I introduced readers of the Home Archivist to two institutions committed to the preservation of Canada’s documentary heritage, Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) Preservation Centre and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), and two professionals at work in the field of paper conservation, Doris St-Jacques and Greg Hill. I also provided readers with a… Read more »
By Jessica Dunkin In the last Home Archivist post, I tried my hand at processing letters from the MacKendrick family collection. At the end of that post, I expressed misgivings about some of the techniques and materials I had used. Since then, I have met with Doris St-Jacques, a paper conservator in the Maps and Manuscripts laboratory at Library and… Read more »
By Jessica Dunkin In the series’ inaugural post, I gave readers a brief overview of The Home Archivist, a project in which I—a professional historian—process and arrange a collection of nineteenth-century letters. The context in which a collection was produced, what archivists refer to as provenance, is central to these practices of processing and arranging historical documents. But what of… Read more »
By Jessica Dunkin This is the first in a series of posts called The Home Archivist, in which a professional historian discusses her experiences with a private collection of 19th-century letters. In the two years leading up to their wedding on June 29th, 1891, Amelia Wilkinson and John MacKendrick exchanged letters almost daily. Unlike most collections of courting letters, this… Read more »
