Tag Archives: archival research

It Starts Here: Black Histories Research Guide at the Archives of Ontario

This is the final instalment in a three-part series on the use of content warnings in classrooms, archives, and museums. You can read the first instalment here and the second instalment here. Melissa J. Nelson & Natasha Henry-Dixon   Melissa J. Nelson : Making Description Remediation Visible The Archives of Ontario is the largest provincial archive in Canada. However, many… Read more »

Digital Access, Pandemic Responses, and the Future of Archives

Two people in wheelchairs speaking to someone crouched in front of them

Jazmine Aldrich Anyone who has been conducting historical research (or attempting to do so) over the past two years, has likely faced challenges ranging from closed facilities to limited hours due to COVID-19. Archives, museums, historical societies, libraries and all manner of cultural heritage institutions have felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as the fog lifts and some… Read more »

Stronger Together: The Potential Collaborative Agency of Historians and Archivists

Andrea Eidinger and Krista McCracken Over the past few years, the historical community in Canada has been rocked by a few scandals. No, we are not talking about the endless discussions around monuments. Rather, we are referring to the numerous public disputes between historians and archivists relating either to the discovery of or access to archival material. For example, you’ve… Read more »

Subjectivity and Objectivity: Photography, Family, and the Historian

Benjamin Bryce I recently submitted an article manuscript to a scholarly journal about my great-great grandfather, Cooper Robinson, and his photography in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a social historian of migration, I have long been interested in family, but I had never done work on my own family. My personal, albeit distant, relationship to… Read more »

Research Diary II: A Small Island in Low Season

Alban Bargain-Villéger This is the second and final part of the diary I kept during a research trip to Groix island in December 2018. The first episode covered my journey to Paris and the train ride to Lorient. The following pages begin on the evening of my arrival, after a rough, though bearable, ferry ride across the Courreaux Strait. December… Read more »

Unexpected Archival Finds: Shingwauk Student Register

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Krista McCracken Recently staff at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) began a project to digitize a number of the stock registers, accounts books, and financial records associated with the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, which operated in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The materials in this project ranged in date from 1883 to 1945, with the bulk of the records relating… Read more »

Top Tips for Research Trips: Making the Most of Your Visit to the Archives

Stacey N. Gilkinson Classes have finished, exams are over and it’s finally summer, which means it is now time for many researchers to embark on trips to the archives! To the novice academic or researcher, archival institutions can be uncharted territory. You might be wondering how you should approach an institution, what to bring with you or how to navigate… Read more »

Historian, Meet Archivist: Researching the History of Complex Organizations

Today’s post is cross-posted in partnership with Aidhistory.ca Jill Campbell-Miller, PhD and Ryan Kirkby, PhD, MLIS In general, historiography and historical methods courses do a good job in teaching students to be skeptical of their sources. As undergraduate and graduate students, we learn to scrutinize what we read, hear, or see. Yet while historians may be familiar with how to critique… Read more »

Missed connections: looking for everything in the archives

Danielle Robichaud Archivists are commonly asked by researchers to produce everything available about a particular topic. While understandable from a researcher standpoint, fulfilling the request is a challenge. Unlike library holdings, archival material is rarely described to the item-level. This makes it difficult for archivists to do more than point researchers to where everything about a particular topic could be…. Read more »

Creating the Historical Record in Literary and Personal Archives

by Krista McCracken Archives document people, organizations, and communities from almost all walks of life and are most commonly referred to for their historical value and viewed as repositories of things of intrinsic and lasting historical value. This is also true in the case of literary archives and the personal archives of creative practitioners, but these archives have the added… Read more »