Tag Archives: Archives

Digital Outreach and Wikipedia in the GLAM Sector

by Krista McCracken Discussion around the value of contributing to Wikipedia and its use as a resource has been occurring since the establishment of the collaboratively written encyclopedia in 2001. You don’t have to look very far to find someone decrying the crowdsourced material as rubbish or others proclaiming it as the best thing since sliced bread.  In between these… 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 »

Black History Education through the Archives of Ontario

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(ActiveHistory is pleased to partner with the Archives of Ontario to present resources for educators on Black history in Ontario) Alison Little As educators continue to build inclusive, diverse, and flexible learning environments for their students, there is an urgent need for resources to support critical engagement with the past. To assist classroom teachers, the Archives of Ontario has online… Read more »

Archival Literacy and the Role of Universities in Archival Instruction

By Krista McCracken Over the past few years one of the many hats I’ve worn at Algoma University has involved providing introduction to archives sessions and educational programming around our archival holdings.  This work often leaves me thinking about archival literacy and the skills historians need to be successful at archival research. Archival research is a vital part of historical… Read more »

ActiveHistory.ca repost – More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill

ActiveHistory.ca is on a three-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in mid-August. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular and favourite posts from the past year.  We will also be highlighting some of the special series and papers we’ve run this year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers. The following post was… Read more »

The Role of Canada’s Museums and Archives in Reconciliation

by Krista McCracken The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) held its closing events in Ottawa from May 31 – June 3, 2015. The event included the release of an executive summary of the TRC findings and Calls to Action made by the Commission.  The 388 pages of the summary highlight the work of the Commission and the material… Read more »

Preserving Canada’s Sporting Past with the Jackie MacDonald Scrapbooks

By Adrienne Coffey and Danielle Manning Jackie MacDonald is an athlete who gives Canadians good reason to be proud of their sports heritage. She has competed in a multitude of sports, first attracting attention as the star player on a Toronto city league basketball team that won two Junior National Championships. She has also participated in competitive swimming and diving,… Read more »

More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill

By Danielle Terbenche In 2012, I began attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Thornhill, Ontario. After learning I was a historian, some church members invited me to join the cemetery board. During my first visit to the church’s historic cemetery, I was intrigued by five concrete crosses marking the graves of eight men, dating from 1928 to 1931. In a… Read more »

The Home Archivist – The Grand Seduction

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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 »

Podcast – Canadian Archives at Risk?

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https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Canadian-Archives-At-Risk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download On May 26th, a panel discussed recent developments in the archives world in Canada and the challenges archives face today. The panel was part of the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting in St. Catharines, Ontario. Moderated by Erika Dyck (University of Saskatchewan), the panel featured Nicole Neatby (CHA Liaison – Archives), Peter Baskerville (Chair… Read more »