Documentary Heritage Communities Program Awards 2017- 2018

Results of the third round competition for Documentary Heritage Communities Program awards were announced in Montreal on Friday at the annual meeting of L'Association des archivistes du Québec.

The program this year makes awards to a total of $1.5 million, 18 projects in Quebec, 17 in Western Canada, 8 in Ontario, and 5 in Atlantic Canada.

The single largest award, the maximum of $100,000 for each of three years, goes to the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario for a project The WI Historical Documents : A Legacy to Canada. The WI received a award for a pilot project in the first round of the DHCP.  A large share of the credit for the success of this proposal goes to Irene Robillard who is quoted in the press release

“This financial support will significantly move the digitization of the approximately 1,000 Tweedsmuir Community History Collections of the Women’s Institute (WI) found across Ontario. Some of these Tweedsmuirs would have been lost over time. At the end of this three-year project, about 250,000 more pages will be added to the virtual archives. While the original documents remain locally across Ontario, the digitized documents are together in one location, allowing researchers across Canada and the world to access the Tweedsmuirs and other historical documents and information to learn about our rich communities, conduct family research and discover the wonderful work that has been created by WI members.”

Irene Robillard will be presenting on The WI Tweedsmuir Community Histories: A Social History of Rural Ontario on Sunday afternoon at the OGS Conference.

Another Ontario project, Increasing access to irreplaceable records of our histories of migration and ethnicity proposed by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario receives $77,461 for three years.

Preserving Nunavik's Documentary Heritage : Digitizing and describing two Pivotal fonds for Nunavimmiut proposed by the Avataq Cultural Institute Inc of Westmount is the project receiving the second largest amount, $94,970. The third largest amount, $92,340, is for Computerization of holdings and collections and transfer of archival operations to management software and servers for a better service offerings by Centre d'archives régional des Iles.

Receiving a $66,881 award is Digitization and distribution of the archival holdings of the Le nouvelliste daily newspaper from Appartenance Mauricie Société d'histoire régionale, surprisingly the only newspaper digitization project funded.

The first round of awards funded 65 projects. the second 40. This year there are awards to 48 projects with the average award $31,506, the median $20,000.

This year awards in Quebec totalled $7.3 million, almost half the total and twice the funding to the next highest province, Ontario. The breakdown by province is:

Province	Funding
Alberta	$37,815.00
British Columbia	$246,816.50
Manitoba	$37,386.00
New Brunswick	$24,387.00
Newfoundland & Labrador	$12,326.00
Nova Scotia	$29,938.00
Ontario	$350,303.00
Québec	$731,285.00
Saskatchewan	$41,992.00
Grand Total	$1,512,248.50

There were no awards in PEI nor the Territories.

I hope to post further on the program and the awards as more detailed information become available.