The following are the speaking notes for a talk by Ottawa City Archivist Paul Henry to the Friends of the City of Ottawa Archives, reproduced here with permission.
Two Steps forward, two steps back
FCOA
Event 30 April 2015
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Good
evening. My talk this evening is entitled “Two steps forward, two steps back”.
Over the course of the next few minutes, I’d like to walk you through a bit of City
Archives history, review some of the challenges as I see them, and review how I
see “station keeping” as an appropriate strategy to mitigate against these
challenges.
City Archives Background
The
Archives program was first discussed by Council in 1965, as a centenary
project. The first few persons to hold responsibility for the Archives were not
archivists at all but secretaries at the time, what we would call executive
assistants today, and collections management was non-existent. The only records
of significance transferred to the Archives at the time were the obvious ones,
Council minutes, by-laws, etc., and included what we now refer to as the
Mayor’s Gift collection.
While
the City lacked a formal archives program, the City Clerk maintained his records
through staff responsible for this function, and the City ensured the
preservation of significant records and artifacts from the broader community by
transferring these items to the Historical Society of Ottawa, located at the
Bytown Museum. It would not be until 2003 when this legacy of Ottawa’s past
began to return to the Archives.
The
first opportunity to hire a professional archivist was in 1975, when Edwin
Welsh was hired. So critical to Ottawa’s future vision was this, that Mayor
Lorry Greenberg announced Welsh’s appointment as part of his Inaugural Address.
The
year 1976 saw the first building built for the archives purposes, at 174
Stanley Ave. The Archives would move two more times: in 1997 to 111 Sussex,
then City Hall, and in 2011 to 100 Tallwood, where we are today.
While
Welsh foresaw the requirement for records management in his report of July 26th
1976, including a records centre and training for City staff, the first records
manager, Claire Lee, was not hired until 1980. The Archives never had the space
at its Stanley facility to properly manage the official corporate records,
which remained at the Clark records centre, and later commercial off-site
storage. A full transfer of all archivally significant City records did not
occur until 2014.
Welsh
also foresaw the requirement for a reference service, and that function remains
a core feature of the program today. The entire third floor of the east wing,
right above us, is dedicated to this function.
Today
The Central Archives plays a key role within the Corporation
of the City of Ottawa by acquiring, preserving, and providing public access, as
required under the Ontario Municipal Act,
to municipal records that document the City’s business functions and
transactions to encourage effective governance, transparency and
accountability.
The
City Archives Program also plays a key role in preserving community memory by
acquiring community records, which would otherwise be lost to the City for lack
of a venue to preserve and make them accessible.
The
current Archives’ collection is one of Ottawa’s oldest and most valuable
holdings of information on the development and evolution of municipal
government and the community of Ottawa. This bank of information is
irreplaceable. The City has a legislated and fiduciary responsibility to
provide proper stewardship of this collection on behalf of today’s residents
and future generations.
As
a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, the City Archives contains
one of Ottawa’s oldest and most valuable archival collections related to the
City of Ottawa and its historical predecessor municipalities. The stewardship
responsibility of the Archives is a City-wide function.
The
Archives Program is accountable for identifying and preserving the City’s
corporate memory, and for documenting the City’s history and the enduring
legacy of its Citizens. It is responsible for acquiring, preserving and
providing access, as required under various acts, statutes, and regulations, to
those records that document the rights and obligations of the City, its
employees, and its Citizens, records that best reflect Ottawa society and
document significant interactions between Citizens and the City.
The
Division, through its core functions of Acquisition, Preservation, and Access:
Acquisition
●
Contributes to the City’s records
management framework by ensuring that municipal records of enduring value are
identified in the file plan and in the records retention by-law
●
Ensures historical information which
supports the continuing and historical business functions of the corporation
are available and accessible to decision makers and researchers
●
Proactively identifies and acquires
community-generated records which would otherwise be lost to the City for lack
of a venue to preserve and make them accessible
Preservation
●
Protects the records under its care
through a state-of-the-art facility, by adopting best practices, and by
developing and supporting its professional staff
●
Sets policy and standards for the
preservation of records of long-term value in collaboration with records
creators and custodians
●
Protects and safeguards the records
under its care from inadvertent disclosure as required by law
●
Manages 350+ collections (City and
community), in all media, including nearly 60,000 li. ft of records of enduring
value, 3 million photographs, documentary art, electronic records, maps, plans,
artifacts, and memorabilia
Access
●
Preserves and provides access out of
3 branches (Central, Rideau and
Gloucester)
●
Supports 5 resident partner research
organizations that assist Archives staff with reference requests
●
Showcases its treasures through a
vibrant education, exhibition, and outreach program
●
Embraces new technology through its
state-of-the-art collections management system, virtual exhibitions, and
on-line databases
●
Responds to 6,000+ requests for
information per year
●
115 volunteers contributed 12,000+
hours
●
Serves as a source of reliable
professional advice to the Archival Community
Challenges
In
the interest of brevity, I have restricted my comments to three broad areas
that I see as particularly vexing both for the Archival community writ-large,
and for us at the City Archives.
Electronic records in an age of abundance
At
first blush, electronic records shouldn’t be particularly difficult to manage.
After all, we’ve had computers on desktops for almost 20 years, and our present
youthful generation has known nothing but. Records in electronic format are
abundant, not just at the City, but in the broader Ottawa community. We see them
now arriving as the primary accrual medium for significant community groups and
organizations, that had previously brought us only ledgers and paper documents.
While our facility has the capacity to deal with the environmental needs of
such materials, we admittedly struggle to ensure that archivists working at the
City have or are in the process of developing electronic records competencies.
But
there is hope:
-
our appraisal methodologies continue
to serve us well; what works for paper or other media should work for
electronic records
-
the City’s Business Information
Management System (BIMS) strategy which now manages disposition of official
records, does so for electronic and paper records within the same records
context
We
are currently taking steps to address these issues:
-
in 2012, staff at the Archives and
Information Management developed an electronic records strategy for the
preservation of textual records in electronic form through ensuring the readability of all
records in digital repositories comply with appropriate standards for
preservation, including the adoption of portable formats, such as PDF and PDF/A
-
in 2009, as a result of
implementation of BIMS, the Archives, in partnership with Information
Management undertook a project to set the end state for all official business
records, including those having archival value
-
completed in 2014, this General
Disposition Authority, issued by the City Archivist, is now being rolled out to
all City departments -- our disposition roadshow -- and provides all City staff
with guidance on the eventual fate of all of their records
-
more importantly, the Archives is
now connected to records creators in ways that we never have been, and are now
intrinsically part of the discussion when records are created, and classifications
established
Of
course, all of this learning on the City’s part will make its way to the
broader community of archives and other memory organizations in Ottawa and the
region over the coming years.
Providing access to archival records in the age of Google
Key
to our future as memory institutions is cooperation. First envisioned in 1980
by Ian Wilson’s working group on the future of Archives, a cooperative
framework of archives focused on the management of historical records on the
basis of national, provincial, and local significance was formally established
in 1984.
Despite
setbacks, particularly in funding, this network continues today and serves as a
model for cooperation between archival institutions to ensure the right record
finds its way to the right person, at the right time. The City Archives
routinely transfers records, based in appraisal of value and significance to
our partners, Library and Archives Canada, and the Archives of Ontario. And
indirectly, the Archives will redirect potential donors to local museums and
community archives when the donation most appropriately belongs there.
Through
our locality documentation program, the Archives continues to identify
archivally significant records in the community to ensure both their
preservation, and through partnership, availability to researchers.
And
through our new Ottawa Museums &
Archives Collections online database, we unite the records of community
archives, museums, with City Archives and Museums in one union catalogue, accessible
from everywhere 24/7.
Staying authentic and reliable in an age of Citizen-first
What
is the value of the Archives and Information Management, when budget
consultations are announced not through a press-release, but on Twitter?
Reacting
to this, the Archives commissioned a review of the impact of social media in
2013. The introduction reads, in part,
“Most notable [in fulfilling its mandate] is the
identification, appraisal, acquisition and preservation of records created by
the Ottawa City Council. With eighty-seven percent of the Ottawa City Council
using publicly accessible Twitter accounts and forty-five percent using
publicly accessible Facebook accounts to communicate with citizens on both
personal and professional matters, the performance of this activity has become
increasingly difficult. To add to this challenge, the municipal government does
not have a policy on the use of social media by Ottawa City Council.”
Challenging
indeed. And of course, this raises the question of the role of the Archives in
serving as the authentic voice of the City, a component of the City Archivist’s
job description, in an age where citation, respect for copyright, and most
importantly for archivists: context, context, context are questioned for their
relevance to modern means of information dissemination?
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