Saving for the future

McGill and World War II medals

When a May exposition of Archives memorabilia closed with the opportunity for the public to ask questions, one in particular was inevitable: what about digital? The issue on the mind of every archivist is, like the format itself, a binary one, touching on both archiving and access. While staff in the Archives work closely with McGill's information technology sector to develop an archiving strategy for modern documentation created and kept purely on computer, Pelletier is not ready to carpet-digitize the entire existing collection and dispense with the old-fashioned stacks of paper and microfilm holdings.

"Digitizing does not ensure long-term preservation," she warns. "There's no evidence that the current digital technologies will survive in the long term. If we could ensure that every image and text file created was software and hardware independent, thatwhere we'd be headed. But until we can make that financial and organizational commitment, we focus our efforts on digitization for access."

	Campus protest in the 1970s
	Letters from the Annie Holiday Pelletier collection

Her staff has been busy. The Archives recently revamped its website (www.archives.mcgill.ca) and has populated it with digital renderings of many of the collection's most visual artifacts. Already, 7,000 of the photo archives have been scanned and placed in a searchable database, along with some significant documents and telling ephemera. Pelletier plans to add streaming audio of McGill music, video of theatre productions and campus events, and "theme shows" that string together the most interesting pieces of a collection or era.

"These things are visual and public, but they're also vital documents of the culture of the University," she says. "We exist to acquire and preserve archives, but also to make them available. Digitization makes materials more accessible. That sounds so simple, but it's extraordinary in terms of the exposition it allows us to do when we're freed from having to find three-dimensional space."

Filling the gaps

The Modern Dance class of 1923

What the Archives has, after only 40 years, is impressive. What it does not have may be surprising. There are very few artifacts of student life at McGill. And because the acquisition of such items is on the fringe of its mandate, the department relies on contributions from alumni and their descendants to fill in the considerable gaps. One recent arrival is an exhaustive collection of letters from the family of Annie Holiday Pelletier, one of McGill's first female students. Included are letters she wrote to her parents during her time as an undergraduate, from 1895 to 1899.

"The letters open a significant window on the University at that time, and inform us about family and religious life in plain language," says Johanne Pelletier (no relation). "There are so few sources in which students speak for themselves about life on campus, and this is one of the most revealing and beautifully crafted parts of the Archives."

Piece by piece, the collection of ephemera continues to grow. Ian Pilarczyk decided to extend his regular personal forays onto eBay, the Internet auction site, to include searches for McGill artifacts. Budgeting a few dollars for the purpose, he's thus far purchased a series of classic postcards, some rare intercollegiate football game programs and a 1913 McGill keychain that was owned by a young freshman named Wilson who died the next year fighting in France. Pilarczyk plans to donate it all to the Archives. "This is purely a work of love," he says. "It's a good cause -- McGill's patrimony, an important thing to preserve."

This small involvement as a voluntary search agent for the Archives has turned Pilarczyk into an advocate. "McGill's history is more than just the obvious," he continues. "It's the day-to-day activities of student life, which decades from now people may find very interesting. I wish that 100 or 150 years ago, more people had said, 'You know what, it may be really interesting to people to realize what students were doing in the 1870s.'

"How many people inherit old McGill items from relatives or friends -- old class notes, textbooks, t-shirts, memorabilia -- and just chuck them? How many think to call the Archives first?"

Says Burr: "Every acquisition has at least one thing in common with the rest: someone realizes it has long-term value."

The rest is history.

Ed Kromer is a freelance writer living in Montreal.