History in the making

An old student library card; a matriculation card from 1873-74

Though McGill University was founded in 1824, the Archives wasn't established until 1962, when outgoing Principal F. Cyril James appointed Alan Ridge to appraise and consolidate the vast stores of documents that had collected in file cabinets, laboratory cupboards and custodians' closets across campus over the previous 140 years. "It's extraordinary that these materials survived," admits Pelletier. "But amazingly, they have. Whether by virtue of attention or neglect, the consistency of documentation of official records was very strong."

Ridge directed the Archives not only to preserve materials of legal and historic significance, but also to set policy for ongoing University-wide records management. The office began prescribing guidelines and schedules for document retention, and centralizing archival holdings to ensure security, long-term health and control of access. When the Quebec government passed legislation in the 1980s requiring schools to maintain official documentation, McGill was already there.

The ensuing years of education and encouragement have seen an appreciation of history become embedded in the McGill character. Faculty and staff, Pelletier reports happily, know which records to keep. Just as importantly, they've learned which records not to keep. And that's good news to any archivist with space issues, which is to say, every archivist.

"We only need to keep, longterm, about five percent of what we create," Pelletier explains. "We don't have a crystal ball, but we do have a solid knowledge about what McGill, as both an educational institution and a corporation, needs to keep as essential records -- to provide evidence of accountability, proof that we did what we promised."

Having a cooperative clientele makes the whole process run smoothly. "We encourage the University community to think about history as coming out of better records management," Pelletier explains. "That's why for us, history never gets squirrelled away to the basement to be forgotten."

Order out of chaos

	The Donaldas, women graduates from 1880
	Early ephemera, including various invitations to McGill events
	A bound copy of old issues of the McGill Daily

History does go to a basement, however. The Archives is located at the Sherbrooke Street end of the McLennan Library, a modern concrete block with bald façade and squinting windows whose only clue to the antiquities within is a wan patch of ivy that struggles up its southwest face. There's a public reading room on the ground floor but underneath it lies the ideal home for the material -- a secure, dark, climate-controlled environment, a kind of wine cellar for fragile documents.

Rows of tidy shelves are well documented; each box is clearly labelled and logged in a database. Paper is housed in acid-free boxes to slow the aging process. Microfilm, audiotapes, video and film footage are stored in containers that conform to each format's special needs. The collection is a marvel of organization. But history doesn't stop to reflect. Each year another 1,800 boxes of materials arrive from offices and faculties in the McGill hinterlands, each needing to blend into the system. "A lot of intellectual footwork goes into creating such an organized archive," Burr says. "It doesn't come to us neatly in boxes with nice labels."

Sometimes it doesn't come to them at all. The Archives staff occasionally make house calls, as they did this summer in the basement of physical plant. There, a work-study student is charged with imposing some order on the competing archival systems of building plans and project files that evolved unchecked over the years.

The site is chaotic, with documents languishing in unmarked boxes, piles and random cabinets throughout a warren of subterranean rooms. Rolled-up architectural plans are scattered like upended cigarettes, often sharing space with cleaning supplies or cast-off computers. Burr has seen it all before. "This is a real slice of life," he says. "Typically there's someone in every office who has been there for 20 or 30 years and who knows where everything is. But when they leave, the knowledge leaves with them. Then we're asked to organize it so anyone can find the plans they're looking for."

The physical plant project takes about two weeks. The trick, Burr says, is creating a system that is simple to access but that doesn't supplant the old system entirely. "There's a historical side to this," he continues. "Because if we don't understand how they catalogued records in the past, we won't be able to interpret them. But researchers aren't interested in how people kept records; they are interested in substance."

Research assistance

Ian Pilarcyzk, BA'92, LLM'97, is a seeker of substance. A McGill doctoral candidate and legal historian, Pilarczyk spent a year in the Archives, trolling for any mention of the Faculty of Law that he could use to piece together his book, A Noble Roster: 150 Years of Law at McGill. "I went through every issue of everything in print," Pilarczyk recalls. "There's no other way to do it."

Mary Jackson Fowler, McGill's first female Engineering student, dressed for the machine shop in 1946

"Reference questions almost always entail research," Burr agrees. "Unlike a library, we can't just point to a particular source where the information will necessarily be found. Archives are disparate by nature. There's no simple table of contents."

But archivists do know where to look. And they are happy to share the wealth with all stripes of researchers, from the student working up a term paper to the historian producing a scholarly work to the journalist exploring a lead or the amateur genealogist whose family tree might just grow through the Roddick Gates. "The role of the archivist is to ensure and facilitate the work of researchers," Pelletier explains. "We provide a reference service rather than a research service."

That leaves the historian free to draw the conclusions from these raw materials of history. In Pilarczyk's case, a mix of perseverance, luck and expert guidance unlocked the door to 150 years of facts, figures, names, dates and, most significantly, good stories that he could then weave into his history project.

"I've come to see archivists as unsung heroes," Pilarczyk says. "It sounds a bit melodramatic, but there wouldn't be people like me writing history if there weren't archivists preserving it. We tend to think that it's just putting things in boxes. But it's so much more."