events

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September 1, 2010

Digitization day coming up!

Posted by Amanda Hill under About Deseronto, events, photographs
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United Church, Deseronto

The archivist paid a visit to the United Church in Deseronto today, so that she could encourage the members of the Deseronto Diner’s Club to take part in the ‘About Deseronto‘ project. We’re hoping that people in and around the town will share their memories, photographs and objects with us, so that we can, in turn, share them with the wider world through the About Deseronto website.

We are also taking part in a Community Digitization Project which is being led by the Prince Edward County Archives in Wellington. We are organizing a Digitization Day in Deseronto Public Library on September 15th. We are hoping that people will bring in their old photographs of the town, or of their families for us to scan and add to the online information we already hold about Deseronto and the surrounding areas. We are also able to photograph any interesting historic objects that might be lurking in corners of people’s houses.

We hope to see you at the Library on the 15th!

 

June 13, 2010

ACA conference, 2010

Posted by Amanda Hill under Archives 2.0, blog, events, Flickr, funding
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Detail of Sambro Island Lighthouse lens from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

The annual conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists has just come to an end. It has been an excellent event, with many stimulating papers. One of Thursday’s sessions was particularly relevant to Deseronto, as the speaker, Ian Richards, did his Masters thesis on the topic of the contribution that archives can make to the development of their local communities. His particular focus is on the City of Brandon in Manitoba, but the general points he made are relevant to many other municipalities, including Deseronto. His thesis is available from the University of Manitoba’s electronic thesis collection.

Other sessions covered issues such as Access to Information and Privacy laws, measuring the impact of an archival program and the role of outreach in a networked world.

I gave a talk on the Saturday about the work we’ve been doing in Deseronto, including this blog and our Flickr and Twitter accounts. This dovetailed quite well with Ian’s talk and with the talks on outreach and impact, as I was trying to show what the effects of our engagement with these Web 2.0 technologies have been.* My main arguments were that people need direct access to online cultural materials from search engines, that they have to be able to share those materials with other people and that if they are experts on a particular item, they need to be able to contribute to improving its description.

I summarised the main impacts of sharing Deseronto’s photographs online as:

  • Comments and notes from users
  • Collaboration with users
  • New accessions: virtual, digital and tangible
  • New creative works
  • Funding for new projects

Many of these consequences have been featured in posts on this blog. The difficult thing to measure is the impact that the Archives’ activities have had upon the community of Deseronto as a whole. One of the sessions this week suggested that we need to measure the ‘hard to measure’, over an extended period of time. I look forward to hearing about the best way of achieving that.

*The slides are available on SlideShare.

 

February 16, 2010

The winners!

Posted by Amanda Hill under children, Deseronto Public School, events, exhibitions
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On Family Day the prizes for the winning entries in our Family/Heritage Day competition were distributed to the winners as part of a day of activities in the town. Congratulations to Gabe Cook, Jeremy Martin, Leah Hill, Hannah Brinklow, Erica Fox and Levi Van Vlack for their achievements.

Winning entries

Thanks again for everyone who put so much hard work into this, particularly to The Rev. Canon Cyril Betts, a member of the Deseronto Archives Board, who came up with the idea in the first place and who announced the prize winners at yesterday’s event. Thanks are also due to Mr Launderville, the Principal of Deseronto Public School, for his enthusiastic support for the competition and to Noni McMeeken, Paul Robertson and Councillor Edgar Tumak, members of the Archives Board who were all highly instrumental in its organisation.

Leah receiving her prize from Paul Robertson, Chair of the Archives Board

Well done to all the children who put so much effort into their projects. All the entries will be on display in Deseronto Public Library for the remainder of this week; they are well worth a closer look!

 

February 10, 2010

The Smell of England

Posted by Amanda Hill under Deseronto Public School, events, exhibitions, featured item
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Some of the entries in the contest

The response from the students of Deseronto Public School to our Family/Heritage Day competition has been, well, ‘awesome’ as the children themselves would put it. It took the judges three hours to choose the winning entries. The winners will be announced on Monday, February 15th, at the Deseronto Community Centre, as part of a range of events that will be going on there that day.

The judges had a very hard job deciding on the winners: the quality of the entries was excellent. Some focused on the history of our town, while others looked at their family’s history. The range of backgrounds of the people of the town became apparent as we went through the entries: there are descendants of people from Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Great Britain and Italy represented among the children of the school. A number of students mentioned their Mohawk ancestry.

The Grade 2 class that visited the Archives two weeks ago had created haikus on the topic of their family or local heritage. As a recently-landed immigrant from England myself, this entry made me smile (and made me hungry!):

The Smell of England

Many of the entries are now on display in Deseronto Public Library and the winning six will be shown at the Community Centre on Monday, February 15, when the prizes will be awarded at 4.00pm. Please do stop by the library, if you are able to, to admire the tremendous amount of work that has gone into this contest.

 

January 20, 2010

Family/Heritage Day Contest

Posted by Amanda Hill under Deseronto Public School, events, family history
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DESCHS-06-19 Unidentified Deseronto family

The Deseronto Archives Board is sponsoring a contest for the children of Deseronto Public School in time for the Family Day holiday on February 15.

Entrants are being invited to produce a piece of work on their family history or on the history of their community, in any format. Judging will take place in Deseronto Public Library and competition entries will be put on display in the Library from February 10th to 19th.

Prizes for the winners will be:

First: $50

Second: $25

Third: $15

Two consolation prizes: $5

The announcement of the prize winners (and a display of the winning entries) will be made at the Deseronto Community Recreation Centre on February 15 at 4pm. This will round off a whole day of family activities in the town.

Good luck to all entrants!

 

September 29, 2009

Archival excursion

Posted by Amanda Hill under archives, events
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Wrapped volumes at Peterborough Museum and Archives

Wrapped volumes at Peterborough Museum and Archives

Every year, the Municipal Archives Interest Group of the Archives Association of Ontario holds an Open House at one of its member archives. On September 26, archivists from around the province gathered at Peterborough for a tour of the Peterborough Museum and Archives, a business meeting and a barbecue. This sort of event is very valuable for the province’s municipal archivists, many of whom are the only professional archivist on their municipality’s staff.

Peterborough’s archives are extremely short of space (something that is true of many other archives, too), so it was interesting to see how Mary Charles, the archivist there, had managed to make the most of the shelf space that is available to her. One solution that seemed to work well in a number of ways was the wrapping of bound volumes in acid-free paper. Archivists often enclose bound volumes in specially-made acid-free boxes, but this is quite an expensive option and can take up a significant amount of shelf-space. By wrapping them in paper, the volumes are protected, easier to handle and can be stacked more closely together without causing them further damage. The volumes were a source of dust and the air quality of the storage space (which is also the reading room and archives workspace) has improved markedly as a result of this work.

Peterborough’s fall colours seem a little in advance of Deseronto’s right now. This is a view of the lift lock on the Trent-Severn Waterway in the city:

Lift Locks on the Trent-Severn Waterway

Lift Locks on the Trent-Severn Waterway

 

June 20, 2009

Through Sun and Shadow

Posted by Amanda Hill under events, poetry
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On Saturday June 27th at 1.00pm the Deseronto Public Library will host the launch of Richard Goodfellow’s book of poems, Through Sun and Shadow. Dick is a member of the Deseronto Archives Board and is a resident of this town.

Dick will read some of his poems and copies of the book will be available for purchase. Refreshments will be served. Full details of the event are included in the invitation [PDF format].

Here is an archivally-themed poem from the collection, reproduced here, with permission from the author:

The Auction

I won’t be there to greet you
When you rummage through my life,
I’ve gone to where the old folks stay
And I cant come home anymore.

There’s a faded rose in my favourite book
Take care when you turn the pages,
And leave untouched so fondly pressed
The four leaf clover for luck.

The postcard albums have stories to tell
Please treat them like old friends,
And the letters bound in the cedar chest
Reveal the thoughts of youth.

The family Bible I took with me
And love letters home from War
When he was young and vibrant
And thought so much of me.

So little else I’ve room for
Perhaps you’ll understand
What I hold dear I must make clear
I can not take it with me.

So rummage through my lifetime
And read through all my longings
Perchance you’ll find among them
Some part of you within them.

 

April 21, 2009

Dealing with photographs

Posted by Amanda Hill under events, photographs
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The Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives hosted a workshop on “Identification, Preservation and Description of Photographs and Documentary Art”. The morning session was run by Jennifer Bunting, historian and archive consultant. This focused on the different types of photographic materials that archives and museum staff might come across in the course of their work. It was wonderful to be able to handle (with cotton gloves on, of course!) the early photographs that Jennifer brought along – it was the first time that I had had a chance to see a daguerreotype, ambrotype and tintype up close, for example.

There are a number of online resources which might help in dating nineteenth century photographs, although most seem to be based in the UK. Roger Vaughan’s picture library is one example.

In the afternoon we heard from Iona McCraith, preservation consultant, about how best to store photographic materials. Iona had some sad examples of photographic negatives that were deteriorating due to ‘vinegar syndrome‘. These materials are best protected by being stored at low temperature and humidity levels. Given the warm and often fairly humid summer conditions that we get in this area, it seems likely that decay of photographic negatives that have been stored in the average family home will be fairly rapid. In these conditions, the Image Permanence Institute suggests that negatives will begin to break down in under 50 years: a significant preservation problem.

 

March 7, 2009

Ready for take-off

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1910s, events, exhibitions, military training, World War I
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The book launch today was a resounding success. Every single one of the copies of Dancing in the Sky brought to the library by Greenley’s Bookstore was sold, with a long waiting list for the next delivery.

Piles of books before they were all sold
Bill Hunt must have a very sore right hand tonight after signing over forty copies of his book. There was quite a long line of people waiting for him to autograph their copies at one point.


We estimate that 135 people came to hear Bill talk about the training of pilots in Canada during the First World War. His talk was full of interesting facts and contained a number of insights into the great impact that the arrival of the air cadets had upon the economy and people of Deseronto.


Bill was at pains to point out how important the archival record has been in helping him to research this volume: the diaries and photographs left by the young pilots have been a wonderful resource. Music to an archivist’s ears! We put together a display of photographs from the book, library books and original materials from the Deseronto Archives’ collections, as a side-show to the main event:


It was a wonderful afternoon and a tribute to the huge amount of work that went into the preparation, particularly by Deseronto’s Librarian, Frances Smith, by Dana Valentyne of the Deseronto Revitalization Program, and by the Chair of the Deseronto Public Library Board, Don Simpson. Many thanks to them, to Deseronto’s Mayor, Norm Clark, for a great welcoming address, and to the sponsors of the raffle prize: Greenleys Bookstore, The Chocolate Room and the Small Town Café and Bakery. Thanks also to Lori Brooks of the Deseronto Job Information Centre (whose domain was requisitioned for the book-signing) and to everyone who came – you helped to make this event a huge success.

 

February 12, 2009

Dancing in the Sky

Posted by Amanda Hill under 1910s, events, military training, veterans, World War I
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Plans are well under way for the launch of C.W. (Bill) Hunt’s new book, Dancing in the Sky. The book was originally started by Al Smith, who began to write about the World War I training airfields around Deseronto. Al collected stories from people who had worked at (or had otherwise been involved with) the two camps (Camp Mohawk and Camp Rathbun) and amassed a number of photographs. Bill took over the project in 1998 and broadened the research to include the other Royal Flying Corps Canada locations in Ontario. The photographs collected by Al Smith are now available for research in Deseronto Archives (under the name J. Allan Smith Collection). The book is being published by Dundurn Press this month.

The Deseronto Public Library will be the venue for this launch on the 7 March 2009 at 2.00pm. We’ll be mounting a display of photographs and other historic materials relating to the Deseronto camps, and refreshments will be served. Bill Hunt will then talk about his book. Greenley’s Book Store will be there with copies of the book to buy (which I’m sure Bill will be happy to sign!) and there will also be a raffle draw with a chance to win a copy of the book and a selection of other goodies.

It is shaping up to be a great event, so if you have a chance to, please come along that afternoon! The invitation (a PDF file) has more details.

CAMPM-06-05
 

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