I thought she'd left...

My last job for the Archives Hub has been to attend the conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists here in Kingston, Ontario (I know, it’s a tough life). Of course it’s been a wonderful networking opportunity for me too! The presentations were of such a consistently high quality and were so varied in nature that it’s difficult to come up with a summary of the conference as a whole, so I’m just going to mention some of the sessions that particularly stood out for me. On Thursday I was impressed by the reports of outreach work (known as ‘public programming’ here) from Lisa Singer of the Archives of Ontario and Jessica King of the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Obviously these are both relatively well-resourced institutions, but there were plenty of tips there that would also work for smaller institutions, including making a fuss of donors with hand-written thank-you notes or invitations to events, and getting involved with local historical and educational events and organisations. Yesterday there was a session on ‘Selective Memory, Archives and Society’, where Katherine Lagrandeur gave a fascinating talk about the relationship between testimony and archives in Art Spiegelman’s book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, which chronicles his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew and was written in the form of a graphic novel. This was followed by Marcel Barriault’s look at the survival of records of gay male pornography and erotica, which was also, well, graphic! The session on ‘Archivists and Archives through the lens of Popular Culture’ yesterday afternoon was entertaining and had me scribbling down titles of books and films that I need to catch up on. Tania Aldred reported on her research into archivists in film. No fewer than 19 movies have featured archivists in the period between 1941 and 2004, and Tania pointed out that by far the most positive image was in the film National Treasure, with Diane Kruger in the role of Abigail Chase, but that the word ‘archivist’ was never used to describe her. There is a sequel being filmed now though, so there's still hope... The role archives can play in forming a sense of community was the subject of the session I attended this morning, which was very interesting. Anne Foster described the role of the archives in Bute, Montana, where the community was in decline, but an active oral history project undertaken by high school students was instrumental in rebuilding a sense of pride in the town’s past. In the afternoon I was presenting in a session on technology (my slides are on SlideShare), so I had to miss the session on eliciting user feedback, which included a presentation by Geoff Pick of London Metropolitan Archives. Geoff and I had been sitting next to each other for five hours on the way over on the plane on Sunday before we twigged that we were both archivists and both going to the same conference.