Tag: archives

Just because it was documented, doesn’t mean we have it…

Just because it was documented, doesn’t mean we have it…Just because it was documented, doesn’t mean we have it…

April 27, 2026 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

The archives depends on you: dispelling some misconceptions about the process of building the Museum’s collection

 “Archives are the documentary by-product of human activity retained for their long-term value. […] Like people, archives are diverse,” explains the International Council on Archives.

In simple terms, the archives is a euphemism for a ‘collection of story parts.’

In a recent Pique article, I, the Whistler Museum’s Events and Community Manager, was quoted as saying, “an archive is a living, breathing, exciting thing. ‘Archive’ is a verb.”

The action of the archive, however, is only expanded by donations of materials; adding chapters, pages, periods and punctuation to the make-up of a place… and herein, lies one of the major misunderstandings on how the broadening of our museum collection works.* Just because an event happened and it was photographed, or a document was produced relating to the town in some way – does not automatically mean that we have it.

In short, the archive is infused by gifting. We are dependent on donations This can also mean that the archive can be disproportionately reflective of a place’s demographic. This, too, is true for our Whistler archive.

The Museum’s archive can be viewed as an ever-expanding puzzle; whilst we try to configure matching pieces and identify those missing. The process is equally as diverse as the people and collections who breathe life into it: a reciprocal exchange between gifting and receiving.

The local archive is only made broader — more reflective of those who have, and still do, live here – by donations of material: from physical elements (text, photographs, video/film assets) to non-physical ‘oral histories’ that people come in and record. The Museum’s repository is expanded by people contributing to being part of place-making and meaning. Please never underestimate the value of your experience. The Museum does not have an age limit.

Speakers Series are also a valuable way of documenting reflections and past events, recording our stories through the power of conversations — which add to the record — becoming platforms for thought. Again, I was cited in the same March 20th article by Luke Faulks as saying: “…a museum is an exciting place. Your history sheds light on your present, and it’s a springboard for how we inform our future.”

The Museum invites you to become an active participant and co-creator of our storied happenings by attending one of our events, by volunteering to record your tale or by donating relevant items you may have.

This segues into another often misunderstood element of how the Museum is able to process items received. It’s not instantaneous.

 We are a not-for-profit organization that operates with a small staff of three. Currently, we have an additional person added to the team, hired under contract for the sole purpose of inventorying, appraising, processing (arranging and describing) the donation of the Bruce Rowles 70,000+ photographic collection. This entire process has already taken seven months, working full time, and is still ongoing. Ideally, the last step for archivists is to digitize our collections, which is important for preservation of degrading materials and for easy access to these images. The process is time and labour-intensive. A collection of 20,000 images could take one year to digitize, ensuring it meets Canadian archival standards. It is, however, a donation we are exceedingly happy and grateful to receive: a benefit to the entire community. Bruce wanted to ensure his life’s work would be remembered and appreciated. A selection of his photography will be exhibited at the Whistler Museum from April 24th to June 14th.

As further means of perspective, the Whistler Museum’s entire photographic collection currently exceeds 300, 000 items.  With the addition of the Rowles collection, it will be nearing 400, 000. We have approximately 90, 000 of those items digitized. We try to make many of those items available through a variety of means: from special exhibitions, to being posted on our social media networks, online on our archival database to highlighting them through articles and being featured in events.

The local archives is an expansive and immersive space: infused by your continuous contributions into the building of a pastiche-of-place.

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*It would be remiss of us not to acknowledge the past wrongs associated with many colonial museum practices: with a legacy of taking, extracting without permission and stealing from Peoples. The Whistler Museum has participated in the repatriating of some items that were donated, that we did not feel were ours to have. Together, we learn through the past how to co-create collaborative futures…

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The times they are a-changing in Whistler’s historical collectionsThe times they are a-changing in Whistler’s historical collections

October 19, 2021 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

Time are changing in the world of archival and artefact collections, and it’s definitely hard to keep up with the resulting backlog. This is a good problem to have, because it means the community trusts the museum to preserve its past. We have had a significant increase in the number and size of donations to the Whistler Museum and Archives over the past two years (thanks to those who donated!), and we hope we will continue to be on the minds of locals when older things are looking for a new home. We have a few theories as to what led to the increase of donations, the main one being that the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns and business closures allowed some locals the time to do a bit of cleaning and clearing of their homes.

Some of the materials donated as part of the Whistler Pride collection.

While the influx of donations is a particular challenge for us in terms of having enough storage space, it’s also very exciting for the Collections Department here, as there have been items donated on more varied subjects, which can help us fill gaps in our collections. For instance, we have welcomed more documents on the origins of Blackcomb Mountain, more artefacts and photographs relating to the history of snowboarding in the area, a large collection of Whistler Pride documents and artefacts, and even some of the COVID-19 signs which were put up in Whistler Village during 2020. It is very important to us that our collections reflect the community we serve, and this can be a difficult task at times due to donations being a voluntary and charitable act. We always encourage donations, and for locals to remind others that donating items to the Whistler Museum is a much-appreciated option before sending older items and documents to the trash.

Digital files could be stored on many different devices, and are donated to the archives in various forms.

It’s not just our own collections at the museum that are changing, but also the types of media being donated to archives in general. Photographs, videos, and documents that were born in a digital environment are now being donated to archives, and we are no exception here. USB sticks, hard drives, and .jpg files have been donated to the Whistler Museum and Archives this year, heralding the Age of Information which will surely make the process of archiving more complex over time. If a donor were to donate the entire contents of their email account, it would make for some very grueling description work for entering into the archival catalogue, which connects researchers to our collections, and this is just one part of that growing complexity for archivists. In this day and age, data, photos, and files are being created at ever-increasing speeds as technology smooths the path. While this may help future generations learn about ours due to the wealth of evidence we’ve created, it also makes it very difficult to weed through our data to decide what is of value and worth keeping. Endless information is only useful if it is mapped in some way to allow us to access the information that is meaningful to us.

For the time being, the Whistler Museum and Archives has still been able to keep up with the amount of born-digital donations, but the future of preserving the history of Whistler through digital means may become more complicated in the coming decades!

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Archiving Your Life in a Digital WorldArchiving Your Life in a Digital World

November 3, 2020 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

Where and how do you store your personal files and photos?  It’s easy to forget that before the days of cellphone cameras and social media, time and effort were put into printing photographs, labelling them, and putting them into albums.

When I was training to become an archivist, I began to realize that my own photos were scattered across Facebook, my phone, and my laptop, and that if I ever wanted to look back on those memories to share with family or donate them to the archives, it would be one great, big mess.

Personal archiving is the organization and safe preservation of material that relates to the life, memories, and experiences of a person.  Modern personal archiving is often concerned with digital preservation, especially bringing together content from social media and digital devices to ensure the long-term preservation of the memories we store digitally.

Digital files could be stored on many different devices.

It’s hard to know exactly what is going to be of personal or historical importance in the future, and hard to know how to choose what to keep and how to organize it so that we can access it later.  For instance, after actress Vivien Leigh’s death in 1967, her laundry receipts ended up providing insight into how mid-20th century haute couture was preserved and presented in public.  Yet, it’s unlikely that Vivien kept these laundry receipts knowing they would provide historical value later.

While we can’t always know what will be important to keep, we can do our best to keep our core memories and evidence of our impact on the community alive by keeping our media and documents organized, in a safe place.  Based on the Library of Congress’s advice for personal archiving, I’ve provided some steps here that can guide you in preserving you and your family’s digital files:

  1. Locate your files.  Are they on your phone?  On your Google Drive?  On your computer?  On a memory card or USB?  On Facebook?  Decide on one place to compile them.
  2. Choose which files are most important to you and the historical record.  Historical value can often be found in items that document activities, people, places, and events.  Delete duplicates and keep the highest quality versions.
  3. Organize your files chronologically, by subject, or both.  Develop a hierarchical structure of folders for storing the files, and name your files and folders consistently.  Include dates in file and folder names wherever possible.
  4. Preserve your organized files by making copies and storing them in different physical locations (e.g. keep one set of files on your computer, one on an external hard drive, or one on a cloud file-sharing drive, etc.).

If many of your files or photos are not yet in the digital world, consider scanning them.  If you are planning to donate your files to the Whistler Museum & Archives, we are happy to scan any physical photographs you may have and send you copies.

While physical photos can be stored in boxes such as these, digital photos require a different system.

Recently, we have noticed our archival collection is severely lacking in donations from the past 25 years; we believe this may be due to the shift to digital creation with the onset of new technologies.  We would be ecstatic if this article could prompt our community to begin donating old cell phone videos and photos (even if their digital quality is that of a potato nowadays!), or even old Word documents of newsletters from local organizations.  The early days of the internet sparked massive changes in how we create, share, and preserve our stories – this time of change merits preservation.  If you’re able to help us fill the 1995 – 2020 gap in our collection, please email archives@whistlermuseum.org.

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A Crash Course in ArchivesA Crash Course in Archives

June 3, 2020 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

The Whistler Museum and Archives is collecting donations of objects, photographs, video, and other documents to record Whistler’s experience during the pandemic.  We’re accepting items Monday through Friday, 11 am to 5 pm, and all donations will be safely quarantined.  While collecting artefacts is fairly straightforward, as we’ve written in past articles on the topic, archives themselves can be confusing.  So, here’s a quick crash course!

Archives are naturally-generated historical records that are created by a person or organization over their lifetime.  They are preserved in order to demonstrate the function of the donor in society or changes of places and events over time.  Records are usually unique, as opposed to books or magazines, which often have many identical copies (this is one way archives and libraries differ).  For example, a business might donate an advert they created, or a person might donate their photos of the Bike Park from the past decade.

Though archives and artefacts are often grouped together, they are actually separate. Artefacts are physical things, such as Myrtle Philip’s pants and riding jacket shown here, while archives are records such as letters, photographs, films and journals.

Here at the archives in Whistler, we aim to describe, preserve, and provide access to materials donated.  The archives is a tool for researchers – from historians, to genealogists, to filmmakers – to access primary sources and records untainted by censorship or skewing.

The principles an archivist is taught during a degree in archival science are chock-full of French terms, arising out of Belgium and France in the mid-1800s.  Provenance dictates that materials from different origins should be kept separate.  It would be impossible to find anything if we kept all our donations in one big “Whistler Collection.”  Respect des fonds, stemming from provenance, means we must group materials according to the entity which created them or from which they were received.

The archives room within the Whistler Museum is full of the stories of the resort town and those who have called it home.  Keeping it all in order as it grows continuously can be a daunting task, but one our Head Archivist Alyssa Bruijns does very well.

But, wait!  We can’t physically rearrange things into a new order!  We rearrange “intellectually” when cataloguing, because we also have to respect original order.  If we physically rearrange the records donated to us, we risk losing the context of how these records were created.  While keeping this context may not seem useful right now, it may reveal very useful information for a researcher in the future.  When a record is removed from its fellow records, it can lose its meaning and credibility.

So, what’s the point of keeping records if you can’t find anything, maybe by subject or date?  We must describe the records using a catalogue and metadata so we can find them for you.  In fact, in the 1970s, Canadian archivists were among the first int he world to put together a comprehensive description standard that took into account the changes technology brought, called “Rules for Archival Description (RAD)”.   It is the archivist’s Bible.

Many of our archive collections are safely housed in acid-free boxes such as these shown here holding the Blackcomb Mountain Collection.

Archives are meant to last; some archives have already lasted centuries.  To preserve archives safely, we rehouse records in acid-free containers, store in climate-controlled areas, and digitize deteriorating items.  For fragile items and valuable records in high demand from the public, digitization can provide remote access.  Due to media formats dying out a frightening speed (RIP VHS), we must digitize our older media to current formats so we don’t lost it entirely.

Still, even current hard drives can become corrupt and file formats do fall out of use, and this is partly why we never throw out original materials.  Digital technologies still have a shorter life expectancy than paper, though we’re hopeful this could change.  Until then, the Whistler Museum & Archives will keep digitizing to bring you access to our community’s history.  Our photo collections can be found here: whistlermuseum.smugmug.com/; our video collections can be found here: youtube.com/WhistlerMuseum; and our archival catalogue can be found here: whistler.ica-atom.org/.

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