Grants and Contributions

This organization holds more than 28,000 photographic images dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. To prioritize work required, the organization will identify and preserve the most publicly significant of these photos: images from six communities that were once home to an Indian Residential School (IRS). The organization will then sort these images by IRS community, digitize them and restore where required, and create accompanying bilingual finding aids for each community. The organization will then upload the images to a website and make them available to the public.

The project aims to digitize sound recordings that document the Belgian, Francophone and Métis presence in Western Canada and in particular in Manitoba. The project will provide digitization, entry of essential metadata and verification of descriptions for 360 cassettes and 300 soundtracks. This project will protect records at risk of serious deterioration and improve access to historical research materials in Western Canada.

The Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA) Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre is the largest repository of Jewish history and culture in Canada. The collection documents Jewish life across the province from the mid-19th century to the present, and includes personal papers, and business and institutional records that reflect the establishment, growth, struggles and contributions of the Jewish community—from a small group of immigrants to thriving communities. Alongside analog records, these resources now include born-digital records and digital master copies of analog originals. The OJA is not currently equipped to preserve digital records in perpetuity. This project will enable the organization to build a robust digital preservation system to ensure its digital records of enduring value remain accessible well in the future.

In this project, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (WMCR) will digitize 168 scrapbooks from 48 fonds, with over 6,000 pages that represent the Canadian Rocky Mountain community from upper and middle-income families between the 1800s and the 1970s. Scrapbooks are a form of self-publication available to people of varying economic status, as long as they have paper, scissors, and glue. This under-used historical resource will be made accessible to community members and researchers through the WMCR’s online database. Content will include pioneer life in Banff National Park; travels on the Canadian Pacific Railway; political events; scientific and anthropological studies; and family life and events in various communities in and around the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The organization will digitize and describe each scrapbook and preventive preservation will be carried out. Digital scans will serve as a surrogate for the scrapbooks, to increase access and preserve the fragile scrapbooks in the WMCR’s collection.

In this project, Western Front Media Archive will address a need for better long-term preservation of digital assets representing important figures and events in Canadian independent art production. It will accomplish this by way of a technology upgrade, a migration, and strengthening the organization’s digital preservation capacity. The organization will prioritize the transfer of content from at-risk media formats to digital formats, informed by archival best practices. A move from Linear Tape Open (LTO)-5 format to LTO-8 format will offer possibilities for duplicate off-site storage for over 5,000 photographic files, 500 moving image files, and 500 audio files. After one year, the organization will have a fully migrated archive of verified, accessible digital assets, a significantly improved long-term storage capacity, and enhanced organizational knowledge of archival best practices.

The Brome County Historical Society (BCHS) will digitize approximately 25 meters of textual records from ca. 1787 (founding of early Eastern Townships) to the beginning of the First World War. A portion of earlier text records (Pre-Confederation) are on 35mm microfilm and include the fonds of some prominent members of Brome County. The organization will preserve and digitize these microfilm reels and upload their content to the Eastern Townships Archives Portal to make them more accessible. In addition, BCHS staff will research the textual records to create and broaden records-based biographies of local families and individuals.

The project concerns audiovisual archives that include sound archives and moving images of the first actors and organizations that worked in the Magdalen Islands. By targeting the most fragile collections as a priority, the Centre d'archives régional des Îles will digitize and catalogue these archives in order to facilitate access while preserving their integrity. This project will be followed by an audiovisual commemorative event at the beginning of the second year of the project, marking the 165th anniversary of the post office in the Magdalen Islands and 110 years of the history of the ponchon.

The Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation (CHPF) will digitize part of a collection of photographic negatives bequeathed by George Hunter, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Specifically, the organization will digitize 4,000 images of Ontario (the collection includes over 100,000 images), including scenes of mining, aerial photography, farming, cities, small towns and portraits, dating back to the 1950s and up to 2010. This project will make these images available on the CHPF website and enable researchers, local community groups, historians, teachers and the public to access them for reference, historical context, and representations of Ontario’s cultural diversity.

The project concerns audiovisual archives that include sound archives and moving images of the first actors and organizations that worked in the Magdalen Islands. By targeting the most fragile collections as a priority, the Centre d'archives régional des Îles will digitize and catalogue these archives in order to facilitate access while preserving their integrity. This project will be followed by an audiovisual commemorative event at the beginning of the second year of the project, marking the 165th anniversary of the post office in the Magdalen Islands and 110 years of the history of the ponchon.

Archival processing and digitization of the documents in the Marcel Sainte-Marie collection. This impressive collection (more than 20.4 linear meters) consists of files documenting many aspects of the life and living environment of the residents of the City of Hull. On the one hand, the project will ensure the preservation of documents in accordance with current archival standards. On the other hand, the project will promote better accessibility of all the documents in the archive for consultation by a wide audience.