Plenary Sessions

An Accidental Archive: Implementing archival methodology at Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive

Like most community archives, the goal of the The Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive is to shape the narrative through a collection of materials by or about a community that was under-represented, hidden, or dismissed within mainstream narratives. Led by a volunteer collective without archival experise, Rise Up!’s approaches to arrangement and description were designed to suit the purpose of digitizing and making a modest collection of materials available online. Over the past 10 years, the archival collection has grown from a few journals to 1000s of items and a widening range of material types. The current practices for acquisition, accessioning, description and arrangement do not follow archival methodology. The archive has met the needs of the community in many ways. The approach also poses interesting challenges for today as we consider how to continue expanding our collection, implementing anti-racist and anti-colonial practices to how materials are collected, described and contextualized, and strive to improve access and discovery.

How does that help us listen? Unlearning “hungry listening” in the archives

In his book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Stó:lò scholar Dylan Robinson describes settler structures of attention as a “starving” approach to research – a drive to consume that extinguishes the researcher’s awareness of how they are in relationship with books, archival materials, people, communities, land, etc. How can we listen differently, attuning to archives as relational communities of collective memory? The transdisciplinary practitioners on this panel explore what it means to apply (what Robinson calls) “anticolonial listening practices” to collective memory work. Anna Robinson-Sweet draws on oral histories and research interviews with incarceration-impacted people, demonstrating how this community’s contributions to the archive inform archival practices rooted in mutual care and liberation. Temple Marucci-Campbell asks how we may attend to non-traditional archival processes, like olfactory and gustatory methods of memory work, that (may purposefully) escape or evade traditional archiving practices. Stephanie Niu recounts her arts-based experiments in community archiving, demonstrating how anarchival principles (such as “futurism as history”) transform relationships between archivists, archival documents, and communities. Sebastian De Line’s approach to listening in the museum is guided by what they call an “ancestor-led” approach – where “ancestors” are more commonly referred to as “human remains,” “artifacts,” and “objects” in Western museological terms. De Line’s practice of listening – beyond the range of audibility – to ancestors in the collection articulates best practices in museology from non-Western cultural perspectives. Together, these expert listeners share skills in anticolonial listening practices to nourish our relationships with archives and the communities we/they serve.

Sessions

Unveiling Her Story: Making Women Visible in Archival Records

Archival description practices have historically rendered many women invisible through incomplete, biased, or generic metadata. Women frequently appear in photographic records without full names, are identified only through marital status (e.g., "Mrs. John Black"), or remain entirely unnamed, even when they served as donors, memory keepers, or central figures within their communities. This project addresses that imbalance through a targeted initiative to identify and properly document women in archival photograph collections.  Using primary documentation-including birth, marriage, and death certificates, obituaries, biographical reference files, and city directories-researchers systematically verified identities. Collaboration with community members, genealogists, local historians, and long-term volunteers further enriched and validated findings. As a result, 57 women were positively identified, and 62 archival records were updated to include full names, including maiden names, and accurate biographical details.  The project not only corrected historical omissions but also restored recognition to female photo donors, community leaders, and informal memory keepers whose contributions had been overlooked. Updated records now reflect equitable descriptive practices and improved discoverability.  Future approaches include revising acquisition procedures to collect women's full names at the point of donation, continuing proactive identification of unnamed women, strengthening community education efforts, and distributing pocket memory books to encourage individuals to record their identities alongside photographs for future archival preservation.  This initiative demonstrates how inclusive metadata practices can reshape historical narratives and ensure women's lasting visibility in the archival record.

Get a Life! Biographical sketches in theory and practice

Biographical sketches form the heart of an archival description. Information about the creator(s) of records provides important context for the fonds. But what information should be included? Descriptive standards provide guidance as to what elements must be included: name(s); dates; place of residence; education; occupation, life, achievements, and activities. Information on gender, nationality, family, and religious or political affiliations may also be included. Beyond this high-level guidance, biographies in archival description are under-theorized, which in turn has an impact on our descriptive work. This paper will offer thoughts on what a theory of biographical description in archives could look like and how this theory could translate into our day-to-day work.

"Both, And" – A Methodology for Describing and Cataloguing Visual and Material Culture in a Textual Archive

Adopting a “both, and” approach, rather than the “either, or” best practice that has dominated Canadian archival practice for the better part of a century, is the first step to making soldier art and other examples of visual and material culture visible and accessible in the textual archives of our national collections. As its case study, and the originating collection that inspired this methodology, my presentation discusses unofficial soldier art that has been “hidden in plain sight” in the George Metcalf Archival Collection, the Canadian War Museum’s textual archives. It explores the different kinds of soldier art to be found there, including examples that adorn the pages of letters, diaries, military training course notebooks, First World War nursing sisters’ autograph books, and Second World War prisoner of war (POW) wartime log books. The war stories this soldier art tells are personal, intimate, complex, and, at times, both funny and heart wrenching. They offer us a glimpse into the experiences of ordinary Canadians who lived through the World Wars. And yet, because of collections policy, archival theory and best practices at the CWM, much of this soldier art overlooked, if not “lost,” in the textual archives. In short – art, artefacts, and historical documents can be more than just one thing at a time. Often they are a combination of things. Best practices for how to acquire, catalogue, describe, and arrange visual materials in a textual archive must be compiled into a detailed classification guide with a way forward to better include and make accessible archival materials that do not neatly fit into any one single category or description. My research endeavours to remove the “either, or” embedded in the current archival best practices, and replace it with “both, and.”

Possibilities and Pathways for Integrating Archives into Higher Education: Challenges and Strategies.

This panel considers how community engaged partnerships at Wilfrid Laurier University and Concordia University have (re)connected archives documenting Black lives and stories with the communities that created or whose histories are represented in the records. Panelists will explore how both universities have increased access to archives documenting Black histories through experiential learning opportunities; how outreach and educational partnerships support the learning and research needs of Black students; and how practitioners are putting person-centred archival theory into practice. They will share practical advice on developing community engagement projects with constrained budgets and expand on the reasons these projects are necessary to undertake despite resourcing challenges. Practical information on developing community-engaged programs; achieving administrative buy-in; securing necessary resources; developing interdepartmental partnerships; and attracting and supporting participants, with the goal of establishing best practices for integrating archives into education and community, will be provided during this session.

Negotiating Theory and Practice as Community Archives Interns: Three Community Archives in Conversation

In this roundtable session participants will discuss work conducted as part of the UBC Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) project. FOCAS supports UBC iSchool students to complete paid internships in local community archives, and also provides direct support to the community archives. This year, six students are working with South Asian Canadian Digital Archives (SACDA), Hogan's Alley Society (HAS), and VIVO Media Arts Centre. In this roundtable, students will reflect on the relationship of the theory they are learning in their classes to the tasks and challenges they are encountering in the different community archives. They will consider where archival theory, as taught in the UBC MAS, has helped and where it falls short, and will discuss the creative and imaginative ways they work to overcome those shortfalls. Student interns will also consider how what they are learning from their experiences with the different community archives could inform the continuing development of archival curricula and pedagogy.

Starting from Scratch: Creating a Digital Preservation Strategy at The ArQuives

In 2025, The ArQuives (Canada's 2SLGBTQIA+ archives) hired its first Digital Archivist. There was no existing digital preservation policy, infrastructure, or strategy in place, and the organization faced a challenge familiar to many small, community archives: How can we build a digital preservation program from scratch, with limited resources and no roadmap?  This presentation will focus on the reality of creating a digital preservation policy and strategy for the first time. Policy and Strategy are core components of the Digital Preservation Coalition's Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), a widely used framework for assessing an organization's digital preservation maturity level. Using The ArQuives' experience as a case study, this session will outline how to move from Level 0 (minimal awareness) towards Level 4 (optimized).  It will also address how to embed community consultation into policy and strategy development, a particularly important step for community archives. Participants will leave with an example of how to move from ad hoc digital storage to a defined and sustainable strategy. The presentation is designed especially for small and mid-sized organizations without extensive funding, technical infrastructure, or prior digital preservation experience. 

Developing criteria for born-digital appraisal: a review of artists’ hard drives at Concordia University Library Special Collections and Archives

Appraisal is a central part of archival processing, and despite the increasing proportion of born-digital records being accessioned in archives, available guidance for archivists appraising born-digital records is still surprisingly limited. This presentation discusses emerging practices relating to the appraisal of born-digital archives through the lens of two recent processing projects at Concordia University's Special Collections and Archives (SCA). In reviewing the contents of two artists' external hard drives, SCA staff identified a need to develop internal criteria to guide appraisal decisions for born-digital records. The need for born-digital appraisal criteria stems from several factors, including how digital record-keeping practices differ from their analogue counterpart; unique considerations in preserving and describing born-digital records; the financial and environmental costs associated with the ongoing preservation of digital materials; and the preservation issues inherent in certain obsolete and proprietary file formats. The presenters will discuss the process of developing guidelines that consider these factors and share examples of how they have been applied in practice. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of these guidelines as a work in progress, highlighting pain points, pending questions, and areas for improvement.

Whither the ideal fonds? Two perspectives on archiving in the 21st century

Our presentation will discuss the working experience of two archivists, focused on the value and limitations of archival theory when applied to practical workplace situations, derived from our own experiences in the field. Although we both agree that theory informs practice and firmly guides our approaches to archival challenges, the changing nature of record-keeping practices have created shortfalls in which theory has yet to meet the moment. For one, the ongoing digital revolution has ruptured our traditional understanding of what constitutes a record intentionally created for a purpose and set aside for future reference. The ease in which records are created and digitally 'archived' (i.e., in cloud-based storage, hard-drives, or web-archiving) only vaguely resemble the analog practices which informed archival theory, leading us to question whether the entirety of a records creator's digital footprint ought to be preserved. [These and other topics will be explored with reference to our work in academic and religious institutional archives. The speakers conclude that the issue is not a gap between theory and practice, but instead, a gap between the hoped-for 'ideal fonds' and the reality of idiosyncratic record-keeping practices which stress-test theories designed in a foregone information paradigm.  Christopher and Adam connected in 2022 through the ACA Mentorship program. This presentation partly reflects their conversations over the past four years, which often touched upon questions of theory and practice from the perspectives of a recent graduate and early career professional.

Listening to Northwestern Ontario Women’s History

In 1975, a project was founded to gather, preserve, and share stories of women's histories and experiences across Northwestern Ontario. Through years of work, oral histories, photographs, and other documents were gathered: but the project unfortunately stalled, and the materials sat unused for 50 years.   When Lakehead's Archives acquired these materials, we knew how valuable the stories could be. This presentation will trace a journey through acquisition, fundraising, digitization, media relations, outreach, digital preservation, and student projects: all still ongoing at the time of this proposal. Our work has been complicated by changes in oral history practices around consent and privacy over the past 50 years; and the effort put into fundraising, awareness-raising, and contacting family members has been a healthy stretch of both my skills and my previous definitions of archival outreach.

Taking a Page from Solange: Digitizing grey literature in Chinese Canadian archives

In Fall 2025, American cultural creative, Solange Knowles, launched the Saint Heron Library, a free digital and physical archive of rare works by Black and Brown authors and artists. Focused on out-of-print books, zines, and critical texts, the library's collection of vital Black cultural resources promotes their preservation and access to foster scholarship and creativity. A few months earlier, in a small corner of the Internet Archive, THE ASIANADIAN: An Asian Canadian magazine was being made available along similar goals and methods for its 24 issues, expanding steadily to other titles, as they became identified. This session will present on this case study from the University of Toronto Libraries and its partnership with the Internet Archive Canada to build a digital collection of rare and out-of-print cultural works through its Richard Charles Lee Chinese Canadian Archives. Presenters will explore issues that often pose as barriers to digitization and creating digital access, faced by racialized communities, in particular, including consideration of grey literature as spaces carved out by its members. Digital access will be discussed as a way to partner with a community under a shared goal of collective stewardship, in which post-custodial approaches are preferred, and in which records creators, records users, and community members are enlisted as part of the curatorial team. Permissions frameworks will be examined, with attention to how institutions can manage rights to enable access. The session will highlight the leadership, decision-making, and risk-aware approaches required to embed digital access into everyday institutional practice.

From LTO-7 to LTO-10: Strategies for Migration of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies for Long-Term Digital Preservation in a Small Archive

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) undertook a digital preservation migration project to strengthen the long-term stewardship of its audiovisual Holocaust testimony collection. The collection comprises over 200 survivor and eyewitness testimonies recorded since 1979 across analogue and digital formats. As existing LTO-7 media approached the end of its recommended service lifecycle, the VHEC migrated preservation and mezzanine files to LTO-10 in alignment with best-practice recommendations for periodic carrier refresh. [1] Beyond tape-to-tape copying, the project implemented structured repackaging using BagIt and automated Python scripts integrated with CollectiveAccess (CA), the VHEC's content management system (CMS). An OAIS-informed workflow incorporated fixity verification and PREMIS-aligned preservation metadata. The migration produced verified preservation copies for over 200 testimonies and established a sustainable workflow suitable for small and mid-sized documentary heritage organizations.

Decolonizing on the prairies: a progress report

The archives at the University of Saskatchewan have a long history of collecting and making available records relating to Indigenous peoples, dating back to the early 20th century, through the collecting activities of the first University Librarian and subsequently first Provincial Archivist, A.S. Morton. Later records were compiled especially through activities of university faculty members and research bodies. More recent acquisitions have increasingly been acquired directly from Indigenous individuals and organizations. Digital projects undertaken over several years have also made many of these records easily available. University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) is not alone in reckoning with its legacy as a colonial institution. Focused attention on decolonization and reconciliation was first initiated after the release of the Reconciliation Framework. The Reconciliation Framework provided an accessible approach to some of the theory and recommended practices in this area. Appointment of a term Indigenous Archivist in 2024 allowed for dedicated capacity and knowledgeable leadership. UASC and library colleagues have undertaken various decolonization initiatives, including adoption of Indigenous data sovereignty principles, a community gathering relating to residential school photographs, reparative description for digital projects, collection reviews, and direct engagement with First Nations. This session will focus on engagement with First Nations, with adoption of Indigenous data sovereignty principles guiding this approach, and highlighting Beardy's and Okemasis Cree Nation as a case study. This will be a report and reflection on work and relationships in progress, including approaches to repatriation, shifts in institutional practice and staff knowledge, and the experiences of the Cree Nation.

Archives for the People: Archival Outreach to Support Grassroots Movements

This panel discussion will present the case study of the Jose Maria Sison Legacy Foundation, an archival initiative located in the Netherlands which comprises the fonds of Philippine revolutionary Jose Maria Sison, with comments from community archivists from the Philippine solidarity movement in Canada. This case study will be an opportunity for the archival community to discuss how archival theories function to not only record, but also support, currently active and living political movements.

Navigating the Role of the Donor throughout the archival process

Building on Rob Fisher's 2015 paper "Donors and Donor Agency: Implications for Private Archives Theory and Practice," this presentation reflects on the undertheorized role of the donor in the archival process through the example of one acquisition at UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives.

Future Opportunities for Student Group Representation in Archives

This session will centre on a student history preservation and outreach project conducted by the Toronto Metropolitan University Archives. Rooted in research findings that expressed widespread student group disengagement with or disinterest in archiving their histories, and in a student-centered theory and practice, this project has sought to express what the Archive can offer for student groups, and why preservation is relevant for student groups and campus advocacy.   When students do not feel reflected in archival holdings, or they feel it upholds a bureaucracy that their groups can be in conflict with, they are less likely to feel comfortable donating their histories. Due to this, the project has paid a lot of attention to where these feelings of disinterest come from and will discuss how we seek to offer respectful long term solutions that will provide better continuity for student groups that see student turnover annually.   This session will provide a case study of the project's current accomplishments, including the state of student group history in the TMU Archives, outreach activities, and workshops and meetings with students, and will discuss future goals for the project. Furthermore, this session will discuss gaps in the Archive and how this can be taken up to illustrate relevancy in archiving to students today.

Case study: Archival Theory vs Corporate Reality at the WSIB Archives

The Corporate Archive works within a larger institution whose primary functions do not align with that of the Archive's - preserving corporate history. It is the Corporate Archivist’s job to impart the importance of archival theory and practice to the corporation. They must take a flexible approach to theory when needed in order to meet the needs of the broader institution and the unique circumstances of each Archive. At the WSIB Archive, these circumstances include inheriting an obsolete filing system that does not align with archival standards of arrangement and maintaining a client-friendly system, while moving the Archives towards more widely accepted archival standards. Using the WSIB Archive as a case study, we will discuss the unique challenges of establishing and running a Corporate Archive and navigating the obstacles of employing and adapting archival theory while managing user expectations in a corporate environment.

From Textbooks to Backlogs: Approaches to Archival Processing at UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections and University Archives

Tackling the backlog is a challenge for even the most seasoned archival professionals. How do recent graduates develop the skills and expertise necessary to carry out large-scale processing while balancing institutional needs and archival best practices?      This panel will take a case study approach to explore backlog reduction projects currently underway at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Library Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) and University Archives (UA). The three panelists are early-career archivists who have recently stepped into their roles as the UA Digital Archivist, RBSC Processing Archivist, and the UA Processing Archivist.       Each panelist will discuss their respective backlog projects and the challenges, successes, and opportunities they have encountered in their work. The case studies will discuss their work to modernize legacy systems, streamline processing workflows, and navigate staff transitions, all while developing professional confidence through theory-informed practice. For example, the UA Digital Archivist will address the hidden digital backlog: on-demand digitization created for researchers that is not integrated into formal description or access systems. This presentation will outline key steps, including assessing copyright status for online access, designing an inventory database, preparing digital files for upload, and revising finding aids to reflect newly available digital content.      Overall, the panelists will share their experiences putting into practice their recent archival education, including how they reconcile the archival theory learned in the classroom with the on-the-job realities of resource limitation and the inherent complexity of archival processing.

From Abstraction to Accession: Applying the Canadian Archival Accession Information Standard at the Dalhousie University Archives

Archival accessioning is the physical and legal addition of predominantly unpublished documentary material to an archival repository’s holdings. It is widely regarded as a critical first step in managing archival materials, but policies, practices, and workflows relating to accessioning vary widely across archival institutions. Introduced in 2019, the Canadian Archival Accession Information Standard (CAAIS) aimed to fill this gap by synthesizing common metadata elements present in accession records. As with other archival standards, institutions are left to navigate the standard and apply it to their own context, effectively bridging the theoretical and prescriptive principles brought to bear by the standard with the practical realities of institutional requirements. Recently, Dalhousie University Archives determined that it needed to retire its legacy system for managing archival accession records and adopt the accession module of its chosen archival collections management system – Access to Memory (AtoM). To support this systems migration, the Archives developed its own set of internal metadata guidelines, based on CAAIS. Development of these guidelines involved consideration of the Archives’ own workflows, procedures, and practices, as well as the legacy accession records and constraints of the accession module within AtoM. This presentation explores the process that the Dalhousie University Archives underwent to adopt CAAIS and implement new accession guidelines. It highlights how archivists relied on CAAIS to develop metadata guidelines that supported Dalhousie’s existing accessioning practices while also facilitating the necessary shift to a new system for creating and managing archival accession records. Overall, this presentation will outline the opportunities and challenges experienced with applying CAAIS in the Dalhousie context. A key component of this will also be exploring the technical platform that the Archives’ operates – in Dalhousie’s case – Access to Memory (AtoM) As such, relatedly, this presentation will also explore the use of AtoM’s accession module and its suitability for managing accessions.

There and Back Again: An Archives Story

In late 2022, work began to pack and transfer the entire holdings of UNK's Archives and Special Collections in advance of an extensive 2-year multi-phase renovation project of their Library building.  Given the limited range of relevant articles or case studies published on the subject of designing or moving archival collections, the archivists relied on a combination of common best-practice knowledge and instinct throughout the process.  Organization was maintained via a carefully curated numbering system and associated spreadsheet.  The collection was held in (somewhat) secure storage for 10 months before the transfer back into the partially renovated archival vault took place in late 2023. Almost immediately. issues arose due a reduced space for storage, inadequate shelving, and physical construction that would be ongoing for a further six months.  It was immediately apparent that a complete redesign of the new space was necessary.  After several months of consultation with vendors, new shelving was acquired, necessitating third and fourth coordinated moves in early Spring 2025.  This presentation will discuss the multiple planning, packing, transfer and storage phases of each process, and provide advice regarding tips and pitfalls that others may incorporate should they embark on similar projects.

Balancing AV preservation best practices and available resources: Lessons learned from a large AV preservation project

This presentation will explore a case study of a multi-year Audio-Visual (AV) preservation project and lessons learned trying to balance digital preservation 'best practice' with available resources. The case study explores challenges in preserving an AV collection with over 10,000 AV records, lessons learned in selecting records for digitization based upon selection criteria, resources required for digitizing high quantities of at-risk AV records, and the process of navigating file format preservation challenges with limited resources. The presentation will highlight the dichotomy between digital preservation 'best practices' for AV records vs. available resources or storage space isn't easily scalable. We hope to answer the question of "what format is best for digitized AV records if you don't have unlimited storage space?".  

Artifacts in the Archives

Artifacts in your archival vaults need a more unique approach to collections care. Are you satisfied with how your artifacts are being managed? Follow a case study in this presentation and consider these lessons for yourself.

The economics of imagination in the archives: what happens when the money runs out?

In 2019, the University of Ottawa Library's Archives and Special Collections (ARCS) was gifted a significant financial donation to support our Women's Archives.  This collection has its roots in the Canadian Women's Movement Archive (CWMA) which was born out of the feminist movement as a grassroots community archive overseen and cared for by activists.  Since coming to the University of Ottawa in 1992, our institutional archive has been attempting to continue the legacy of the CWMA within the confines of a traditional academic library.  It is only however with the financial support provided by the donation to the Women's Archives that we have had the luxury of time and staff support to reimagine what the archives can be.  The past couple of years has seen us engaging with community and reestablishing trust with feminist activists through conversations, hosting events and supporting the work of feminist organizations.  We have also been rethinking and adapting traditional archival practice, including acquisition, description and dissemination, including building new research tools, developing new forms, updating language, designing educational programming, embarking on oral history projects and creating engaging exhibits.  Archivists have thus been able to take on new roles as storytellers, creators, advisors, teachers and activists. This session will discuss some of the activities and approaches that ARCS has been undertaking in the past 6 years to become a space of conversation, a place where historical narratives and contemporary issues come together, and what happens when the money runs out.  Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande will speak about the work she has done as storyteller in residence, archivist Marie Noel will speak about new approaches to educational programming and community events and Marina Bokovay, the Head of ARCS, will talk about goals and aspirations for the future as well as what is at stake.   

Between the Archive and the Audience: Pedagogies of Queer Public History

This storytelling session explores how LGBTQ2+ archives, heritage organizations, and community-based practitioners can make archival materials accessible, meaningful, and relevant to non-specialist audiences through innovative pedagogical approaches. Drawing on case studies from both the UK and Canada, the session examines how queer public history is taught outside formal academic settings, particularly through digital programming, storytelling, and community-led learning.

From Principle to Practice: Archival Theory and the Day Schools Project at Library and Archives Canada

This presentation examines how archival standards are translated into daily practice through the Federal Indian Day Schools Project (DSP). Running from 2022 to 2026, the DSP is one of the largest and most complex digitization initiatives at Library and Archives Canada, encompassing up to six million pages of records created by the former Department of Indian Affairs. Organized within colonial administrative systems, these records have long been difficult for Survivors and researchers to locate and navigate. The DSP has improved discoverability of largely restricted records through enhanced file-level descriptions, and new and innovative internal tools designed to operate at unprecedented scale within legislative constraints. Working with sensitive and restricted materials also exposed gaps in existing descriptive standards and challenged assumptions about traditional archival systems. The project offers a model for advancing ethical, user-centred approaches to description, demonstrating how archives can improve access and accountability while responding to the realities of colonial records and their ongoing impacts.