Guardians of our history

As Concordia’s 50th anniversary draws near, archivist Eric Côté thinks that more people should know about the department that serves as official custodian of heritage.

“One of our roles is to promote the university’s history,” says Côté of Records Management and Archives (RMA). “It includes many achievements, and also mistakes that we need to remember so that we don’t make them again.”

The small but dedicated RMA, which itself turned 50 in 2023, encompasses two groups of employees: a records-management team that helps faculty and staff to organize their documents in compliance with laws and university regulations, and an archives team that stores and catalogues materials for current and future generations to consult.

Not only do the archivists continually collect documents through institutional channels such as academic units, they also accept private donations from faculty, staff and alumni. As a result, their extensive holdings — which predate the merger of Sir George Williams University and Loyola College in 1974, and include photos, event posters, lecture notes, press releases, yearbooks, sports jerseys, trophies, videos and more — cover wide swaths of university life.

“Not counting digital documents, we have around 6,200 boxes of papers in our vault,” says Julie Daoust, Concordia’s RMA lead.

All that material has survived until today despite the fact that much of it was soaked by firefighters’ hoses when a blaze broke out in one of Concordia’s annexes in the winter of 1982.

The archivist at the time, Nancy Marrelli, BA 84, contributed greatly to saving the collection. Her written account tells how papers that had become solid blocks of ice were stored in freezer trucks until the university could arrange to freeze-dry them at a food-processing plant.

From analog to digital

Thanks to the vision and leadership of Marie-Pierre Aubé, RMA’s director and Concordia’s university archivist since 2010, the digital age has brought improvements to the department. For starters, scanning analog materials makes them easier to search and retrieve.

“What used to take days to find can now take minutes,” says Eric Côté.

Digitization also helps with preservation, since the people who want to see brittle old files now won’t need to handle them.

Meanwhile, to protect digital data itself, the archivists store select content in a specialized digital-preservation environment. It’s also backed up on servers at multiple geographical locations to reduce the risk that a single disaster could take out all the copies. Finally, they perform regular bit-level checks to ensure file integrity and trustworthy data over time.

One of the team’s greatest digital-transformation challenges is deciding what to put online. Materials with high historical value get priority, although the archivists need to watch out for materials that might be under copyright protection.

They’ve also come across documents that deserve a content warning when they go on the web. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, a lot of racist and sexist ideas plague publications from decades past. And every so often, something just “goes over the edge” of today’s content norms, as Côté puts it.

“As an example, Loyola College was fairly conservative, but things sort of exploded there at the end of the 1960s,” he says. “In an issue of Gamut, a student-run magazine, we found a whole series of nude photos. I mean, they’re artistic, but we still have to make sure people know it’s in there before they click.”

Getting ‘creative to find solutions’

Many new records are “born digital,” meaning that when hard copies exist at all, they’re just printouts of the original digital format.

Some of this content makes its way into RMA’s web collections with the help of Olivier Bisaillon-Lemay, an archives reference technician whose responsibilities include sending web crawlers to capture relevant pages and posts. Archived web content will remain available even after the original host takes it down.

Some of Concordia’s web collections try to gather everything coming from a particular source, such as the news section of Concordia’s website. Others are centred on topics that may be of special interest to future researchers, such as COVID-19 or Concordia’s Indigenous community.

Then there are the born-digital files that don’t live online but rather on storage devices such as discs and drives. Some of these media can be troublesome, according to Julie Daoust.

“Especially CDs and DVDs: Archivists don’t like them!” she says. “People used to use them a lot, but they’re not the most stable format. Even though they’re not terribly old, we’re not always able to extract the information, which is kind of heartbreaking.”

So far, few university archives have tackled the issues posed by the degradation of digital media.

“That forces us to be creative and find solutions,” says John Richan, Concordia’s digital archivist.

In a trailblazing move, Richan and his colleagues opened a digital preservation lab in 2020. It’s a space dedicated to migrating vulnerable data into formats that meet the best practices of today.

The lab’s legacy hardware and specialized equipment mean it can take on large and challenging projects.

“For example, we discovered that putting CDs into a drive one at a time and copying and pasting the data is not very efficient for the volume of discs we receive,” says Richan.

“So, we have a machine that can stack up to 100 CDs at once and pull the data. It’s been a lifesaver.”

Students from Concordia and other Montreal universities visit the lab to gain experience with digital archiving.

“As much as the lab is a space for us to work, we’ve always envisioned it as a research and teaching opportunity, too,” he says.

A rich resource for the community

Last year, Bisaillon-Lemay fielded nearly 150 requests from people who wanted to consult Concordia’s archives.

“That part of my job is getting easier as time goes on,” he says, explaining that researchers can now often find what they need without him thanks to RMA’s online research tools.

Still, he emphasizes that he’s available to assist anyone who finds the tools tricky to use or who’s interested in digging into records that haven’t been digitized.

In addition to the obvious — documenting Concordia’s history as an institution — the archives are also useful for people who are researching the lives or ideas of notable faculty or alumni.

For instance, RMA recently received more than 50 boxes of donated material from Pnina Gagnon, a prolific contemporary artist and the widow of the art historian François-Marc Gagnon, an affiliate professor at Concordia and the founding director of its Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

“He’s a big part of Quebec’s cultural landscape,” says Eric Côté with enthusiasm. “He published so many books and gave presentations around the world, and he was on TV for most of the ’90s. I remember watching him as a teenager! It’s humbling when you arrive in front of a body of work like this.”

In addition to professional academics and journalists, RMA’s team also assists students, employees and alumni, including those who are doing research for personal reasons.

“A few years back, there was a person who had an illness that made her forget a lot of things about her life,” says Daoust. “So, she asked us questions and we were able to help her recall her time at Concordia.”

“Our mandate is to help people,” Daoust continues. “We know it can be difficult to work with archives when you aren’t used to it. But 95 per cent of the time, we can find what you’re looking for, or at least something relevant. We’re here for you.” 

To donate materials to the archives, visit concordia.ca/donate/archives.

For support in using Concordia’s archives for professional or personal research, write to archives@concordia.ca.