Reflections on a year of new and enriched holdings at Concordia’s Records Management and Archives

Eric Côté is archivist and John Richan is digital archivist at Concordia’s Records Management and Archives. They prepared this summary of the past 12 months at RMA.

Concordia’s 50th anniversary celebrations kept Records Management and Archives (RMA) busy in 2024. The unit supported research for the Concordia University at 50 public history book and produced a rich timeline of our history in collaboration with the Concordia Library.  

With a somewhat back-to-normal 2025, new archival acquisitions and further developments in the analogue and digital collections have made for a challenging and exciting year.

New acquisitions

Over the course of 2025, RMA continued to acquire archival material from notable and distinguished Concordians. The acquisition, preservation and ongoing access to the archives helps support community building and research activities.

Received during Fall 2024, the Anastasios Anastasopoulos materials were processed last winter. Anastasopoulos (1933–2024) started his career at Sir George Williams University as an assistant professor of economics in 1967! After archival processing, eight boxes of archival records now highlight his career at Concordia as a professor emeritus, a published researcher and a director of the Institute of Applied Economic Research.

The archives contain academic papers, teaching materials (course outlines, notes, textbooks), correspondence, and a wide array of notes. All are related to his field of expertise: macroeconomic theory and policy, financial economics, the theory of uncertainty and applied general equilibrium models.

Also acquired during fall 2024 are the archives of Terence Byrnes (1948–2023). graciously donated to Concordia by his family. The fonds is composed of materials related to Byrnes’ teaching in the Department of English, as well as his presentations at various colloquia, distinctions he received and his work as an editor and writer. Most of all, the fonds showcases his renowned photography, including more than 1000 prints, negatives and slides related to his many projects. The most notable images include “Springfield,” “Literary Portraits,” “Crowns” and “Fair Game.”

Enriching our holdings

RMA has also received additional materials from pre-existing fonds. The Leila Sujir fonds includes new textual records related to her film Dreams of the Night Cleaners and immersive sound and video project, “Tulipomania,” as well as other projects linked to Elastic Spaces. The fonds also received materials from presentations made at different conferences, seminars and talks, plus documentation collected while she researched her creative projects.

Maïr Verthuy has also added materials to her fonds last summer. Most of the additions are records related to her extensive research on French writer Hélène Parmelin, with whom she had a close relationship. Parmelin entrusted Verthuy with part of her personal archives: scrapbooks of press clippings that collect her writings in different newspapers from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as some correspondence. Also included are recordings of interviews Verthuy made with friends, colleagues and peers of Parmelin while working on a book on her body of work.

RMA also took some time last year to revisit some of the private fonds we received in the past that we thought needed extra special care. One of them is the Marjorie Goodfellow (1938–2024) fonds.  Marjorie Goodfellow was the assistant director and head of public services of the Sir George Williams University Library from 1968 to 1973. An active member of Alliance Québec (of which she was vice-president in 1985), Goodfellow trusted the Concordia Archives to preserve the alliance’s records. Throughout the 1990s, she preserved reports, publications, minutes of meetings, constitution records, policies, press clippings and correspondence — all which are included in the fonds.

All these items (and more!) are available for public consultation. To make an appointment, write to archives@concordia.ca.

Digitization and digital preservation

RMA continued to digitize and digitally preserve items from various archival fonds and collections this year. The Concordia Yearbooks from 1975 to 2010 are now all available online as part of our Internet Archive collection!

Past issues of The Link, from the first number published in August 1980 to 1995, are also available on Internet Archive.

RMA also had recordings from the International Conference on Research and Teaching Related to Women digitized from original quarter-inch audio reels. Held in the summer of 1982 and spearheaded by Maïr Verthuy and the members of the young Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the conference attracted more than 300 women from 80 different countries. The recordings are also available on Internet Archive.

Collaborating with the Concordia community

This past year saw RMA support a variety of Concordia community-based media groups including: CJLO, CUTV and L’Organe. Support for these groups included conducting an archival research workshop for CJLO, a large-scale (and ongoing) video digitization and access project with CUTV, and the acquisition of the L’Organe archives.

Each of these collaborations is rewarding, as RMA staff are often introducing first-time archives users and students to working with primary source material, carrying out archival research and preservation best practice.

The Concordia University Alumni and Friends Archives Collection was also enriched this year, thanks to generous donations. Past student and staff member Patricia Chau handed RMA numbers from 1997 and 1998 of The Commerce Exchange, published monthly by the Commerce and Administration Students Association (CASA). Additionally, the archives received an Agenda Report and Agenda Survey Results report from the CASA Agenda Committee, photographs from the committee members of 1995–1996 and some correspondence, and a photograph of the secretary-general sector members in the 1990s.

Planned Donor Joyce H. Newton donated a series of photos taken while travelling in Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Vermont during the 1980s and 1990s, including some taken in Ottawa on July 1, 1997, during the Royal Tour. Two photographs show the carriage in which Queen Elizabeth II rode during the parade.

Three-time graduate Irene Steiner contributed to the collection with A Legacy of Strength and Knowledge, a self-published anthology of texts she wrote on different topics close to her heart. She also donated a copy of her autobiography, A Life of the Twentieth Century, published in 2014.

RMA continues to enhance teaching and experiential learning opportunities through various internship placements, support course assignments and develop strategic digitization projects through the RMA Digital Preservation Lab. A list of collaborations and projects can be found on the RMA Digital Preservation Lab website.       

Below is a snapshot of the ongoing CUTV digitization project:

2026 and beyond

RMA has recently received an extensive donation from Kevin Austin, professor emeritus in the Department of Music. The materials include archives from the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) and the Concordia Electroacoustic Composers Group (CECG). The items are being processed and should be available to researchers by the first quarter of 2026.

The digitization of issues of The Link from 1996 and onward will resume in early 2026. We also wish to continue to digitize items to feed our Concordia Newsletters collection.

Records Management and Archives invites the community to share which items they’d like to be able to access online by writing to archives@concordia.ca

Find out more about Concordia’s Records Management and Archives.