Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Adam, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I think that your perspective of being a senior archivist at a large archives, but also involved with community archiving, can bring so much different depth to this conversation.

So thank you so much for making time to talk with me today.

Adam Birrell:        You’re very welcome. Thank you for asking me. It’s great.

SC:        I’ve been thinking a lot about small community organizations and how they understand their work during this time. And my first question is a big question about history: Have you thought about history any different because of this time? And I wonder how that impacts or that shapes or intersects with your work both in a big provincial archives but also these smaller community organizations.

AB:        It is interesting these settings, because we’re very much surrounded by records and the legacy of previous health epidemics and pandemics in both Archives of Ontario setting, as well as the ArQuives, formerly called the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. In the provincial archive setting, we do have records that concern the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and we have these images of people wearing masks and public notices about keeping safe and public health initiatives seem very distant and now, we’re having our own moment for that, so to speak.

And so, it really brings those moments really close. It’s a lot easier to relate to what people were going through then, and now we’re walking through the streets and through our grocery stores in 2020 wearing masks, seeing people wearing masks and having the same fears and anxieties that people must have experienced over a century ago. In the archive’s setting; volunteer, small or medium-sized archives if you will, we have the legacy, the very tragic legacy of the AIDS crisis for that community. And as someone who is too young to remember the 1800s portion of that, it’s being in — somebody [inaudible 0:04:16.7] in the newspaper pages of obituaries in 2020 and how we’ve never seen this before. And it’s like, well, actually, we have.

AB:        And kind of the LGBT community has seen this and has experienced this. And it is within living memory, and the way that the 1918 pandemic is largely not, but it is interesting to, when you haven’t witnessed those personally how going through this experience brings the experiences of those two very significant events to the forefront, then you can really put them very much more readily.

SC:        Yeah, it’s interesting that you’ve brought up the AIDS crisis in the 1980s because I also have been thinking about that a lot in how the AIDS crisis put so much fear and anxiety in the gay and lesbian community. Even just about like being out, right? Like you couldn’t go to the bars in the same way. You couldn’t meet people, especially if you weren’t out to your family. And like that undercurrent of fear and anxiety that if you are not a member of that community, you can very well not think of that history, but that this moment is so much of this fear and anxiety for so many more people.

And when I say that I think about history differently in this moment, I think about how it’s so easy for us to ignore or discount this giant thing that happened in the 1980s. The giant fear, because it doesn’t seem like we have the records, but we do have the records. They are just in different place of them. Places we might not think of going to get teaching and learning materials, for example.

AB:        Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that was true that some people will attract to draw perhaps too closely parallel connections between those, the AIDS crisis and today, and there is a lot of significant differences. Mainly the immediacy of public bonds to it was very different. And as you allude to the experiences of the individual how people — there was that added layer then of homophobia and people being positive and not being able to talk about their experiences, where today because this is a society-wide issue if you will rather than a community issue, which was ignored for a long time in the AIDs circumstance, they are very different, but there are some similarities, for sure. And it is interesting to think about that and it makes you think differently about that time period as well.

SC:        And like, I think that is what is so outreached in this moment as a teaching moment how it really should force us to reconsider so many different points of history and the narratives that we think we know about them.

SC:        So maybe could you talk about if you think teaching history might change after this? Now, I know you aren’t directly a history educator, but because you are an archivist and you work with large and smaller and medium-sized archives you were dealing with, then you’re exploring the stuff with so much teaching and learning. Do you think the way that we will be able to mobilize these records? Be able to teach with these records might shift and change after this time?

AB:        I do. And I think the expectations around access will change considerably. They already have been engaging for a long time, but I mean, right now, we were talking now over video conference because we can’t meet in person. I mean, that’s an easier thing to mobilize and do. And I’m sure lots of people are using video conferencing they’ve never used it before. I know my parents [inaudible 0:08:24.1] their first time. But in terms of access to resources, the expectations are changing even more than they have before.

And I think I don’t know that we’ll go back to normal “if you will” after that. I think we [inaudible 0:08:43.3*crossed] maybe another threshold in terms of demand for online access to resources. We’ve seen that in libraries, we’ve seen that in museums, who are literally and virtually opening their doors to virtual tours of their institutions who may never have done that before. [inaudible 0:08:59.6] none of us to the extent.

As an archivist, whether it is the collection of the size of the Archives of Ontario or medium-sized archives like The ArQuives or very small Thornhill Archives collection, which is the, by all definitions, a very small collection, each of those have their own reserves challenges. I mean, the Archives of Ontario is in many respects, very well-resourced, but it’s a matter of scale. And perhaps under resource, we look at the size of the collection that we have to meet the increasing demands of providing online access to even the materials that are open access.

So it is going to be interesting to see as this continues and after the immediacy of the crisis is over, increased calls for photographs and films, and cartographic records, architectural records being put online so that our increasingly online world can meet that demand.

I mean, we have video chats every week with my colleagues. Many of them have children, and they talk about their kids using Google classrooms and other online learning modules. And so, it’s only a matter of time before this demand for online learning is going to bump up against archival library museum resource of being similarly available online. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. This is purely from approaching the — from the practical standpoint of resources and bringing [inaudible 0:10:38.2] is really. And as long as we’ve had a digital world whereas our collections were still majority analog, and this is going to take time. So from collections management archivist’s perspective, that is it’s kind of scary because we want to be able to meet those challenges, but it will take time.

SC:        Well, I‘m thinking about small archives like the Thornhill Archives. How does this shift how you and the other volunteers might think about your work? Because I think about how much labour and how much cost goes into digitizing things. That it seems easy because we all have our phone so close, but it’s not this easy, cheap free thing.

AB:        It’s not. And I think it might bring calls to increase that training and capacity at different levels. And one project that we’ve discussed locally, which is actually been discussed at a fourth organization that I’m sort of potentially involved with sort of an advisor capacity of small house, museum, heritage center that has a archival collection that actually has been digitized through student effort a couple of summers ago. And up until now, there has been sort of casual chit-chat about involving seniors who could, from the comfort of their own home, transcribe those letters to make them more accessible. And it’s something we’ve only talked about up until this point, but, well, now everyone is in their own home. We have those TIFF images sitting on hard drives and we’re starting to talk about actually moving forward that project that’s been on the backburner because everyone has been busy with their lives. And now, that we have more time at our disposal, we’re actually looking at moving forward with that transcription project.

So it’s been a nudge. Well, and since it’s a [inaudible 0:12:38.0] example of where this pandemic which has affected many different people in different ways has pushed the project forward.

SC:        This question seems like a leading question. Like we’ve rehearsed it before him, but it’s not. So I apologize, but [inaudible 0:12:59.3], which I now realize makes it extra scary.

But I think I’d like a small community archives that if people are interested in donating their records too, especially older people, there’s kind of this vision of what an archive is. Do you think it’s going to — with a move online, do you think it’s going to shift people’s willingness, but also like understanding of what it means to donate if things are going to go up online?

AB:        And that’s something that we’ve been aware of sometime, archivist [inaudible 0:13:37.1] but aware of our public perception that the creature in the basement over the dusty records is something — is an image that we’ve been all too happy to shed, but there are some resistance to that. With the March tolerance, we’re already in the midst of it, but with archives, everything lacks behind. We’re increasingly getting electronic records more and more, and there is that fear that one of the great motivations of archival donation is the cupboards are full, the shelves are full, the filing cabinets are fully well with digital storage becoming so cheap.

If you filled the hard drive and just buy another hard drive, where is your incentive? And so, that actually pushes us to be more — we have to be a lot more diligent and a lot more active in terms of approaching donors, whether they are new people or organizations that we want to approach or people who we haven’t heard from in 10 or 20 years, and say, “Well, we want your archives and we want not only the [inaudible 0:14:42.6] they have in the door, but also the materials you have in your hard drive. Your email accounts, that’s a really challenging one to motivate people because they think of their email theirs. “That’s mine. Those aren’t business records, that’s my email.”

In some cases, the distinction is very blended, especially if you’re talking about volunteer organizations where the evidence of your involvement is literally intermixed with your correspondence with your family. Those are much wider challenges that have been around for longer than this moment we’re in now, but it does bring to the forefront other things that have been happening.

We’ve seen people create records of this moment. Taking photos of boarded up windows along the streets where there used to be opened businesses and now there is a street that’s empty of people. There’s been such a jarring change in the accessibility and fullness of our landscape in terms of people and activity, that people are documenting that. People are taking photos of pole signs and public health notices. People wearing mask, you name it, and people are becoming much more aware of becoming record creators. And we as archivists San Diego, for instance, have been talking about the importance of documenting that this particular moment, not necessarily the full complete archival lives of these individuals and businesses, but kind of a cross-section of the documentation of this particular moment.

And T, for example, has a web-archiving initiative to document COVID-19 response in messaging and the AL has been getting involved with that to a certain extent. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but it does make you think differently of both capturing records and really to think differently about the process of archiving a particular moment, which maybe is different than approaching [inaudible 0:16:38.5] learn organization about your full archival history.

SC:        Yeah. Like, I think that, like, this moment is able to reveal a lot of different things about the historicity of kind of normal interactions.

SC:        And it might encourage people to want to be able to have that as a more public or open record either now or in the future as a way to identify that like, that this is who I was in this moment. This is my response.

AB:        That’s right. And what’s interesting as I’ve seen sites where people have been collecting photos, you can learn some sites you can go to and submit your own photos. Photos of streets of the changing environment we’re in and how people are experiencing that. And on the one hand, it’s really great. People are gathering, and that people were saving it. But just like digital records and the online environment is much more fragile than the analog environments. And at least in the third term, one thing I wonder about those kind of resources, if we approach people who are building those resources and say we want to archive this and document this, I wonder about their response. Is it, “Well, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s online. It’s already documented, already captured”?

And I think it calls to us as information professionals in the widest sense to come in with wearing our preservation hat, wearing our knowledge of a lot of the risk to digital records and that, really, in a year from now, are we going to see this things surviving online? And on Facebook? On Twitter? Wherever these things have been captured in the moment, there is an adherent risk to them as resources that are not like taking a roll of film and sticking it into a drawer or saving posters in a drawer that you can find 20 years from now. There is much more immediacy to the need to preserve these digital objects.

SC:        Mm-hmm. And something than [inaudible *Kristin] again, an archivist that I interviewed earlier, talked about is about the how much there is going to be, and the value of them, and how to think through those things. To think through the meaning and significance when — like, I can literally take a thousand pictures of my day-to-day, will that demonstrate what the COVID pandemic was for everyone in Toronto? 100% no, but I still have the thousand photos, you know.

AB:        Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, that the volume is a huge factor. And as archivist, we go through a lot of process. I mean, where a government archives process is what we do. Speaking with my AL [inaudible 0:19:34.0] and we go through a lot of appraisal to determine what it is that we want to acquire. I think in order to respond effectively to this, and i[inaudible 0:19:42.9] some of this is already happening in many other institutions. I saw a National Post article that talked about the different organizations that are documenting COVID in different ways whether that’s institutionally, regionally, nationally. And they are sort of have been focusing on different areas that we’re not going to be looking at documenting this, collecting one person’s photos or an organization’s Twitter account. It’s really maybe a cross-section looking about universities that document hashtags.

AB:        And sometimes [inaudible 0:20:21.5]. Sometimes it’s an occurrence of some kind where you actually take all the tweets or all the records that document that. And it’s a different way. It’s really a way that is largely foreign from an archival standpoint because we want to document all. We want to document all the activities of life and existence of an organization or a person, but that might not be the best way to document COVID-19 in 2020.

AB:        And it might be a slice of how we document things differently.

SC:        Yeah. And for me, as a history educator too, I think about the ways that we can link stories to these records as a way to demonstrate how — because we can be very hyper aware of this notion of reporting, that if we’re attaching stories to the records that we want to make public, then we can help kind of narrate a particular version that we are trying to show even if historians down the line will challenge that and shift that, but we can kind of connect it with that. So this leads to my third question, because for me, one of the really amazing things about primary sources is that they can really highlight how, and this is something I’ve talked about in a Kennedy’s history webinar, which I will link above.

But like, it shows that we were there, and it shows that they were there. Like, for me, primary sources can really challenge so many notions that we expect about history, and this is why I say that we need to imagine a new we. We need to be more aware of the we together that I think we get in our heads a particular narrative about the past that primary sources can really challenge. So I end this little three-question interview by asking people, do you think that the ways that we’re going to imagine or imagine a new we will shift and change after this moment. And if so, in what ways? And if not, why not?

AB:        Yeah, it’s interesting. And I think that a big part of this is not about subjects that we’re documenting or, what’s the best way to say this? From a provincial archives respective, I think we’re pretty confident we’re going to be preserving the public health, the public messaging policy behind this. But that’s far from enough, and we need to make sure that we’re documenting the diversity of voices here in order to responsibly capture a record of this moment in time, which can be very fleeting.

I know as we’re sitting at home, working from home, hopefully working from home, it can seem like it’s going on forever, but really, this is a short moment. Hopefully, will be a short moment. It is so important that we capture diversity of voices. The individual hopes and fears, whether that is on Twitter messages, people who have been responding to this from a professional standpoint; doctors and nurses, frontline people, people working in grocery stores, migrant workers who are encountering issues around protecting their own health while they’re doing their jobs.

So it’s really documenting a diversity of voices in this space, not just the official messaging that I think is going to be, hopefully, plentiful in terms of what we’re able to preserve for this moment. And so, that really is our challenge as well. It doesn’t mean that every institution has to do everything, but there’s an important element of working together. Institutions need to work with each other to make sure that, all right, maybe you’ve got this piece of it, maybe you’ve got this piece. And we’re, as an organization, part of the provincial acquisition strategy with the Archives Association of Ontario. And I have no doubt that as this goes forward, there will be discussions about regional archives augmenting this regionally, local archives documenting this locally. Sort of taking the appropriate steps to capture what is [inaudible 0:24:44.0] thing in your realm, but also making sure that you’re filling in the gaps that maybe you hadn’t considered. So it does require a creative [inaudible 0:24:51.9].

SC:        Yeah. And for me, what I heard there too is how important it is that we are aware that different archives aren’t designed to archive the same material. Like, they’re not designed to do everything and how important it is to work with different types of archives in order to tell a more full story of who we are together. So thank you so much about bringing those different perspectives. I think it’s so important for us to be cognizant of the work of archivists in helping to shape how we mobilize history. And in essence then, the histories that we are able to teach and learn. So, thank you so much.

AB:        You’re welcome. Thank you for this opportunity.

SC:        Yeah, this is really great. And I’m gonna provide all the links to the different organizations you work with below. And any other things that you think are useful — just got very windy here. Any other thing that you think it will be useful for people to kind of understand this moment or to record this moment? So, thank you again.

AB:        You’re very welcome. Thanks, Samantha.

SC:        Okay, we’ll talk later. Bye.

AB:        All right, buh-bye.