News from the historical society’s archives
As you may now know, the Société d’histoire de Coaticook received in 2017 a $54,368 grant from Library and Archives Canada, more particularly from the Documentary Heritage Communities Program. We had proposed a project where we would hire a professional archivist to update the naming, describing, and classification systems for our archives so that they are aligned with the industry’s rules and guidelines.
At the same time, the archivist would have to filter out our collections in order to clean out what had to be thrown away and give to whom it may concern the documents that should be conserved elsewhere. Finally, all this work had to be condensed into a digital database accessible by everyone to facilitate access to our archives. I will mention also that the Société d’histoire de Waterville, the co-applicant organisation, also had its share of the grant and of the archivist.
We then call on Mrs. Jody Robinson, a well-known archivist in the Eastern Townships. She took 10 months to filter out, clear out, describe, name, and classify our archives. Everybody can now make use of her work by searching through our catalogue by going to in the Société d’histoire de Coaticook section of the Eastern Townships Archives Portal at https://www.townshipsarchives.ca/coaticook-historical-society. This site, hosted by the Eastern Townships Resource Center (ETRC), is entirely in both English and French. You will also find a few samples from our photo collections. So, is you find something interesting, we invite you to come up to the historical society to find out more and maybe make other nice discoveries.
Finally, it would not be fair to our volunteers if I would not emphasise the importance of their efforts over the years to tackle our archives. They established the basis of classification and descriptions systems, not to mention the colossal work of research behind document identification, all this without the expert advice and resources we just had. This project was not to erase the work done in the past, but rather to upgrade and improve on what had been done so that our archives could be better known on the Web.
I, therefore, join the rest of the Board of Directors of the Société d’histoire de Coaticook to thank everyone who contributed to the success of the endeavour and to invite everyone to visit the Eastern Townships Archives Portal (https://www.townshipsarchives.ca/coaticook-historical-society) and make good use of this new resource to learn more about your past and your heritage.
Karl Bourassa, historian and treasurer
Société d’histoire de Coaticook
