Conference Agenda

The Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives (AMBA) is a non-profit, volunteer-driven community archive in Ontario that preserves the region’s history. This presentation explores AMBA’s journey, highlighting its diverse collections, oral histories from long-standing volunteers (25 years), digitization efforts, and online exhibits. Balancing traditional preservation methods with modern approaches allows the community to connect with its past and create a shared future while promoting inclusivity.

The Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives (AMBA), a volunteer-driven non-profit organization founded in 1986, has been important in preserving the History of communities in two towns in Ontario, Canada. This paper explores AMBA's approach to archival practice through traditional and modern techniques, reflecting the importance of safeguarding administrative, individual, and collective memories. The presentation will demonstrate how AMBA has adapted to societal challenges and technological demands while remaining embedded in the community it serves.

As a community archive, AMBA serves as a repository of historical documents donated by the community and actively shapes their identity. It preserves a wide range of materials, including land records, photographs, scrapbooks, family papers, maps, and business archives. It focuses on local industries, such as the lumbering era, which shaped the region's development. Special attention will be given to the Archives' collections, such as the Gillies Brothers of Braeside, McLachlin Brothers of Arnprior, and Charles Macnamara Collection, which document significant aspects of the local industrial past and its impact on Canadian History.

The presentation will include oral histories of the most important resources in our organization, AMBA's long-standing volunteers. Many of them have been integral to the Archives for over 25 years, and their stories offer a personal perspective on the development of AMBA, including its founding, growth, and the challenges faced along the way. These volunteer-led collections provide valuable insight into the organization's evolution, archives' changing role in preserving the community's identity, and how we become an award-winning institution.

AMBA has also embraced digital technology to broaden access to its collections. The archives have made their holdings available to a wider audience through online exhibitions and digitization projects. For example, the White Pine College exhibit highlights the significance of the lumbering era through interviews with former mill workers from Braeside, offering a unique perspective on the local industry and its impact. Another exhibit features the Charles Macnamara Collection, which showcases the work of one of Arnprior's earliest photographers and his documentation of the local natural environment and lumber camps. These exhibitions, created through collaborations with volunteers and external funding, reflect the Archives' ability to adapt to the changing landscape of memory preservation.

Additionally, this paper will examine AMBA's strategies for overcoming common challenges small community archives face, including limited resources, space, and an aging volunteer base. AMBA's solution-oriented approach includes creative community partnerships, grant funding for digitization projects, and developing programs such as 150 Years of Living off the Land, The Lumbering Era, and the Walking Through the Decades historical tours, which foster greater community involvement and public engagement with the Archives.

Finally, this presentation will consider how AMBA's work balances past and traditional archival practices with strategies to engage and preserve community identities. It will also include the fundamental role of archives in safeguarding local, national, and collective identities while addressing the growing relevance of community archives to reflect marginalized voices and communities. By leveraging volunteering, digitalization, and public engagement, AMBA ensures that History remains a part of the community's identity.

By fully processing its model archive and implementing a digital asset management system for its other design assets, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is able to illuminate its holdings and demonstrate its role in documenting the built and unbuilt environment through the lens of BIG's projects. In doing so, the firm is able to connect to the communities touched by its architectural endeavors.

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), is a private architectural firm with eight offices in Europe, North America, and Asia employing over 700 people. A full-scope firm that offers services in Landscape, Architecture, Products, Planning, and Vision, BIG’s reputation has been that of a scrappy, rule-breaking, avant-garde architecture firm and the Model Archive displays this character in each of its models. Following years of adhering to a 'BIG keeps everything’ protocol and a frustrating curatorial process with the Formgiving exhibition, all agreed the Model Archive was in an impossible-to-manage state and nearly uninterpretable. Models desired for the exhibition were never found, discovered in unsalvageable conditions, or unidentifiable. Rather than disposing of the model archive, BIG invested in a year-long processing project to illuminate our holdings and demonstrate its crucial role documenting the built and unbuilt environment. Through the lens of both realized and unrealized projects, BIG’s assets – physical, digital, and anecdotal – contribute to the cultural framework of our built environment. For instance, the research conducted by teams at the outset of each project offers invaluable insights, reflecting the challenges and intricacies of a particular location while also addressing the social, economic, and cultural priorities of its time. From a more artistic standpoint, BIG's model archive showcases architectural trends and technical advancements, highlighting the use of specific materials and various glue and joinery techniques. Through several exhibitions such as "Ocean Blindness – We Don’t Know the Ocean" (AXIS Gallery, Tokyo, September 2023), BIG’s archival materials, including models, digital visualizations, and research documentation, provided visitors with a comprehensive view of the project’s potential to tackle challenges associated with coastal urbanization, thereby bridging a gap between urban lifestyles and our deep reliance on the ocean. BIG's architectural assets, whether utilized internally or shared broadly through public exhibitions and publications are invaluable to providing information and context to the communities and environments where our projects our located in the world.

Momentum is building to centre Indigenous nations and communities in information practice, teaching, and research for an archival future that centres multiple ways of doing and paradigms.

Momentum is building to centre Indigenous nations and communities in information practice, teaching, and research for an archival future that centres multiple ways of doing and paradigms. A growing assemblage of international statements and protocols—e.g., the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Sovereignty, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the International Council on Archives Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration, the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives Reconciliation Framework, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, Principles on Indigenous Archival Repatriation (PINAR), the Indigenous Archives Collective on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges and Information Held in Archives, the National Library of Australia’s Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols - reflect this shift both within specific domains and broadly across all facets of information work.

In this presentation, researchers and practitioners from different standpoints and different countries working across the archival practice to support Indigenous and First Nations’ rights in records will discuss their work and projects related to archival repatriation or reclamation to communities across respective unceded lands.

2024 was the 5th anniversary of the ICA’s Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration, a milestone in the international archival community. This paper discusses Tracking Tandanya, a project gathering information on the implementation of the Declaration in Australia and in overseas institutions working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The project aims to establish an evidence base to identify strengths and areas for improvement in supporting Indigenous self-determination in archives.

2024 marked the 5th anniversary of the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration, a milestone in the international archival community's commitment to transform archives by centering Indigenous leadership, self-determination and knowledge systems (International Council on Archives, 2019). At its core, the Declaration calls for a fundamental resetting of relationships with Indigenous peoples and a radical reimagining of archives to honour Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. The Declaration has received strong support in Australia, however, without a clear implementation strategy, it remains difficult to assess how the Declaration is being activated, and crucially, how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are shaping these changes (Barrowcliffe et al, 2021).

This paper will introduce the Australia-based research project Tracking Tandanya, a collaboration between the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, and the Australian Society of Archivists. Through the collection of self-reported data and development of a reporting dashboard, Tracking Tandanya tracks how the Declaration is achieving its goals of radically transforming archives to support Indigenous priorities. The project gathers information on the implementation of the Declaration in Australia, as well as from overseas institutions working on returning materials to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. By establishing this evidence base, the project aims to identify both strengths and areas for improvement in supporting Indigenous self-determination in archives.

The paper’s four speakers will discuss the following: 1) Introduce the project and the importance of the Declaration for Indigenous priorities and archives; 2) Share insights from the 2024 Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration Symposium held in Aotearoa; 3) Report on early project findings 4) Discuss opportunities and challenges related to Indigenous Archival Futures, and in particular reflect on the education and training needs of archivists. The paper will overall provide insights into what Indigenous Archival Futures might encompass in the years ahead, highlighting how Critical Indigenous Archival Studies – informed by Indigenous research methodologies and methods – can support current archivists, while fostering the development of an Indigenous archives workforce aligned with community goals and self-determination.