Archives are cool, hip, fun, quite participatory, and increasingly inclusive. Hooray! Once again, our volunteer-run organization joins the archival community in celebrating the International Archives Week.
If you are curious or passionate about archives, the International Council on Archives (ICA) provides a vast agenda of activities which take place in many countries. We proudly add to the festivities our first collection development campaign: COLLECTION CONNECTION. The ICA also offers fantastic webinars, in English, French and Spanish, over the coming days.
The theme this year is accessibility. It is timely for us, because we have just enabled user subscriptions on our website. Visitors can now create their page, album, gallery, group, and network. Happy #IAW2025 to us all!
You have a research report to publish? Children and Society : The International Journal of Childhood and Children’s Services is calling you. Published by the National Children’s Bureau (UK), there are only three weeks left to submit your abstract for the Children in the archives issue.
It is encouraging to see journal publishers paying more attention to and joining the conversation about the urgent need to preserve children’s artifacts.
This call for abstracts comes a few months only after the publication of an issue of Archives and Records (Volume 45, issue 3, 2024) dedicated to the role of archives in engaging children and preserving their social and historical contributions.
At the beginning of 2024, CDIC reached out to the McMaster University’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE), requesting support in researching some of the hypothetical factors related to the decision to contribute (or not) to CDIC’s collection. In no time, the OCE had a dynamic team put together under their Research Shop program.
The multidisciplinary team, led by Syed Mahamad, included Hamza Abouiznied, Mia Brufatto, Lily Li, and Lina Mabayyed undertook to identify motivations and barriers influencing the preservation of children’s artwork by families, and contributions to CDIC. Understanding these factors is crucial to increase CDIC’s ability to educate the public on the significance of children’s art and preserve it for future generations.
In total, 113 participants aged between 18 and 64 completed the online survey, and all Canadian provinces plus three territories were represented.
The team produced a report filled with never before documented insights on children’s art conservation as personal, family, or cultural heritage. Ninety (80%) of the survey participants reported that their parents saved their artwork when they were children, is but one such insight.
The study reveals that the main motivations for preserving children’s artwork within the home are:
Tracking the child’s artistic and personal development
Appreciating the artwork’s aesthetic value, and
Maintaining emotional connections to the pieces.
By far, the biggest barriers to preserving artwork in the home were a lack of space to physically store the artwork and time constraints.
Regarding contributing to the CDIC archive, the main motivating factors were:
The opportunity to share and celebrate the artwork with a broader audience,
The child desires to contribute to the archive, and
Receiving incentives, including crediting the child as the artist and/or small giveaways.
Factors that discouraged participants from contributing to the archive included:
A lack of knowledge about the CDIC and its mission,
Perceived logistical challenges with the artwork submission process, and
Reluctance within the family to part with the original artwork.
The research team included recommendations based on their findings. The new knowledge emerging from the study will help CDIC to review its communication tools, as well as its collection development strategies.
At this point, it seems that CDIC should simultaneously address the need of families that seek as much exposure as possible for their images, and the need of families that prefer a restrained access limited only for archival and research purposes.
Stay tuned to see how CDIC will adapt for better serve contributing families, and reach out to other collection users. For the great project partnership, CDIC would like to thank the research team, as well as Evan Gravely and the Office of Community Engagement, at McMaster University.
Reasons why participants were interested in contributing to the CDIC archive. Source: McMaster University, 2024.
From Godzilla to Barney, and all the Jurassic Park sequels in between, it is safe to say that almost every kid has drawn a dinosaur or two at some point.
The bones of real dinosaurs are preserved and displayed all over the world. They help us understand and admire their bygone animal supremacy.
Did you know that specialists also care for their feces? Yes, dinosaur poop has its own museum! Well, actually a museum for feces that have mineralized, and turned into coprolites.
The Poozeum was first launched as an online resource in 2014, by its founder George Frandsen. Ten years later, it recently opened its physical gallery and storefront in Williams, Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. Poozeum holds the largest of such collections, with about 8,000 coprolites. It holds a Guinness World Record for it, and also for holding the largest coprolite (67,5 cm x 15,7 cm) ever found, which George Frandsen says likely comes from a T.rex.
Next time you draw a dinosaur, don’t you forget its coprolite. Who knows, maybe one day we will find out that the whole planet is but one humongous spinning orbiting coprolite, or a derivative thereof.
Founder George Frandsen strikes the pose at the Poozeum. Source: Poozeum, 2024.
This year again, we add our voice to those of many dedicated people and institutions that care for archives around the world. This year’s theme is #CyberArchives.
The International Council on Archives has put together an impressive global agenda for the occasion, filled with a wide variety of events. One of them is our Exploring Connection project, coming to fruition on June 13th during a special ceremony, at the University of Guelph Child Care and Learning Centre.
This to say that the past still has a long and bright future ahead.
Nearly 150 new items are now available for viewing online. They were all created almost twenty years ago, and a contribution made by Gisèle Dallaire and her children in August.
The new images include several school activity sheets by Claire, and drawings by her pre-teen big brother, who showed enthusiasm for muscle cars and some comic book characters.
Autumn (detail). By Claire Chambers. c2004. Source: CDIC-CIDE.
A few weeks ago, we joined Archeion, an online service provided by the Archives Association of Ontario. A little over one hundred records, or about a fifth of our collection is now accessible on the platform, and all items will eventually make their way there. For easy access from our website, simply click on Browse the collection from the menu to the right.
For now, three of our fonds are visible on Archeion. Together, they present images from the late 1970s until recently. Our images from earlier decades will be added as we continue entering new records in the system.
Special thanks to Jazmine Aldrich, Archeion Coordinator, for kindly assisting us in this important step forward. Many thanks also to volunteer Michael K. Chow, who helped us identify the best online database solution for us.
The World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is an awareness campaign that takes place annually on the first Thursday of November. The day marks the significant and growing importance of digital information and celebrates those who have made a commitment to prevent the disappearance of digital documents.
The WDPD is an initiative of the Digital Preservation coalition (DPC), a charitable organization based in York (England), with offices in Glascow (Scottland) and Melbourne (Australia). Their WDPD blog includes articles from all over, including Canada. Of interest is also their categorization of twenty different “digital species” and risk classification for each of them. Among the categories, personal archives are considered critically endangered.
A couple of years ago in this blog, we introduced Onfim. This thirteenth century child whose drawing on a piece of bark had been discovered by chance, among other archeological findings. Thanks to a growing number of medievalists researchers over the past few years, the images left by medieval children are no longer left to chance.
The advances in child psychology have long helped parents and educators. They now benefit medievalists, and it is great news for children’s drawing conservation. Deborah Ellen Thorpe holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of York (GB). In 2016, her article Young hands, old books: Drawings by children in a fourteen century manuscript, LJS, MS. 361, was published in Cogent Arts and Humanities (Taylor & Francis). In it, she meticulously and convincingly argues that the hands that drew three drawings in the margins of a centuries-old manuscript were those of children. Her observations are strongly supported by the works of several researchers in child psychology and arts education.
Other reputed medievalists, such as Seth Lere (Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia, University of California Press), and Nicholas Orme (Medieval children, Yale University Press) have been instrumental in nurturing a growing interest in what medieval children have left us.
Drawing by a child in the margin of a 14th Century manuscript. LJS 361, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries folio 26r. Source: National Library of Medecine, 9 August 2022.
We collect items that are very much part of the day to day lives of young families around the world. For this reason, it is natural for us to admire those collectors and curators who do the same. Near the city of Jodhpur in Western Rajasthan (India), Arna Jharna: The Thar Museum is doing just that by collecting and curating Jhadus or brooms.
The museum was founded in 2000, by late folklorist Komal Kothari. It displays 180 types of brooms, according to Supriya Newar‘s thorough article on Live History India. Simple objects provide amazing insights and the brooms helps visitors to explore the stories of the people of Rajasthan, their working and spiritual lives, as well as their natural surroundings. Another article by Chelsea Santos, Assistant Curator at The City Palace Museum of Udaipur, brings us closer to the Arna Jharna museum. It is published on mainlymuseums.com.
In 2016, the picturesque Musée Calbet in Grisolle (France) had also celebrated the broom in a special exhibition, from a different source and perspective.
Brooms at the Arna Jharna Museum, with tags that mention geographic location and name. Photo: Chelsea Santos. Source: MainlyMuseums.com, 30 October 2021.
