We expect to have until June 2004 to produce the finished product, but the money has to be spent by March 31st so co-operation, collaboration, and participation are going to be key. Effective communication is also going to be important so I'd like to take this space to provide an overview of the project plan and current activities.
The Board was pretty confident that this project was going to go ahead so last spring we signed an agreement to partner with the Alberta Online Consortium (AOC); we established a project team; and we contracted Glynys Hohmann, an archivist at the City of Edmonton Archives, to conduct a survey and create a list of archival holdings of interest with respect to the proposal.
In early September, I met with Linda Lucas, Director of Strategic Development at the AOC, to revise the work plan and adjust the budget to reflect the new timelines. We also reassessed project goals and deliverables and considered the human resource requirements. We decided to launch the team at a full day meeting on October 2nd.
The planning day went very well in my view. Archivists Michael Gourlie, Glynys Hohmann, Susan Kooyman, Janet McMaster, Mary Nutting and myself met with the team assembled by the AOC. Sarah Klotz from the Library and Archives Canada joined us as an observer. [Don Bourdon and Anna Gibson are also members of the team but were unable to attend this first meeting.] We spent some time outlining the opportunities for both the archival community as well as the learning community. We also spent time orienting the teachers and technical people to archival concepts and principles. Susan finished up this segment with a show and tell using material she had scanned from the Glenbow collection. The teachers were quite excited by the possibilities and discussion over the lunch break was quite animated.
After lunch we focused on defining the scope of the learning objects, identifying elements of the professional development toolkit, and determining next steps. We had initially proposed to develop two learning objects - one dealing with immigration and one dealing with prairie populism or western alienation. The team moved fairly quickly to a decision to focus energies on the immigration theme for this year given the limited amount of time we have to get this into production. After a lengthier discussion, the group decided to digitize records that related the personal stories of individuals - diaries, journals, personal correspondence and the like. We agreed to look for stories relating to Francophone immigrants so that there would be some original content in the French language as well. We also agreed to reserve some of our digitization budget to capture a few significant records that will provide the economic, social and political context within which the immigrants arrived.
The outcome of the planning day and prior work then is as follows:
The ASA will arrange for the digitization of a minimum of 8,000 pages of archival records from a variety of participating institutions. Glynys Hohmann remains responsible for the final selection of the records but she will base decisions on the recommendations of the institution as well as the list she produced earlier in the year. If you have particularly interesting records that relate to this project that weren't captured in the original survey, be sure to tell Glynys about them and provide her with the following information: title of the fonds, ethnic origin of the creator, geographic area settled, dates of creation, brief description of the record(s), and number of pages to be digitized.
We are hoping to capture stories about a variety of ethnic groups, settling in various regions in the province, covering a range of time if possible. We are already aware that there is going to be a somewhat unavoidable bias in selection towards immigrants coming from English speaking countries at this point. Hopefully, this can be addressed over time with further resources. In this context, it is important to note that we have made a deliberate decision to digitize the complete diary, or the whole file of correspondence, or the whole series or fonds wherever that makes sense. We want to introduce as much flexibility into the finished product as possible and reduce selection at our end so that lessons around concepts such as context will be easier to communicate.
Janet McMaster and Susan Kooyman have worked with Cinemage to create the database structure and develop metadata standards. The standards were available by mid-October. We are also working with the Library and Archives Canada to ensure that our standards will meet or exceed a national standard for description of educational and archival material.
If Glynys has approved your selection of material and you are equipped to implement the metadata standards but don't have access to trained personnel to do the digitization, please contact either Michael Gourlie or me. We have the names of a few people and we can work with you to address any staffing issues. Digitization costs will be covered at a rate of $125/day.
We hope to have the bulk of the digitization completed before Christmas.
Meanwhile, the teachers, who had an orientation session with Susan at the Glenbow and will now have a good sense of the depth and quality of our collections, will be meeting in early November to start discussing possible research questions and considering learning objectives. They will be able to start working with the digitized material by mid-December. The plan is to focus on three or four immigrant groups and examine questions around the lives of individuals that are relevant to the curriculum at different grade levels.
Whenever possible, one or two archivists will join the teachers to ensure that the records being digitized will meet their needs and to help us determine where some context may need to be built in. We also want to stay involved with the development process to ensure that the learning object incorporates lessons in concepts such as bias inherent in the records, credibility of sources, importance of context, and authenticity of documents as well as lessons about immigration in Alberta.
The actual technical design of the learning objects will begin in the new year. In the meantime, it's one step at a time.
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