Thanks to a federal grant, the Mahone Bay Museum will continue its work archiving thousands of local documents.
The little museum received the same grant last year from Library and Archives Canada to help them tackle a massive backlog of items collected over the years.
Lyne Allain, manager and curator of the museum, says it’s been a big undertaking.
“We`ve worked through a lot of our backlog with these grants, it`s kind of surprising how much we still seem to find,” says Allain.
For example they’ve found things they thought had been archived and boxed up but weren’t.
Allain says space is an issue when it comes to donated items and they’ve had to become choosy when it comes to what they accept.
“We have to be very picky and we`re limited not only in human resources but also financial resources and space.“
She says they’re always grateful when the community thinks of them for a donation but unfortunately they can’t take everything.
Last year’s grant allowed Allain and staff to accession nearly 1,000 photos from a local woman’s collection.
They also put many of the photos on Facebook to help identify the people in them and later place them in an archival quality album so people can continue to identify them.
This year’s grant will provide them with $20,000 for staffing hours and materials they’ll need to accession around 800 photographs and 50 cms of documents.
They were the only site in Nova Scotia to receive one of these grants.
This year’s collection is broader and from several sources.
And although space continues to be a problem for most community museums Allain is thinking about ways to remedy that.
She has started scanning photographs and documents they can’t accept.
In the future, she’d like to apply for a grant to help them create a digital archive so they can keep collecting community stories and heritage without worrying about where to put it.
Story by Brittany Wentzell
@BrittWentzell
