Public open hours: The Archives were open for enquiries and on-site research appointments 17.5 hours/week until 20 December. The Archivist returned to work on 3 January 2025, volunteers returned the week of 6 January, and public drop-in hours resumed on 14 January.

Enquiries: 12 in December, 1 of which in person; 17 in January, of which 4 in person.

Total for 2024: 206

Running total for 2025: 17.

On-site volunteer hours logged: December 30, January 33 (5 volunteers - we welcomed a new regular volunteer onto the team in late January)

Volunteer projects (ongoing):

• municipal demolished-property files indexing
• historic building permits indexing
• file listing in a large collection of personal papers, preparatory to cataloguing
• transcribing oral history recordings, checking existing transcripts

Photo views on Flickr : (about 8.7K, total 321, 364 by 7 February 2025, since 3 Mar 2022).

Archivist's work:

• ongoing additions to Oak Bay property reference files – transferring to a volunteer starting February
• WW2 online memorial project
  • stage 3: completed researching small subset of names difficult to identify (success!), connecting with community researchers
  • created individual pages for each name in the list, to streamline browsing.
• Meetings with Mayor & Cllr Smart, OB Rec staff and outside organizers re Stanley Cup centenary exhibition and related events
• Digitizing and sharing images of relevant archival materials to hockey exhibition planners
• Planning for Oak Bay art & artists exhibition
• Planning for Oak Bay Rec 50th anniversary exhibition
• AABC CPD module, "Managing Plans and Drawings"
• Site visit/correspondence/discussion re further accession to a family papers fonds
• internal and external enquiries research and responses, facilitating researcher visits, volunteer management & monthly bulletin - #58

Connect migration: Many apologies for the broken links here on Connect - this is owing to the whole of Connect being migrated to a new platform just before the holidays. Some work on the war memorial project entries has been lost. Links in the Blog Index at https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives/blog-index have been manually restored, but these are the only ones that work. I will have to continue this re-research and repair job at a less busy time of year.

How to find individual posts again from their old URL:

e.g. https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives/news_feed/oak-b... no longer exists, but you can create the new URL for the same post by removing "news_feed/" , i.e.

https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives/oak-bay-remembers-second-world-war

- Post by Anna Sander, 7 February 2025.

To cite: Sander, Anna. (2025, February). 'December 2024 - January 2025 in the Archives.' [Blog post]. District of Oak Bay, Archives. Retrieved from https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives/december-january-archives [date accessed].

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Questions or appointment requests? Please get in touch!

Website: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives
Photo Search: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives/photographs
More photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakbayarchives/
Blog posts: https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives
Email: archives@oakbay.ca
Phone: 250-598-3290