Where archives are concerned, there's no such thing as a small leak. One of the archives repositories was affected by a leak elsewhere on the ground floor at Municipal Hall in mid March. Fortunately it was clean water, and only at floor level, i.e. the carpets got wet, and it was discovered and dealt with quickly. The contents of the largest repository were decanted into the search room & other repositories, disrupting volunteer and drop-in hours for the week. Since (of course) no boxes were sitting on the floor, no archive material got wet. Many thanks to the recovery team who dealt with the incident promptly and thoroughly, and to colleagues who helped move boxes and shelving in both directions. A week after the leak, all was back to normal. Temperature and relative humidity are continuously monitored, and rH is back to the usual consistent <50%.

Public open hours: The Archives were open for enquiries and on-site research appointments 17.5 hours/week as usual, with drop-in hours on Tuesday mornings except for 12 March.

Enquiries: 9, of which in person 1. People have been getting out into their gardens! and half of March was spring break for many schools and families.

Running total for 2024: 40

On-site volunteer hours logged: 42 (4 volunteers)

Volunteer projects:

• municipal demolished-property files indexing
• historic building permits indexing
• scanning photographs
• physical numbering of hundreds of items in several collections of personal papers, preparatory to cataloguing

Digital images:

• Larry McCann & UVic students' photographic sample of Oak Bay houses by building era, photos taken ca. 2000-2002: 800 of 1700 uploaded so far, scanning and processing of 2nd half underway

Views on Flickr in March: 11.6 K (total 265.3 K by 2 April, since 3 Mar 2022, i.e. a monthly average of about 10,000 views of individual photos).

There are now more than 3,000 publicly viewable photos on the growing Oak Bay Archives Flickr account in addition to the 1300 on the District website. The rest are access and preservation copies. Owing to copyright restrictions and other access conditions, these individual copies can be made available to researchers on request for private study purposes only. They are also used remotely by volunteers working on indexing and tagging projects, and in-house for reference during cataloguing, to minimize light exposure to and handling of the originals.

What are people looking at?

The most-viewed single photo so far is a page from the middle of a Taylor family album, showing several photos in which they visit the Porritt family in Calgary in 1937. I have no idea why this particular photo has had more than 1300 views so far! The rest of the photos in the same album average 30 views each.

The most-viewed album is the big series of photos taken from historic appraisal cards; most individual photos have had several hundred views, and some more than a thousand.

Archivist's work:

• dealing with consequences of the flood
• continuing shelf check & locations register update
• scanning and processing of digital images as above
• scanning and processing access & preservation images of photographs, updating catalogue descriptions of PR 131 Mayhew house papers
• reviewing and updating catalogue descriptions of PR 106 Pattinson family papers
• internal and external enquiries research and responses, facilitating researcher visits, volunteer management & monthly bulletin

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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

- Post by Anna Sander, 2 April 2024.

To cite: Sander, Anna. (2024, April). 'March in the Archives.' [Blog post]. District of Oak Bay, Archives. Retrieved from https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives/news_feed/march-in-the-archives-2 [date accessed].