2022 in review

Some highlights from 17.5 hours/week in another unusual year at Oak Bay Archives:

January

25 enquiries
virtual visit to GNS Grade 4
digitizing a large collection of film and glass photograph negatives from 2017 .

February

This January there were 25 enquiries to the Archives which is double the monthly average from last year.
continuing work on several hundred individual film negatives and glass plates from the 1900’s to 1920’s. Bertram Howell (1877-1972), formerly of Marrion St., was an Oak Bay electrician and prolific photographer. When he went into care, his household items and contents were auctioned off; several decades, later this part of his photographic work came to the archives.

March 2022

There were 18 enquiries in February to the Archives.
digitization of the Bertram Howell (1877-1972) photos is complete. In all there are 550 items, mostly negatives, with an estimated 1300 images in total.
A selection of the photos are now in the foyer of the Municipal Hall and fall into 4 main themes: WW1 First Canadian Forestry Corp; a few of Victoria and Oak Bay; early electric power generators, and; living in Portland 1905-1911.

April 2022

• #Archive 30 tweets throughout April based on Bert Howell’s photo collection – will be blogged on Connect as well
• the May foyer display/Twitter series/Connect blog article will be “Then & Now” photos of the commercial block of OB Ave, tying in with both

• May’s #Explore Your Archive theme on Twitter https://twitter.com/explorearchives and

• a request from Willows School for a walking tour activity based on OB Ave.
• AABC membership renewed, entering more of the personal/family collections on Memory BC

Revising house history research document for new homeowners – mayor request
Ditto for Heritage Commission new members’ orientation package
Ditto research guide leaflet for Heritage Foundation table at Night Markets
Which also means updating the website
15 boxes are on their way from storage, to review and probably accession and process
More top level descriptions entered on MemoryBC
Enquiries, changes to photo captions, street names history page

May 2022

Continuing to work on the “Then and Now” photos of the commercial block of OB Ave. There have been a lot of changes!
Archives house history leaflet and copy of building permits index printed and shared with OBHF for their stand at summer Night Markets.
13 enquiries received and answered
Oak Bay Avenue Then and Now display in the Municipal Hall foyer and supplementary walking guide created for Willows School
Building permits index binder and info sheets created for Foundation table at Night Markets
Oak Bay village building & occupancy history underway

(Looking ahead to summer projects:(

(Connect posts, tweets lined up for #MARBLEDMONDAY and #EYAROYAL
Appraising 18 bankers’ boxes of mixed Foundation and Commission records
With HR and Corporate Services staff, drafting policy & procedure for return of Archives Volunteers
Continuing Oak Bay Avenue village core history research with volunteers
Municipal Hall foyer displays: RR Taylor; Judging a Book By its Cover; Spotlight on Maps)

June 2022

RR Taylor album: finishing digitizing and starting biog background research for introduction & captions
Volunteers: good Zoom meeting yesterday, bulletin #43 going out today – we’ll meet in person outdoors next month
New accession: received new Hilda Wharf (d.2014) collection, mainly photos, fortunately most with identifications and some contextual papers. Hilda was a local music teacher, her husband Norman (d.1990) worked for the provincial govt and survived being shot down & German POW camp in WW2.
Digitization: quality checking and file naming building permit and old appraisal card photos (several thousand of them, taken ahead of last year’s reno for work-from-home reference), for Archives use and access copies for Building & Planning.
Outreach: lining up July tweets for Explore Your Archives theme of Sport – we have lots of sport photos so that should be a good one. The summer foyer display & Connect post will also be on this theme.
Other June-July Connect posts: a research feature on Olive Bunting, later Munro, Clerk/Bookkeeper at Oak Bay municipal offices 1915-21; highlights of a surprising array of marbled endpapers encountered in historic corporate ledgers; and a complete (I hope) list of the principals of Oak Bay High School.

August 2022

August was divided into two parts, both containing the word appraisal. First, finishing the digitization of all 1800+ photos from the incomplete series of ‘long appraisal cards’ (old Finance records) and uploading them. They’re now online at https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakbayarchives/albums/72177720301021359.
Second, records appraisal: after sorting and listing the Heritage Foundation and Commission/Advisory Panel/Committee records, I started examining several batches of boxes of municipal records, including public works records detailing the work and wages for the municipal horses 1906-1912 - definitely keeping those!
Digitization: file naming of building permit and old appraisal card photos (municipal Finance dept) continues; 500/1800 house photos from appraisal cards (1950s-1970s) are online so far at https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakbayarchives/ In some cases these may be the only historic photo available to current home owners; in others, the only surviving photo of a house no longer standing. As a group, they also include information about urban trees, a lot of incidental period detail, especially cars, and glimpses of daily life in the Oak Bay streetscape, including mailmen, window washers, children, and dogs. When upload is complete, this series will more than double OBA’s online photo total – cf. 1315 already available at https://www.oakbay.ca/archives/photographs
Outreach: August’s Explore Your Archives theme is Animals - again lots to choose from in OBA photos from family collections, ranging from household pets to commercial dairy goats. Horses and ponies are particularly evident in many roles from leisure riding to professional racing, milk delivery and municipal works carts. Several OBA volunteers are working from home on the OB village building history project. I also have a current MLIS student and a recent graduate working on remote volunteer projects.

September 2022

working through 3 boxes of municipal records 1906-1912, ordinary departmental stuff that I’ll keep as a rare glimpse into what was actually going on, since council minutes are pretty sparing of detail and it’s particularly interesting to see details of the first years of the municipality. So far my favourite file is public works records detailing the work and wages for the municipal horses!
Sarah (Deputy Director of Corporate Services) and I had a fun afternoon looking through 8 (9?) boxes of badly water damaged, very mouldy 1930s admin records, outdoors last week. I photographed one thin file since there are associated community records in the archives. Otherwise we concluded that the contents were both informationally routine and damaged enough not to be worth attempting to restore, especially because they were from isolated single years. Files were listed and contents will be destroyed.

Looking ahead into September, records appraisal continues, and the records destined for the archives will be listed and rehoused in archival boxes for permanent retention. I’ve just started a CPD course on Managing Archival Photographs, provided by the AABC: https://aabc.ca/Managing-Archival-Photographs In 20 years of managing archives, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to learn specifically about this particularly interesting, challenging, diverse and ubiquitous group of formats. The course textbook is excellent; I was able to get a secondhand copy, now part of the archives’ reference library.

September - October

A large chunk of my time was spent listing and sorting Heritage Foundation records and publications for custody transfer to the Foundation. These boxes and objects had been in a large 'general storage' room in the lower floor at Municipal Hall, and since Foundation members were not able to come in and remove them before the renovations, I packed them up and marked them to come back to the Archives so that amongst a move of several thousands of boxes of records, a designated person was looking out for them. There is no longer storage space in Municipal Hall for community organizations' records. Why was I spending time on this? The histories of what are now the Heritage Commission and the Heritage Foundation are closely related, and so are the records, but the Commission is a body of Council while the Foundation is a community organization. It was important to distinguish one from the other so that Commission records could be retained by the District and Foundation records could be released to the Foundation.

October-November 2022

Records appraisal of transferred administrative series continues.
50 new archive boxes have arrived from Hollinger MetalEdge, to 1) house unboxed collections, 2) replace non-archival boxes, 3) eventually replace all 'bankers' box size' boxes holding standard size files
in the final stretch of CPD module by AABC, Managing Archival Photographs – really useful course, filling some specialist gaps in my own training and also fuelling creation of procedures manual/future training outlines for staff and volunteers
making historic District files routinely available to departmental staff: short appraisal cards (active 1940s-1970s), long appraisal cards (active 1940s-1970s), building permit books (1942-65 so far). More than 19,000 image files and an index.

December

Preparing for both year-end and a visit next week with the Mayor and Coun Watson, the new Archives liaison
working out a complex/confusing family tree in order to put the right captions on the newly digitized photos at https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakbayarchives/collections/72157721320070277/ and choosing some of them for
one more display upstairs, transport theme because there are pics of several great old cars - notably being driven by women - the unpaved Malahat, AND (probably?) the horse-drawn Oak Bay garbage wagon!

Enquiries total: 138 (143 in 2021)

Blog posts: 14

Tweets: total 70K impressions (views)

Volunteer e-bulletins: 8

Volunteer Zoom chats: 4 + 2 outdoor in-person meetings

Summary

The numbers show a change in emphasis in my work from last year to this; while I was away from the collections for half of 2021, I had more time to undertake training modules, connect with volunteers and feature already-digitized images via social media. 2022 has been my first full calendar year working on site *and* without preparation for and aftermath of a major move to deal with. This has meant I could get my teeth into some basics that weren't possible last year, especially new digitization of photographs, new preliminary box listing of collections, and replacing regular cardboard bankers' boxes with archival acid-free ones half the size.

Still true:

I have yet to work a day resembling 'formerly normal' conditions in the archives
I have been in post for the full time equivalent of 16 months
the large and experienced team of archives volunteers have not been able to work with me on site yet
learning new things every day means you know more things every day

- Anna Sander, February 2023

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Questions? Please get in touch!

Website: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives

Photo Search: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives/photographs

Blog posts: https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives

Email: archives@oakbay.ca(

Phone: 250-598-3290

- Post by Anna Sander, February 2023.

To cite: Sander, Anna. (2023, February). '2022 in review.' [Blog post]. District of Oak Bay, Archives. Retrieved from https://connect.oakbay.ca/admin/projects/archives/news_feed/2022-in-review [date accessed].