Why the Archives does not collect copies of records from loans or other archives

tl;dr:

1) Thank you for using and sharing our Oak Bay Archives digital copies of historic photos, WITH correct citations and captions and a link back to our website, AND with watermark intact. The images and their contextual information are made freely available to you - why wouldn't you do the same?

2) If you would like your historic family photos of Oak Bay to be available to a wider posterity, we would LOVE to consider them for the Archives - and yes, you will need to formally transfer ownership of the original prints/negatives to the District of Oak Bay (Archives). We can usually provide full digital copies back to you, for any use you want to make of them, including printing/sharing with your family members.

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Every archive, especially those with personal and family papers, ends up with material that doesn't pertain exactly to its collecting mandate or geographical location. Records created during the ordinary transactions of businesses, organizations and governments tend to fall into clearly defined categories and pertain to specific places and subjects, but the archival fonds created organically by the ordinary lives and activities of individuals and families in particular often include material on a wide range of subjects and places.

Is the 1910s photo album of an Oak Bay family less interesting because some of the photos are from their former home in the City of Victoria, or their holidays at Shawnigan Lake, travels in BC's Interior, or visits to family in Ontario? No! Would we break up the collection and redistribute everything to the places they are directly relevant to? Definitely not - this goes against a fundamental archival principle of "respect des fonds".

Context is key. An archive is a network of interrelated documents that tell the story of their creator/collector/user(s). For an archivist, that's the primary identity of any archive. Any of our later research interests are secondary - but are often the main reason for preserving and cataloguing an archive at all. Archival catalogues aim to do both of 1) reflecting the original order and relationships between/among the records and 2) describing and indexing the records in a way that helps future researchers to discover, understand and interpret them for their own purposes.

As archivists, we do our very best not to make decisions for researchers about which parts of a collection or archive they might find interesting or relevant - rather than selecting or "cherry-picking", to the best of our abilities and resources, we try to make all parts of the collection equally available, so that researchers can bring their own questions to the archival material and make those decisions for themselves, based on as complete and accurate an understanding of the archival material as possible. We can't possibly guess what amazing range of research uses might be made of the material from different viewpoints, time periods and subject areas - and we had better not try!

All this to say: it's not surprising - or wrong - that Oak Bay Archives holds photos of Kelowna in the 1930s, or that the City and Provincial archives hold historic photos of Oak Bay. We certainly collect and share information about related collections in other repositories, but we don't normally collect or provide access to copies. (This line does sometimes become blurred in Canada, often because of the enormous distances required for researchers to travel between repositories holding related material on any given subject - the Hudson's Bay Company archive was a good example.) Now that we are able to digitize some of our records, especially photos, access across space and distance - to digital surrogates at least - is becoming increasingly practical.

It is always important to know where the originals are, and to cite the source whenever and wherever an image is used (and let's be clear that the HBC archive was indeed clear about that). I do not normally accept copy loans for the archives, except in unusual circumstances and then only for the archives reference files. This means that - often with real regret - I will not agree to someone bringing in their family album and leaving it in the archives for a short time, to be digitized and returned, with the archives having permission from the private owner to make only the digital images available in the archives and online. I can only accept the real thing. (And in some cases, born-digital records are the real thing! But that's another story...) Sometimes potential donors are not ready or able to give away their treasured family records, and I regret having to say no to copies only - but I will. I'm conscious that those images may never get to the archives, may never be shared with others. But such offers are an opportunity to explain the archival principles of provenance and authenticity, and people who value their own family records tend to understand this well. This is a change in practice at Oak Bay Archives, so I hope this article helps to clarify that the change is carefully considered, and why it's important.

If the potential donor does decide to deposit their records, I can usually offer a full set of digital copies back to them (eventually!) for their own use. There is often only one member of an extended family who has real interest in or concern about preserving the originals, but many who would enjoy having digital copies or reprints of a selection. And of course once they are deposited, anyone in the family can always consult the originals at the Archives. Nobody has to worry about them rotting in a damp basement or baking in a hot attic, prey to pests, floods, house moves, and careless handling.

But why not? How can I refuse to free these wonderful images of Oak Bay life in the past to use on the internet and in publications without requiring the owner to surrender a cherished heirloom? How can I possibly turn down these generous offers of irreplaceable, fascinating and highly relevant images?

If I only have the digital image, I will never be able to prove its authenticity by comparing it to the original.
How can I check whether a mark on the photo is a feature of the original composition, a developing stain, a later annotation, or a digital artifact from the scanning process? I can't.
Scanning is great, but it doesn't capture all the information - sometimes layers of information - in the original print (or negative).
Sometimes things go wrong with a scan, an image is lost or becomes corrupted.
If the scan is incomplete and cuts off a margin, contextual information such as names, dates, places and other captions may be cut off. If the original is not in the archives to check and/or re-scan, that's it, the image or information is lost
What if there's better scanning technology in the future? In 50 years, with good storage and handling, most 100-year old photo albums will still be around, but if the original isn't in the archive, we're stuck with this old jpeg from 2022. Think of old black and white microfilms or photocopies. We can do so much better now - what might be possible not long from now? The same applies to software and format obsolescence - if one day we can no longer read/use our current digital photo formats, but we still have the physical originals, our successors can use newer technology to scan the originals again.
Many vicissitudes can get in the way of promised eventual donation "one day"; they don't always come to fruition. Permitting copy loans may create a false impression in the potential donor that the issue of historical continuity has been dealt with.
Photographic manipulation has been around since the beginning of photography itself, but with the advent of AI generated/manipulated images, preservation of and access to originals is increasingly important. For instance, I digitally removed images of people on a recent series of Oak Bay house photos when putting them on the internet, for privacy reasons. But the originals are still available for comparison in the archives - for instance, so you can see that I only removed the person, no changes have been made to the image of the house. More on this to come, e.g.:

- Marina Amaral, AI is creating fake historical photos, and that's a problem. March 2024. https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-historical-photos (Thanks to Andrew Chernevych on LinkedIn)

- Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, The Specter of AI-Generated Historical Documents. May 2024. https://legalhistoryinsights.com/the-specter-of-ai-generated-historical-documents/

All digital images of hard-copy originals are facsimiles - access and preservation tools. In some ways they can help us get more information and different uses from the original than is possible when using the original - but they cannot replace the original.

What about watermarks? Why bother?

Using correct citations and preserving digital watermarks acknowledges the work of the institution in preserving, describing and digitizing the image, and making the image and its description available, and in some cases there are also rights and permissions issues attached even to old photos and other records. More importantly, good citation provides a trail for other researchers to follow in order to find other relevant related material, or to ask related questions, for their own research interests. This is the only reason I put watermarks on Oak Bay Archives photos, and I'm disappointed when I find they are being used with the watermarks removed. They don't look lovely, but that's not why they are there. It's so easy for an image to become orphaned from all of its contextual information. If a researcher needs a copy of an image without a watermark, we can provide them of course. But for use "in the wild" on the internet, that watermark should stay, to provide a way for others to find us.

- Anna Sander, summer 2024.