Canadian Museum of History Visit

January 20th, Visit to the Candian Museum of History

If you missed our trip on the 20th, you missed a real treat. Our orientation to the museum included not just the nuts-and-bolts of how to access the public interfaces for the museum catalogues (for reference, the catalogue is behind this link and the artefact collection is here), but also an excellent discussion of how the materials conserved at the museum came to be collected here. One thing that struck us was the critical importance of record keeping at every step in the process. This was particularly apparent when we were chatting about the earlier eras in the Museum’s history, and the fact that sometimes the object record becomes divorced from the accession record. I also found the ways the object labels could be parsed for something of the object’s biography to be quite interesting. On which note, this video from the Canadian Heritage Information Network:

The visit concluded with a brief exploration of the rich resources of the Museum’s library (including access to the Ancestry database, if you’re interested in the genealogical angle). It was all a bit of a firehose of information, and it’ll take us a bit of time to digest everything. We had a brief look at some of the Fort Frontenac records, and we’ll have to think carefully what we want to do with these (there are some 50k!). Transcribing the information, thinking through the metadata to collect, maybe tying the records to the object catalogues, perhaps a bit of crowdsourcing of the task of transcription… there’s a lot we can do and the CMH group and I will have to sit down together to do a bit of brainstorming.