It happens once in a museum curator/archivist’s lifetime. Decades of visual records belonging to the community’s longest publishing newspaper are gifted to the community archives and Salmon Arm Museum staff member Deborah Chapman is still grinning.
“It was an excellent Christmas present,” she says.
The problem for staff at the Salmon Arm Observer was space. The business had relocated operations to Shuswap Street when the building it had occupied was sold. After vacating the Hudson Street location, new owners allowed the Observer to store its negatives and photographs until the building was to be razed.
The expected timeframe was January 2011. Over this past Christmas season the building was stripped and salvaged material removed to make way for demolition.
Thanks to Wayne Peace, Renaud St.-Onge, and Wayne’s canopied truck, more than 40 boxes of photos and negatives are now stored on the Salmon Arm Museum’s grounds at Haney Heritage Village.
The next thing addressed was ownership and the right to duplicate images. Observer publisher Rick Proznick only had one stipulation. He gave permission for the Salmon Arm Museum to use the photographs as long as the Observer is credited.
Processing a big collection isn’t simple, Chapman says. The project is long-term and could take years.
The curator/archivist explains that each image has to be matched up with its newspaper.
That task will give provenance to the images – naming the people, places, and events covered.
The images also have to be catalogued, put into a museum database, and assigned key terms. Then the images have to be placed in acid-free envelopes. The project will be labour-intensive and expensive.
“Luckily the archives room has a group of dedicated volunteers and, when funding is secured for supplies, they will set to work,” says Chapman. “This donation is a once-in-a-lifetime gift. As more modern digital images disappear from computers, they’ll be even more valuable.”
Chapman calls the photos a unique record of time and place – Salmon Arm during the last three decades of the last century.
“Aren’t we lucky the staff at Black Press realized they had a gem to leave the community?” she asks.
