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Who donates their stuff to the archives?


Ideally, everyone! But, in practice: only people who know what archives are and how they work. If users of archives and donors of archives were a Venn diagram, it would almost just be one circle! With this website, our goal is not only to show people that anyone can be a donor, it's also to help people engage with archives and understand what archivists do as well as all the amazing resources that archives provide.


Section Overview

In this section, we'll talk about who - individual, groups, organizations - donates their materials to the archives. You'll also find out a bit about the Canadian archival tradition of acquiring both public and private records.

If you're using the donor workbook, we'll ask you to think about the different roles you play in your community and how each role might produce records of interest to an archive.


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[ you guessed it... still in its formative stages ]

With the growing popularity of community archives and people's increasing ability to create records thanks to technology, archivists have become more concerned with the people and the stories that make up the contents of archives. We take this issue very seriously and hope that by reaching out to new people and teaching them about all of the possibilities that archives bring, future generations will have the chance to be exposed to more diverse stories and ways of looking at the world as they learn about history.

Some people who write about archives have put donors and their motivations for donating into certain categories, and the thing that they all have in common is familiarity with archives. Throughout training as archivists, we learned that archives and the duties of archivists are not exactly common knowledge, with academics being the biggest users of archives. This in turn directly influences the kinds of records and the people who donate them, favoring wealthy, educated white people and leaving out a sizeable part of society. This population of people who are familiar with archives also influence one another's decisions about the institutions to which they choose to donate, which also limits resources and knowledge to limited locations.

We are affiliated with an archival institution, but this website and this guide are intended for a very broad audience. Regardless of where any materials might go, we want to encourage familiarity and comfort with archives and archivists, so that any future donors trust that they are making the right decisions. In short, we want to change the answer to the question you see above, and we want you to be part of that change.