ATHABASCA – Athabasca County councillors passed a motion at their March 30 meeting to forward a request for financial assistance from the Alice B. Donahue Library and Athabasca Archives to an upcoming budget and finance committee meeting for further discussion.
The request was made by archivist Margaret Anderson, who also gave councillors a brief update on what is happening with the Athabasca Archives and their plans for a possible expansion.
“It’s a very busy archives,” she said.
Anderson noted that while the library and archives are supported by grants from the Town of Athabasca, they are a resource for both municipalities and their holdings are accessible to anyone.
Their holdings include textual records of the Town and County of Athabasca, as well as other local personalities and service groups; photographs, VHS and cassette tapes; a large reference book library with more than 400 titles; and various local artifacts and artworks.
“We have newspapers on microfilm dating back to 1909 as well as paper copies,” she said, adding that they also have homestead records dating back to the early 1900s.
Anderson said that volunteer Linda Doroshenko has been working on managing the archives’ photo collection and maintaining their newspaper clipping file, adding that she has so far processed more than 20,000 photographs and digital files.
She added that they have two pieces of equipment that they can use to digitize VHS tapes and audio cassette tapes, as well as a digitization scanner donated by the Northern Lights Library System headquarters that they can use to digitize large-format documents and books and save them as PDFs.
Anderson said they receive approximately five requests per week for information, adding that the archives can be reached via phone, e-mail or webpage forms.
Recently, Anderson said she has been doing research for the archives co-ordinator at the national RCMP headquarters in connection with the RCMP’s 150th anniversary celebrations coming up in May 2023.
Financial request
Eventually, Anderson requested that council consider the possibility of adding the Athabasca Archives as a line within the municipality’s annual budget.
Anderson didn’t specify how much assistance they were looking for, but she suggested that even an annual contribution of $1,000 would be of assistance.
“That would be very, very helpful and we would appreciate it very much,” she said.
Anderson said the archives are not so much strapped for cash as they are starting to reach capacity in terms of their ability to store records and items, so they need to consider the possibility of expansion.
Division 9 Coun. Camille Wallach asked how much extra space they need, though Anderson was unable to give an accurate answer.
She noted that if they did move into a new space, they would have to go through the records to decide what they would take.
“We would want to make sure that we’re not moving over stuff that’s not relevant anymore,” she said.
Following the presentation, Division 6 Coun. Gary Cromwell made a motion to accept Anderson’s report for information, though after some brief discussion he amended the motion to have the matter forwarded to an upcoming budget meeting.
