Archives can't be built in a day

By Joanna Becket

“An archives, as it turns out, is a bit like Rome. Can’t be built in a day,” wrote Orland French, former president, Hastings County Historical Society, in an opinion piece in The Belleville Intelligencer last November.

This is the public stage of the capital campaign headed up by French to move the Hastings County Historical Society community archives to a new location at the Irish Hall on Church Street.

French has found that although competition for the donor’s dollar is stiff, Belleville residents are stepping up with private donations towards the estimated $1.2 million required to build and equip a new site for the community’s historical documents.

What sets this cause apart from other appeals for support, said French, is that it’s a one-stage appeal.

“We’re raising money for a capital campaign to create an archives and once the archives is complete, we’re not going to come back in a year to the public and say we want more money, because the city and the county have taken on the responsibility of running it.”
It’s all in the name of preserving the past.

“If you don’t preserve the past, then you have no community record of where you come from,” said French.

“I think this is especially important for students, for those who study history, and for historians. People who are interested in genealogy, for example, really appreciate the kind of information they find in archives,” he said.

The Hastings County Historical Society partnered with the City of Belleville and Hastings County to donate $950,000 of the current $1.2 million target. Corporate and private donations are helping to fill the balance needed to complete the project.

“We getting close to the million dollar mark but there’s still a shortfall of about $300,000,” said French.

The target start date for construction is likely to be in September, 2012, said French.

The historical society archives has been operating out of the former Thurlow town hall on Cannifton Road North for the past 10 years, in a small space troubled by humidity, pests and structural issues.

At its present location the community archives has about 2,300 square feet of useable space.

The new Church Street site will house about 8,000 square feet of useable space.

The archives currently maintains collections of prints and negatives, maps, plans, architectural drawings, newspapers, microfilm, ledger books and family scrapbooks.

This past summer, The Belleville Intelligencer added an additional 900 bound  volumes of newspapers, covering the period from the 1880s to 2011.

“We have half a ton, about 900 volumes, so all together we have over 1,000 bound volumes of The Belleville Intelligencer. The Intelligencer also donated their photographs and negatives,” said the archivist Sharon White.

“It’s been estimated that the archives has approximately one million negatives. More than half of them are from the Intelligencer,” said White.

“The biggest issue is space, the amount of space and also the organization of space,” she said. So the new building will have most of the archival records stored in a dedicated storage vault and it’s called a vault because it’s secure.

“It has environmental controls to monitor temperature, humidity and air quality. That’s one of the things that make it a bit more costly than just building an office building, because you need to have these special controls.”

Most of the shelving will be in the main halls that are two storeys high and will be designed to fill that space.

“The shelving is very specialized. It will be fitted to meet our requirements to make the most efficient use of the space,” said White.

“I hope the new archives will be more spacious and there will be more things actually available for self help in the reading room including electronic systems so you can search on a data base.

“There will a reference library to consult as well. We also have some genealogy materials and some information pamphlets about how to research your own house or property and also, information about other heritage organizations in the area.”

Will this new facility be state-of-the-art?

“It’s not the Cadillac version,” said White. “But I think it meets all the requirements for a good community archives that will preserve the records in the future and have good space for making them available and good space for the volunteers and archivists and people who work with the records.”

The move is currently planned for 2013.

“But plans can change,” said White.

“We have to get it right. And that’s one reason we’ve had the architect’s feasibility study and the careful look at the design. The design will be tweaked but we’re very happy with it in terms of it being an efficient and cost effective use of the space,” said White.

“We’re getting there. It’s very exciting,” White said.

 

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