Attempts at National Planning for Archives in Canada, 1975-1985

Abstract

PRIOR TO THE 197oS, archives in Canada existed impecuniously in isolation one from another somewhere in the shadows of Canadian society. Although the federal government established the Public Archives of Canada in 1872, and over the next hundred years all the provincial governments, many universities, some churches and businesses, and a few public libraries and museums founded repositories for archival materials, before the 1970s archives and archivists made little impact on policymakers in the cultural field. Indeed, before 1970 there was little concrete evidence of a sense of community of interest among Canadian archivists, let alone among the archives for which they worked. Over the past decade, however, a series of events combined to transform the outlook and, to a lesser extent, the situation of archives and archivists in Canada. In the process, governments and their cultural arms came for the first time to grapple with the collective problems and needs of the archival community. In retrospect, the changes that have occurred may be seen to represent a watershed in the development of Canadian archives. Led by the youthful and vigorous group of archivists who joined the staffs of archives in the expansionary 1960s and 1970s, the archival community began to perceive itself as sharing a collective mission to promote the broadest possible preservation of the country's archival record. Given the longstanding penury of archival institutions, much debate ensued about the means necessary to the end of preserving and exploiting the nation's archival documentary heritage. What began as an exercise in describing the state of archives and their need for greater financial support slowly evolved into a search for a structure in which to set about planning the orderly development of hitherto isolated and often