Migrating the “Photo fonds”
Exterior, Levinson's store, Montreal, QC, ca. 1909.
ID: 1255_pr000604
One of the central mandates of the Archive’s digital transformation is to migrate our catalogue of archival descriptions from a legacy text-based (read, very outdated!) to jplarchives.org, our cloud-based (read, new and fancy) asset management system. The migration has been ongoing since Spring of 2022, and has (honestly) been both a fun and a challenging undertaking – the best kind, right? One of the biggest questions at the outset of the migration was how we would approach some of the largest fonds in our collection. Fonds 1255, the Archive’s Photograph Collection, contains approximately 20,000 photographic records. These photographs lend an important visual element that helps depict the rich history of Montreal’s Jewish community. From community events to personal family photos, to historical organizational photographic records from a variety of Federation CJA agencies, fonds 1255 really does have something of interest for everyone.
Children playing basketball at Camp Wooden Acres in Montreal, QC, 1953
ID: 1255_pr04311
Fonds 1255 presents an interesting and unique migration challenge for our team. Generally, our fonds are organized around persons (usually the donor of the fonds), organizations, schools, synagogues, and the like. Fonds 1255 differs in that it is organized formally, that is, around the fact that all the items in fonds 1255 are photographs. While us archivists are not entirely sure how fonds 1255 came to be, our best guess is it became a catchall for photos as a way to mitigate the kind of material decay that photographic records are at risk for by keeping them stored all together. Another guess is that in a time before any archivists staffed the Jewish Public Library Archives, all photographs came to be stored together in fonds 1255 as their individual provenances were largely unrecorded or unknown.
Louis St. Laurent, former prime minister of Canada, speaking at the YMHA at a podium, n.d.
ID: 1255_pr011049
As far as getting the descriptions for the photos in fonds 1255 from our legacy database to jplarchives.org, this requires checking that the identifiers recorded match the images described, and then moving forward with refining and modifying those descriptions to suit our current metadata conventions. Then the fun part, digitizing and adding a selection of photographs online. Since the fonds contains about 20,000 records, this migration might take a while! That said, we’re all really excited that it’s underway, and that (slowly, slowly) this rich visual history of our community will be openly accessible. While each record type (text, photos, videos, artefacts) have their special roles, there’s something about photographs – not just what they represent, but their tactility and sense of time – that always helps to ground the work we do here in the archives as being work that preserves a unique and important history.
