Here in the midst of a beautiful Montreal summer, the temperature-regulated archives has been a nice reprieve from the heat.

From the JPL Archives team, we’d like to extend a thank you to our volunteer Elinor Malus! Since autumn 2024, Elinor has been our go-to private investigator. When you look at our archive's online database, you'll notice that each collection's "creator" (the subject of the material) has a biography, which we call a biographical sketch. However, some of our older collections did not have these biographies. By manually going through each of our collections, complemented by genealogical research on websites like AncestryLibrary.ca and JewishGen.org, Elinor worked hard to create biographies for each of these mystery creators. She has recently succeeded in catching us up! While we await a new assignment for our favourite PI, we wanted to thank her for all her help and dedication to this project.

Another special highlight in June was having Bennett Samberg volunteering with us for the month. Bennett is working toward completing his undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies at McGill, and has a budding curiosity about archival work. Bennett worked on adding further organizational infrastructure to our photograph collection by creating thematic files for our photos. Prior, we had never recorded file information anywhere, and so it was unclear to researchers where these "mini collections" of photos within the broader photo collection started and ended. Thanks to Bennett's meticulous work, the photograph collection will be structured in a way that encourages browsing and provides much-needed context for each and every photo we have. Bennett was with us here in the archives every day in June, and brought such a serene, light energy to our workspace. Working alongside him was a gift, and we can't wait to see what he does next.