When we downsized Broadview’s office space a couple of years ago, we had to part with hundreds of old photographs taken for our publication. Many were portraits of past United Church leaders and church events, stored in rickety filing cabinets and jammed into fraying files with names like “Sunday School Picnics” or “Acid Rain.” Every time we wanted to find an old photo, we had to guess at how a previous staffer might have filed it. Mostly, they sat unused.
I decided to donate these images to the United Church of Canada Archives at 40 Oak Street in Toronto. Today, archivist Laura Hallman and her team have preserved the photographs and taken steps to make them accessible and searchable for future generations.
It’s often been said that journalism is the first rough draft of history — a sentiment popularized in 1963 by Philip L. Graham, then president and publisher of the Washington Post. But in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate that there’s no way to research or even access that “rough draft” without the fine work of archivists who preserve it on our behalf.
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Archives conjure images of quiet and sterile underground rooms, but they are vitally important. They document activities and shed light on individuals and institutions. They tell our stories and enrich our understanding of identity and culture. They can play a key role in upholding justice, for example by providing historical records to residential school survivors and their descendants (see the interview with Tanya Talaga).
At anniversary times, like Broadview’s 195th in 2024 or The United Church of Canada’s 100th anniversary in 2025, archives let us to dive into our past — who we were and where we came from — so we can better understand where we’re headed.
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We’ve had some fun over the past year digging out old magazine covers and front pages for Broadview’s anniversary Cover Quiz, and we couldn’t have done it without archivists. The United Church archives has digitized The Christian Guardian (1829-1925); it’s freely accessible in their catalogue. The Library and Archives of Victoria University, in the University of Toronto, has posted The New Outlook (1925-1939) in its digital collections. The United Church Observer is available at the United Church archives on microfilm from 1939 to 1981 and in print form after that.
With a federal government grant, we recently digitized nearly 350 Observer stories, spanning 2008 to 2015, and posted them to our website. It was painstaking work, taking nearly 400 hours, but it lifted great journalism off dusty CDs and made it publicly accessible again. I encourage you to check out this publication’s efforts at writing the first draft of history for nearly 200 years. If you stumble upon something intriguing, let me know!
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Jocelyn Bell is the editor and publisher of Broadview.
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