Proposed changes to Library and Archives Canada has prompted a backlash.  A group calling themselves Save Library & Archives Canada (LAC) is calling on the Canadian public to get involved and to help save Canada’s national memory.  According to LAC, the changes are far reaching and include:

• narrowing the mandate from preserving cultural and historical heritage to the preservation of federal government records
• reduced public access
• decentralization of heritage materials by third party providers
• elimination of vital specialist archivist positions, such as newspaper specialist, library scientist, and government documents specialist
• compromised quality of LAC’s collections because of cuts to the acquisition of materials

For more information, go to the Save Library & Archives Canada website.

The Canadian Alternative Media Archive is pleased to welcome visitors from the Making Media Public Conference! We’re glad that you’re interested in preserving the often ephemeral and yet vitally important stories from independent and citizen’s media in Canada.

The website is brand new and the project is in its planning phases, but there are a few things we’d like you to know about.

We are asking visitors to fill out a very brief survey about alternative media and their interests in it. Click here to fill it out.  You will be helping us get a sense of what issues are important to you when it comes to preserving alternative histories.

The archive is just getting off the ground.  We are reaching out to different elements of the independent media sector in Canada, consulting with various stakeholders, looking for funding, and exploring technical strategies for storage and retrieval.

We are also planning a conference on alternative archiving in Canada next Spring 2011.

If you are interested in staying up to date about the Canadian Alternative Media Archive, please sign up here.

Thanks again for your interest.  And please get in touch with us if you have any comments, questions or suggestions.

By Michael Lithgow and Kirsten Kozolanka

[Presented by Michael Lithgow at MiT6 Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission on 24 April 2009, Boston, MA]

The era “globalization”, among other things, describes a shift in consciousness that includes new and emerging practices of remembrance and new locations and new forms of public memory (Stepnisky 2008).  Not so long ago,  the study of public memory rested on, at least in part, an assumed distinction between archival memory and “lived” memory.  Archival memory assumed formal and specialized practices of selection, cataloguing and access (through exhibitions, museums, archives, etc.), and lived memory assumed the more spontaneous, vernacular and generally ephemeral qualities of remembrance by citizens, often through rituals and ceremonies.  Digital technologies allow these distinctions to be conflated.  The storing and organizing functions of the archival aspects of memory have collapsed into and with the access and interactivity of vernacular ceremony through digital technologies like the internet.

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