Bigger than a breadbox.This is a picture of the Alberta Records Centre, where the provincial government stores its inactive records. (Inactive records are the ones the government no longer accesses regularly. They will eventually be either destroyed or transferred to the provincial archives.) To give some idea of the size of the place, the guy in the picture is about 6'3, and he's standing at row 1 of 24. The records centre has a capacity of 710 000 boxes. The Provincial Archives of Alberta accepts only 3-5% of inactive records from the Alberta Records Centre. Even so, their collection is huge.
This fall I worked on a project for a government department that involved reviewing records that the provincial archives had accepted but no longer wanted. Even though most of the info was pretty boring, there were some nuggets among the dross. The thing about archival research is that you never really know when you're going to hit paydirt. A really interesting document on medical ethics in Alberta, for example, may be tucked into in a file on the day-to-day administration of the mental health program. Or a file on the provincial government's response to the 1987 tornado stuck in a box full of accounts payable info.
If you've ever been interested in stuff like why Edmonton felt the need become an architectural wasteland, those clippings files the archivist was talking about today are a good place to start. I learned from them that one of Edmonton's mayors in the 1960s said old buildings like the McLeod Building and the old post office "have no value" whatsoever. And the editorial this was quoted in agreed with that sentiment!
Nobody, least of all I, claimed archival research, or for that matter records management, is exciting. But it's pretty cool when you come across those gems.
