When I meet people in Whistler and the topic of work comes up, I talk about Whistler’s wild history and how awesome it is to work with every day. I also bring up the challenges of the job: as a non-profit, we fight with our pens each year to maintain a budget for operating through grant writing and presentations. History marches on and collections inevitably grow; we are bursting at the seams in terms of storage in our portable behind the library.
We are balancing the storage issue with wanting to represent as many of the subcultures in the Whistler community as we can. This town changes fast – evidence of places, people and events from even 10 years ago have already been wiped from the landscape (The Boot, for instance). If potential donors believe only Myrtle Philip and the Crazy Canucks are “old enough” to be considered history, the evidence of more recent events will be lost before anyone gets a chance to donate related items.
I’ll give you a step-by-step process of what happens when you donate in the hopes that perhaps you might consider it an option. The process of donating involves bringing your items, documents, films or photographs into the museum and signing a donation form in which you’re able to give us historical context for what you’re donating – maybe “worn on Gaper Day in 1995” or “photos from shows at Alpenrock”.
Our mandate allows us to accept any item that is related to the Sea to Sky region (though we prefer receiving things relating to the Whistler community!) and items that demonstrate mountain culture. We then give each individual item of our donation an accession number that acts as its own unique identity.
For an artefact (any physical object), a lot of physical description is necessary (object type, year of creation, years of use, dimensions, colour, material, geographic origin, condition, and so on). We photograph artefacts from all sides, capturing details like inscriptions on the back.
All of these descriptions and photographs go into one catalogue record for each artefact. This catalogue is searchable, so that if we want to find “Whistler Mountain pins” we can view all artefacts that were described this way. Before storing artefacts, we make sure they’re cleaned of dirt, mould or anything else that might degrade their condition in storage.
Cleaning artefacts requires much care that we do not damage the object. We often use brushes, cloth and lightly soaped water. The artefacts are then wrapped in acid-free tissue, placed in acid-free boxes and placed on a shelf in our off-site storage.
For archival donations (written documents and media), content is more important than physical appearance. We describe an item’s physical appearance in a catalogue entry and tag the catalogue entry with “access points” – subjects, places, people and organizations related or pictured – so that we can search for all the items related to a certain topic.
You can even search at home at whistler.ica-atom.org. Archival donations are stored on-site at the museum because we often receive requests for certain texts or photos to be digitized. Digitization requires a massive amount of computer storage, two very expensive scanners and a lot of employee time.
If you’re interested in having your own items go through this rollercoaster of historical processing, come by the museum! We’re especially looking to fill gaps in our collection – mountain biking, summer activities, restaurants, and 1996-2010.
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