• Judith Chipperfield, Department of Psychology
• Tom Nesmith, Department of History
• Russell Smandych, Department of Sociology and Criminology

Dr. Judith Chipperfield, BA (Hons), MA, PhD (Manitoba)
Retired June 30, 2021

Dr. Judith Chipperfield

Judy Chipperfield has made significant contributions during her 27 years at the University of Manitoba. She is internationally recognized for research on the psychology of health promotion and disease prevention. Results from her studies have implications for improving health and longevity of older Canadians, offsetting caregiver burden, and reducing health care costs. Chipperfield is the founding director of the University of Manitoba Laboratory on Aging and Health, co-directed the Emotion, Motivation, and Control Research Group and was a research affiliate at the Centre on Aging and the Health, Leisure, & Human Performance Research Institute.  For her work, she has received many honours, including prestigious awards/prizes from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Investigator Award, Partnership Award, Mid-career Aging Award, Knowledge Translation Prize).

Throughout her career, she has published hundreds of reports, conference proceedings, chapters and scholarly articles. Her research has been featured in the media, government reports and in a House of Commons discussion. Chipperfield has also generously contributed to service across several departments and faculties and participated in many university-wide and national initiatives such as evaluation, decision-making and strategic planning for CIHR. She taught many graduate and undergraduate courses and has provided training opportunities for students and advanced postdoctoral fellows/research associates. When bestowed the Faculty of Arts Professor of the Year Award in 2009, her mentoring success was described as “truly trans-generational and international”.

“On behalf of everyone in Psychology, we are very proud of and very much inspired by Dr. Chipperfield’s contributions to research and scholarship, teaching, and service to the University of Manitoba throughout her career.  She is someone who has raised the profile of our department on the world stage with her innovative research in health and aging, and at the same time contributed immeasurably to the lives of her students, mentees, and colleagues here in Manitoba,” said Dr. Dan Bailis, Head of Psychology.

Dr. Tom Nesmith, FRSC, BA, MA (Queen’s), PhD (Carleton)
Retired December 31, 2018

Dr. Tom Nesmith

Dr. Thomas Nesmith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Association of Canadian Archivists. He holds an outstanding achievement award from the Faculty of Arts and a lifetime service award from the Association for Manitoba Archives.

Arriving at UM from the National Archives of Canada in 1990, Dr. Nesmith founded archival studies within the Joint Master’s Program in History, making UM only the second university in Canada to offer a degree in archival studies at the graduate level. His award-winning publications fundamentally shifted how scholars, archivists and archival users understand the nature and meaning of archives and archival work.

Dr. Nesmith has a long history of service at UM and in the Canadian archival community. His most significant contributions at UM include contributing to the successful bid for the archives of the TRC, resulting in the creation of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and serving as Associate Dean of Arts (2001-2004). He has served as general editor of Archivaria, and has been an invited keynote speaker to archival conferences all over the world.

Dr. Roisin Cossar, Department of History Head had this to share about Dr. Nesmith, “the fields of Archival Studies and History both owe significant debts to Tom Nesmith, who championed the reciprocal relationship between the two in his career.”

Dr. Russell Smandych, BA (Saskatchewan), MA (Simon Fraser), PhD (Toronto)
Retired June 30, 2021

Dr. Russell Smandych

Dr. Russell Smandych has been a faculty member of the Department of Sociology and Criminology since 1986, and has made significant and sustained contributions to research, teaching and university and professional service throughout his career. In 2010, Smandych received the Faculty of Arts Award in Internationalization for his efforts to increase students’ awareness of international culture, perspective and issues.

Building on his cross-disciplinary training in history (BA), criminology (MA), and sociology (PhD), much of his research has been broadly interdisciplinary and comparative; ranging from his early socio-historical work on the development of poor relief, criminal justice and penitentiary systems in the 19^th century, to his more recent widely cited publications on British colonial legal history, settler colonial law and Indigenous peoples, comparative youth justice system reform and transnational/global crime and international criminal justice.

Throughout his career, he has been a dedicated instructor and graduate student advisor, teaching courses on criminal justice, youth crime and society and advanced criminology in UM’s popular undergraduate criminology program, and through serving as the primary graduate supervisor or committee member on over 50 MA and PhD theses completed at UM and four at other universities in Canada and Australia.

Smandych has also made career-long contributions to professional service, reflected in membership on editorial boards of several international peer-review journals and ongoing work with research grant funding organizations.

“Dr. Smandych was the ideal colleague; highly competent and respected in his field, always dependable and helpful and unfailingly collegial and personable,” shared Frank Cormier, Head of Sociology and Criminology.

Congratulations to all on receiving this honour.

Although not all communities have equal access to electronic media, information in general is more available to more people than in 1918, when that flu pandemic hit. Ironically, though, some of today’s records are more fragile and fleeting than those produced in 1918.

How will our institutions capture the fleeting records of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to ensure that governments, policymakers, planners, and historians can examine what happened, what went right and what went wrong? How will the voices of ordinary people, including racialized communities, be preserved so that we all remember and honour them?

A recent report for the Royal Society of Canada examines this complicated situation. The report was authored by three UM faculty and staff–Faculty of Arts history professor Esyllt Jones, archival studies professor Greg Bak, and senior scholar Shelley Sweeney (Archives and Special Collections)–as well as history professors Ian Milligan (Waterloo) and Jo-Anne McCutcheon (Ottawa).

“Remembering is a Form of Honouring: Preserving the COVID-19 Archival Record,” released at the end of February, discusses the dire situation for Canada’s archives, having suffered financial cuts and funding stagnation since the 1990s, while being confronted by the ever-growing onslaught of electronic records.

The report recommends policy changes in three key areas: funding and support for memory institutions; gaps between preservation capacity and current digital record production; and preservation of, and access to, valuable scholarly research into the societal impact of COVID-19.

The goal of the report “was to begin a conversation about priorities for archival preservation, the need for greater equity and justice in our preservation practices, and ways to safeguard the existence of historical records that will allow us in future to bear witness, with fairness and truth and in a spirit of reconciliation, to our society’s response to COVID-19.”

Read more: Remembering is a Form of Honouring: Preserving the COVID-19 Archival Record

*About the cover image: Photographer Morgan Wedderspoon’s pandemic walks series builds on her practice of collecting found objects spotted on the ground, snapping phone photographs of found objects.

Why don’t archives just digitize everything and make it available online?

Collections at a large archive like Library and Archives Canada (LAC) include hundreds of kilometres of records, millions of photographic images, maps, architectural plans and artworks, and hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video recordings. LAC, like other archives, has more mandate than budget. Digitizing this quantity of material far exceeds the institution’s resources.

Then there are the benefits relative to costs. Archives like LAC cite the popularity of records as the number one reason for digitization. Legal and academic research requires not just selected records, but entire bodies of records, including many not looked at since they were put into the archives. Digitizing large runs of obscure records would not be a responsible use of scarce public funds.

Protecting privacy and intellectual property

Like many archives in Canada, LAC holds government records as well as records donated by private individuals and organizations. Access to these private records may be restricted under legally binding donor agreements to protect donor privacy, third-party privacy or copyright.

But even with government records, the situation is not so simple. Government records include personal information of individuals, which must be protected under the Privacy Act.

Equally, the Access to Information Act, while opening many government records, keeps some closed to protect third-party privacy and national security, and for other reasons.

Since government records include records received by government, such as when a citizen sends a letter or a consultant submits a report, governments do not hold the copyright on all their records. As a result, some cannot be digitized under the Copyright Act.

Read more: 2020 is a year for the history books, but not without digital archives

Canadian history is replete with examples of government surveillance that in retrospect is seen to be unwarranted and harmful. Indigenous communities, for example, have been under government surveillance for longer than Canada has been a nation. The records of this surveillance are government records. Digitizing them and placing them online would deprive Indigenous people of their privacy and undermine Indigenous sovereignty.

Preserving the digital

Archives do not destroy the records they digitize. For every digitized record the burden of preservation is doubled: the original must be maintained and the digital copy, to be useful, must be preserved against obsolescence and data loss.

Unless archives are provided special funding, digitization is a zero-sum game: it uses up resources that are not available for other tasks. Among the most important of these is the preservation of born-digital records, including email, spreadsheets and documents, as well as new forms of records such as websites and social media.

Created on outdated computers and stored on obsolete media like floppy disks or CDs, born-digital records require specialized software, equipment and methods of preservation. Canadian archives desperately need public and researcher support for an infusion of funding to meet the challenge of born-digital archiving.

Given the ubiquity of digital technologies today, creating archives of born-digital records must be our most urgent priority — including records created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Selective digitization

Fortunately, archives have been working on this problem for some time now, and programs of selective digitization have been very successful at making high-use records readily available online.

Archives need to ensure that detailed, highly specific descriptions of records are created so that researchers can have a clear idea about the records they need to see before making travel plans.

Large archives, like LAC or Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, have regional offices that keep records close to where they are most relevant.

And most importantly, Canadian archives have dedicated staff who can provide insight and assistance to researchers, or direct researchers to already digitized materials. Reaching out to archival staff before travelling to an archives is a good idea during the COVID-19 pandemic or anytime else.

Canadian archives have endured decades of funding shortfalls and reductions, even as they have faced new challenges in digitizing non-digital records and capturing born-digital records. Increased funding is essential: but let’s not chase the mirage of digitizing everything.

This article authored by Associate Professor of History (Archival Studies) Greg Bak originally appeared online on The Conversation. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

Tell us about your background, past degrees and how you got to be where you are in your education.
I’m from Kenora, Ontario. After high school I went to the University of Waterloo and completed my B.A. in History with honours. During my B.A., I became increasingly interested in museums and decided to go to Fleming College to complete the Museum Management and Curatorship program. After I received my Ontario College Graduate Certificate I worked at the Halton Region Museum (now Halton Heritage) and volunteered at the Oakville Museum. Then, I moved to the West Parry Sound District Museum. It was while I was in Parry Sound working with members of the public researching their family history that I knew I wanted to switch to archives. But, I recognized that I would need to pursue a Masters degree. 

Why did you choose Archival Studies? Why UofM? And, where do you hope your MA in History (Archival Studies) will lead you?
I chose Archival Studies after a personal experience assisting a daughter find her late father’s photograph album that had been donated to the museum. It was a powerful moment that cemented my decision to apply to archival studies programs in Canada.

I chose the University of Manitoba for a number of reasons. U of M is close to home, tuition is more affordable in comparison to other Canadian programs, the student to professor ratio is exceptional, I was fortunate to be offered a Manitoba Graduate Scholarship, and our professors Tom Nesmith (now retired) and Greg Bak are well known in the archival community. 

I hope that my degree will keep me in the Heritage and Culture field. Whether it is in a large archives or a small community museum, I have always enjoyed the challenge of connecting people to the past.

What can you tell us about your internship this summer?
My internship this summer took me to Yellowknife, North West Territories. I was part of a project at the NWT Archives to describe 5000 digitized photographs from the Native Press newspaper. The Native Press was an Indigenous newspaper which covered stories in the western NWT from 1971-1993. For my phase of the project we described photographs from 1971-1977. The NWT Archives partnered with the Tłı̨chǫ Government on this project and I worked from April to June with a Tłı̨chǫ contractor to describe the images.

Additionally, we conducted two identification workshops in Behchokǫ̀. Elders were invited to attend the workshop and identify people and places in the images. The workshops were about sharing images back with the community and improving the descriptions. The NWT Archives was invited to attend the Tłı̨chǫ 15th Annual Gathering in Gamèti. We brought 50 large scale photographs, two photo albums with over 300 photographs, and the 5000 digitized images to be displayed on a loop. The trip to Gamèti offered the chance to share photos with as many people from the four communities as possible.

My final task in August was to write the fonds description for the Native Communications Society (the parent organization of the Native Press from 1975-1993). I had the chance to interview former staff from the Native Press which helped me understand better the daily operations and administrative structure of the Native Press in addition to personal stories that brought the records to life. 

What’s the most exciting or unique thing that happened to you during the internship?
There were many unique experiences that I had during my trip to Yellowknife. Eating Easter dinner on a house boat off of Jolliffe Island in Yellowknife, seeing the arrival of the paddlers on the Trails of Ancestors annual canoe journey at 2:00 am in Gamèti, walking across Frame Lake in -20 C weather in May and sitting above Cameron Falls in July. 

How does the internship add value or benefit your studies and research?
The internship component of the M.A. History (Archival Studies) allows students to put into practice the theory they have learned. Additionally I will base part of the third chapter of my  thesis on my internship experience.

I am currently working on my last chapter of my thesis. It is on archives in the Canadian territories – on the challenges archives face in the north and how they have addressed them. I am also looking at the value and meaning of archives and why they are important for the north. I am highlighting how projects such as the NWT Archives Native Press digitization project are meaningful. 

What’s next for you?
I am currently working part-time as a student at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. I plan on defending my thesis sometime in early 2020 and graduating in the summer of 2020. After I finish my M.A., I hope to continue to work in Winnipeg. There are some amazing archives and culture and heritage organizations in the city.

What advice would you give to those considering this M.A. program?
My advice to prospective students is simply to apply. Our program has had students with an array of educational backgrounds. The class sizes are small. The first year can be tough but, you come out with a strong understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the profession. The internship will provide you with practical experience and often leads to part-time work and helps build a network with other professional archivists. Our students have interned in Winnipeg at places such as the NCTR, the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the Manitoba Archives, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights among many other great places in the city. Students have also travelled nationally and internationally for their internships and had amazing experiences. The thesis component allows students to explore a topic of their interest in-depth and contribute to archival literature. Students from the program have gone on to publish in journals such as Archivaria. Students can also join the U of M Association of Canadian Archivists Student Chapter and the History Graduate Student Association which provide opportunities to network with other students and professionals in the field. 

To close, my experience has and continues to be extremely rewarding, I’ve had so many opportunities that would have been impossible outside this program. I’ve enjoyed my time working with fantastic professors and my fellow students. I’ve had phenomenal internship experiences at the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the NWT Archives. During my time with the History Graduate Student Association I was lucky to volunteer with many exceptional students and professors who helped make the Fort Garry Lectures event a success each year. Thank you again for the opportunity to be featured.

Interested in pursuing a graduate degree in History (Archival Studies)? Attend the History M.A. Information Session on Friday, October 11, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm in Room 111 St. John’s College to hear about all of the available History M.A. programs.  No registration required.