July 7, 2012 - Excerpt courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen, "The memory-keeper's dilemma"
Anna St. Onge, York University’s Archivist in charge of digital projects and outreach, says librarians and archivists are acutely aware of the challenges — and the opportunities — the Internet presents to their respective fields.
However, St. Onge cautions that Caron cannot allow the goal of devising a way to preserve the present to overshadow the work still to be done in archiving the country’s past.
To be useful in a digital format, St. Onge says archival documents must first be correctly identified, organized and labelled so that “in five years, 20 years, or a 100 years, people can benefit from the information in well-kept records.”
“It’s expensive. It’s tedious. And, it’s necessary,” she said.