|
|
3 May 2007
Wade Murray
Chair
Finance and Administration Committee
City of Regina
and
Councillor Ward 6
Dear Mr. Murray,
I am deeply disappointed by the city's decision to terminate the position
of City of Regina Archivist. I urge you and your colleagues on the Finance
and Administration Committee to do all in your power at your 8 May meeting
to reverse this truly retrograde decision. The alternate service proposal
for the Archives made by the City Clerk and City Manager in their report
to you is in no way adequate. If it is carried out Regina's already far
too modest archival program would fall well behind the archival services
offered by even many small towns and counties in Canada, not to mentioned
comparable cities such as Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and
Halifax. This meagre service would hardly be worthy of a city rightly
aspiring to be "Canada's Greatest City". Great cities have great pride in
their past and have great institutions such as archives, libraries,
galleries, and museums to sustain them in a competitive knowledge-based
modern society and inspire the sense of identity and shared achievement
that drives them forward. No great city has ever become so by undermining
these institutions.
A community cannot hobble its Archives and hope to achieve its hopes and
goals. In going over the goals the city administration has set for itself,
and some of the recent items on your committee's agenda, I see many ways
in which the City Archives could be a key player, if funded adequately.
The City Manager is working to make Regina's city government "the best
municipal organization in Canada". Two of the three pillars of his
strategy are "Asset Management" and "Customer Service". Yet, management of
all city records, surely a (and perhaps the) vital city asset, and crucial
to any effort to make a city's administration the best in the country, is
now to be woefully underfunded. And how is customer service improved by
reducing even further the already limited access to the records due to the
already underfunded Archives? A genuine commitment to customer service
would see that the city has a great asset in its archival records and
would make every effort to increase, not decrease, services for them.
How can civic government in Regina be as progressive as it aspires to be
when open, accountable administration is bound to be severely weakened by
deep cuts to its Archives, which houses most of the most valuable records
the city has, as, after all, they are the only ones to be kept
permanently.
In looking at your committee's recent agenda items, I note that you have
just dealt with matters related to the Regina Old Warehouse Business
Improvement District, Regina Downtown, and Tourism Regina. The Old
Warehouse program has as its motto "Our Future is Our Past" and Regina
Downtown envisions a community "alive with arts, culture, and
entertainment; [a] showplace for heritage and creative urban design".
Tourism Regina has the many historical attractions of the city and area
among its primary promotions. A vibrant City Archives program would serve
all of these key community building strategic goals. Indeed, developing
such an archival program should itself be one of the strategic goals of
these organizations and the city. For example, as one strategic objective,
moving the Archives from its remote location outside the core area and
into an attractive facility downtown would be an excellent contribution to
these aims. It is extremely hard for the Archives to be of wider
usefulness, and fend off ill-conceived cuts, when it is rendered nearly
invisible due to its location.
The alternate service plan you are considering will not serve these and
the many other archival needs of the City of Regina, such as protecting
the rich records of private origin created by leading political, business,
literary, educational, professional, and community figures of all
backgrounds. These valuable records may end up being another 'export' from
Saskatchewan (or at least Regina) to enrich archives in other places that
may want and value them more. But more likely, most will simply vanish
through neglect, and never be the powerful and priceless legacy they could
be to the people of Regina. And Regina would then take little consolation
and less pride in a meagre $60,000 saved. Future generations deprived of
this legacy will not think well of the shortsightedness of this one. As
one of the great daughters of Saskatchewan, Joni Mitchell, said, in a
classic warning about environmental degradation that applies in spirit to
the irretrievable archival losses this cut will mean to the community,
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Til it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.
And where are her archives? What an extraordinary cultural magnet to the
city and province it could be. Don't 'pave' over it and others too with
this cut. We now know how right she was about dangers to the environment.
Let us not produce a similar calamity for our archival environment.
Indeed, the archival record (much of it created by cities) of our
long-term impact on the environment is now more obviously necessary in
order to deal with the increasingly urgent priority of protecting the
environment.
The alternate plan is based on three major misconceptions of archives: i)
that archiving is a marginal even "discretionary" afterthought in civic
administration; ii) that other institutions can provide the service that
Regina won't; and iii) that there really isn't much to archival work than
tending to a few straightforward research inquiries once in a while, when
someone asks for an appointment, and that an employee who is not a
professional archivist can do that simple job.
I hope that the arguments above and in my letter of 13 April to Mayor
Fiacco and city council (attached below) show that archival records are
not a marginal concern in city administration and life. The alternate plan
not only ignores these arguments for archives, but also says that this
dismissal has a legal basis in the Cities Act. Only an unduly narrow
interpretation of the Cities Act could justify the City of Regina's
decision to cut its City Archivist position. The clear implication of the
fact that the Act requires Regina to keep a substantial body of public
records "permanently" is that adequate archiving services for them be
provided and thus that at a minimum a City Archivist be employed to do so.
The reference in the Act to the possible role of the provincial archives
in undertaking this responsibility indicates that such ample public
archival services are expected, not the truncated ones the alternate plan
proposes.
For many years the city seems to have interpreted the act in this broader
way because it worked with the provincial archives to house the city's
records. The city has since established its own comparable archives. Why
cut that now? What new grounds for reinterpreting the Cities Act narrowly
could possibly obtain now and yet were misunderstood so badly by previous
administrations that did commit themselves to more acceptable levels of
archival services? If funding is the concern, only small savings in the
grand scheme of things are possible by cutting the Archivist -- some
$60,000 out of a $221 million city budget. And in budget reports in the
press, I see no other service area cut so drastically. Indeed I see
needed, albeit modest, increases in other comparable areas, such as the
City Library and the Regina Arts Commission. I am thus left mystified by
this decision to single out the City Archives for a draconian cut.
Reallocating what amounts to pocket change from larger program budgets
could easily save the City Archivist position.
The alterate plan suggests other institutions in Regina such as the
libraries, museums, and provincial archives can do what the City Archives
has done. This too reflects a profound misconception of archiving. The
other institutions do not have a mandate to identify and archive Regina's
huge volume of official city records. Only the city can do that. If it
does not do so, or does so inadequately, no one else will do it, and the
city will have failed in carrying out a fundamental public trust with a
major public information asset -- to protect the public record (created
with taxpayer funding, and owned by the people as much as they own other
civic assets such as buildings and vehicles) and to make the public's
record readily accessible to the people of Regina.
The plan also proposes to position the City Archives under the Records and
Administration Coordinator. There is no problem in principle with linking
the functions of archives and records management under one head, but that
head must have professional expertise in both areas. It is doubtful that
the coordinator has both sets of expertise. And cutting the city's sole
professional archivist virtually ensures that this expertise will be
lacking. Again, the fact that the plan proposes this, illustrates a severe
underestimation of the complexity and burden of archival work. Indeed, the
one remaining staff member in the Archives would not even be fully
dedicated to archival work, but would take on that now much increased load
(given the loss of the Archivist) and also work on records management
projects. This will inevitably mean archival work will get short shrift.
Archival work in the plan's view is but a mere part-time mechanical
retrieval of documents. The work of identifying archival records from the
great mass of all city records, ensuring that they actually do get to the
archives, controlling and describing this complex mass of multimedia
documents, dating from Regina's earliest days to the near present, so that
users can even hope to find what they want, and of monitoring the records'
physical condition so that they are preserved for the legally required
"permanent" time, is nowhere to be found as the serious and demanding work
that a professional archivist does full time.
And the plan completely ignores the matter of long-term archiving of
electronic records, if it is thought that this massive new problem can be
dealt with by a reduced archival staff, now lacking professional
expertise. If the plan's narrow interpetation of the Cities Act would not
put the City of Regina perilously close to non-compliance with a key
provincial statute (and I think it does), the inadequate resources of the
reduced Archives will certainly do so when the electronic records problem
hits full force, and that will likely result in public embarrassment and
loss of confidence in city hall or worse (legal liability) to the city for
mismanaging it.
The plan's assumptions about archives make it seem that archival records
magically appear on their user's desk, as (unlike most government
functions) no law supports proper archiving or is needed to be revised in
order to do so, no meaningful resources are required to do archiving, and
those who do not have archival expertise and are not assigned archival
work as a full-time priority can nevertheless do this work adequately.
Archiving as outlined in the plan is but a minor appendage to records
management, and records are seen mainly as something to be managed in the
interests of the administrators of the city, as if the records were
largely theirs alone, while citizens who want archival services can wait
behind these officials, at the back of the line, to gain access to their
own record (the public's record, which was made and exists mainly for
them), if they can manage to get an appointment.
The alternate plan for managing and providing archival services is in fact
a plan for just the contrary -- a plan, perhaps unintended, to let the
City Archives languish, to limit it, and deprive it of the necessary
oxygen of adequate resources, to keep it an afterthought when it could be
much, much more, as archives are in most other major cities and
jurisdictions.
I ask the Finance and Administration Committee to do all it can to undo a
serious mistake and not only work to restore the cut funding to the
Archives, but also to recommend that the City Archives be placed on a
proper footing (as it must be recalled that even before the cut, the
Archives was not as well supported as it should have been for a city of
Regina's size, never mind one aspiring to a population of 250,000, as
Mayor Fiacco envisages). I urge as a second step, after restoring the City
Archivist position, that Regina undertake a study of the City Archives
program that is designed to provide a strategic plan with definite
objectives and timelines for giving the Archives the status and resources
needed to do its valuable unique work and to put it on the secure basis it
so rightly deserves.
Sincerely,
Tom Nesmith, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Master's Programme in Archival Studies
Department of History
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Mb
Canada
R3T 5V5
Phone: (204) 474 8559
Archival Studies Programme Web site:
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/archives
|
|
What's New
|
Advocacy Alert - National Archival Development Program |
| The National Archival Development Program (NADP) has been eliminated, which will have a severe impact on the archival community in Saskatchewan and across the country. Click here to learn more and help stop the cuts. |
|
|
|
