Ushering Agassiz's history into the digital age

On a chill day in early January, the sometimes-bustling interior of Agassiz’s historic train station-turned-museum is quiet and empty. The banner for a half-finished Lunar New Year display hangs on a wall between two windows. But on the second floor, museum manager Maria Martins is busy working. Around her, tucked away inside closets, cupboards, and shelves throughout the Agassiz-Harrison Museum are thousands of physical reminders of the community’s history. 

Martins is ready to usher those artifacts into the digital age. 

“The amount of information that has been able to be captured here over the years is incredible, but it's just not accessible to the public,” Martins told The Current during a visit to the historic train station that houses the museum and its archives. The goal is to change that. 

Digitization. System alignment. Volunteer development. Those activities may not sound glamorous, but they form what Martins believes are the most important responsibilities of her position. And her work is already showing fruit. 

A newspaper digitization project that began before her time at Agassiz has just become public, allowing residents and researchers to read some of the Fraser Valley’s earliest newspapers from their homes. Even more digital projects are in the works that could help make Agassiz’s history more accessible to people in the Fraser Valley and beyond. 

No story about Martins’ work at the Agassiz-Harrison Museum can be understood without knowing what makes a community museum distinct from larger, more-prominent history-centred spaces. 

Born from the self-directed desire for collective understanding, community museums are typically built through generations of donations, storytelling, and labour. Agassiz and Harrison’s community museum began in 1979, when a group of residents first met with the idea of preserving the region’s history. In the 1980s, after first opening a mini-museum in the District of Kent’s municipal office, the group purchased the CPR train station to save it from demolition. 

Ever since, the museum has had a home in the station, which moved to the Agassiz Experimental Farm in 1985 and back to its original location in 2003. But the museum’s essence has evolved through the efforts of the dozens of volunteers who worked—and continue to work—to preserve the area’s history. 

Martins says that is one of the underlying foundations for both community museums in general, and Agassiz specifically.

“We're a place for community to come together, where local people can tell their own stories, to represent [themselves] to the outside world and also to create new connections internally and places to come together,” she says. “This is a place where we get to say people are important and your story is important, and we want you to talk about it.”

Martins, 28, is the youngest person to have been hired to manage the Agassiz-Harrison Museum—much younger than many of the volunteers who form the backbone of the museum. But their relationship is reciprocal. 

Martins and the museum volunteers give, as well as take; the volunteers teach Martins about the history of the community they grew up in, while Martins helps the volunteers learn new skills, often related to technology. 

“Sometimes it can be hard if people don't realize the challenges they overcome and make assumptions about what they understand and don't understand,” Martins says. “One of my most amazing volunteers who works on digitization is 87 years old. She came to me and she said, ‘I want to learn how to do this. I want to learn how to use the computer. I want to understand our systems, and I understand it might be a pain, but I want to do it.’ 

“I said, ‘If you want to take the time, I want to take the time.’”

Ruth, the elderly volunteer, is one of many who took on the onerous work of digitizing Agassiz’s newspapers—a project which was revealed to the public in early December, when the museum released the first 36 years of Agassiz Record and Agassiz Advance newspapers on its website, from 1923 to 1959.

The project’s origins pre-date Martins’ time at the museum, with digitization beginning in 2022. It began with a $25,000 New Horizons for Seniors grant from the federal government, thanks to a successful application by local historian and long-time volunteer Bev Kennedy.

The grant program is aimed at getting seniors involved in their communities, which is exactly what the project has done. The museum’s volunteers, most of whom are seniors, have undertaken the herculean task of scanning page after page after page of old newsprint, and preparing it for research.

Martins’ involvement was key to getting the digital newspapers off the museum servers and onto the screens of the public. Martins connected with a company in the United States called Advantage Archives, which works to create accessible archives for museums across North America. The Agassiz-Harrison Museum is one of the first three Canadian museums to partner with the company.

Grant money can be consumed surprisingly quickly. For this project, some of the money went to pay for archival boxes, which are used to hold newspapers and preserve them for the future. A single archival box, which can house about 30 newspapers, costs around $25. (They are so expensive because they are specially designed to prevent paper from disintegrating over time.)

Part of the funding was used to create the work area where volunteers sit and scan brittle papers for hours at a time.

Martins gestures to a small computer and scanner sitting against the museum’s upstairs wall. Both were mundane looking: the most impressive part of the scanner was the grey pole that loomed over the base of the stand. The computer monitor was temporarily obscured by a piece of poster board.

Despite its uninspiring appearance, the scanner system is not a two-bit operation. The scanner, which Martins described as looking like a “stick on a stand,” cost the museum around $2,000 and captures images with a high-quality resolution of 3,000 dots-per-inch. 

The computer hosts software that allows the museum to use ocular character recognition while scanning, meaning that the newspaper pages are uploaded as text-searchable files rather than simple pictures. The software identifies each letter on the newspaper page, and allows future readers to search for words and phrases in the document.

To get the newspapers into their final digital form, more than just scanners and computers are needed. Volunteers spend hours placing each page under the scanner, then repeating the process again and again.

“It's just a lot of time,” Martins says. But when it’s finished, hunting through an old newspaper is no longer like looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, the search becomes a high-powered magnet that can pull the metaphorical needle out almost instantly. 

As Martins says: “it just changes the game.” 

The most important part, though, is actually having the newspapers in hand. Because you can’t digitize something if you don’t have a physical copy in the first place.

“We're using what we have,” she says. “So we're starting from the very beginning and going to the present. There's a lot of years missing. We do not by any means have the full collection.” 

Some of the museum’s newspaper collection comes courtesy of the provincial archives. (Some of the newspapers at the Agassiz-Harrison Museum have a stamp on them that says “Legislative Assembly,” because that is where they were donated from.) Others come from local residents’ own attics—and Martins is hoping more will come to light eventually.

“If anyone has more newspapers, gosh, we'd love for them to come forward,” she says.  

The museum’s newspapers are hidden away in a tiny upstairs room that is filled to bursting with all kinds of paper-based archival holdings. Photographs are filed away in cabinets in the centre of the room, while the newspapers are on a back wall in those fancy boxes. 

The boxes are so expensive in part because they are specially designed to help preserve the paper. Most paper is acidic, and becomes brittle and increasingly fragile over time. The boxes minimize “acid migration” from one paper to the next, and also keep out dust and moisture.

The boxes closest to the ceiling are the oldest, and most fragmented. There is also a pile of newer Agassiz-Harrison Observer papers, which the museum is maintaining for future preservation. (There are no plans to digitize those copies though—the Observer, which is currently owned by Carpenter Media, began publishing digital editions online in 2013.)

There are still more documents in the room: massive loose newspapers—the kind you could imagine hiding behind in a noir detective movie—that are out for future display rather than preservation, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, and more that Martins hasn’t even begun to touch.

“I don't even know what's in the archive yet. There's too much stuff,” she says. 

That leads into the next part of Martins’ work: figuring out exactly what the museum has, and where on earth it’s all hiding.

Outside the archive closet, Martins turns on one of the volunteer computers and opens an online database detailing nearly 10,000 of the museum’s artifacts. It’s not available to the public yet.

“We're at a point where if someone looked up those records and they were like, ‘I think that this was the most cool object. It's related to my family’—I can't go find them,” she explains. “Our records are completely disconnected from the objects and the archives that they represent, and I'm not willing to make them public until I can actually follow through on requests.”

The online database already has almost 10,000 items documented, but they aren’t connected in a real way to the physical items in the museum. Some photos have been digitized—and those can be viewed in the database or shared digitally. But other items, like a typewriter and a netted hat, are identified without any way for Martins to find them in the museum itself. 

Volunteers are currently looking through the museum’s accession books—essentially, lists of donations—and adding those items to the digital database. The next step is to comb through the museum’s various closets, cupboards, and shelves to actually find each time.  

“Some of those things people haven't thought about since they were accepted in 1983,” Martins says. 

Once the items in the museum’s digital repository are connected to their physical counterparts, research will become much easier. But getting it to that point will be a challenge.

Despite there being nearly 10,000 items in the museum’s digital database, Martins estimates there are at least 15,000 more to add.

“I know it doesn't seem like we hold that much based on the size of the building, but just looking at the archive, how many pieces of paper could you fit in a box?” Martins says. “Each of those pieces of paper is one item. So it builds up pretty fast.”

Like the newspapers. The boxes upon boxes of newspapers stacked floor-to-ceiling in the museum are finally available to people in Agassiz and beyond through a mouse click. 

They form an integral part of Harrison and Agassiz’s historical record—not necessarily because they report important historical events, but because they document how people in the early 20th century experienced their world.

“When you really place yourself back in that time, this is how people learn about anything exterior to their home without talking to another human being,” Martins says. “You went to the newspaper and the newspaper said something as simple as the Agassiz family is going on vacation to the Panama Canal. That's one I looked at recently. It's like, why would we want to know if they're going on vacation? But it would also say, someone got first place at the Fall Fair in these categories. And there'd be a full page dedicated to that.”

(The Current can attest to the many pages dedicated to those local events. You can read our stories on the history of community fairs, which relied heavily on contemporary newspaper accounts of the fairs, here and here.)

“It's really your lens to the world,” Martins continues. “I was looking at some papers from 1945 and of course, all these local things are still there, but also it's completely focused around the war. You have different reprinted articles from larger newspapers about what's happening in Europe, but you also have something about the local Legion saying, ‘Hey, we're trying to put together lists of anybody in this area who gave service,’ and they're actively trying to do that and asking the community for help if they missed anyone.

“When you look at that one day, you can find information, a particular story about a thing you might be researching, but really it's a snapshot of what someone in history that day would have understood about the world”

You can find all of the Agassiz Harrison Museum’s digitized newspapers online here. Currently records are available from 1923 to 1959, although volunteers are still working to digitize the rest of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

If you are interested in volunteering, you can contact the museum at [email protected]. If you have copies of old Agassiz newspapers you want to donate, you can contact the museum at the same address.

Correction: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect email for the museum. The email address has now been updated.