To mark International Archives Day on Saturday, June 9, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) invites the public to participate in an archives scan-a-thon and other activities in its ten centres across the province. The theme of BAnQ’s events is Discover Your Inner Archivist — or Cyberarchivist.
Reservations are required to attend events in Gaspé, Rimouski, Saguenay, Sherbrooke, and Trois-Rivières.
No reservation, however, is necessary to attend BAnQ in Old Montreal, Quebec City, Gatineau, Rouyn-Noranda, and Sept-Îles.
The full list of activities for each centre is on the BAnQ website. Copy and paste the URL into Google Translate for an English translation, or if using Google Chrome as your browser, right click with the mouse.
As example, here’s what four of the centres are doing.
In Montreal, participants will be briefly trained by specialists from BAnQ and Wikimedia Canada. In teams, they will take turns to digitize archival records, verify the quality of the digitizations, and upload them and write descriptions on Wikimedia Commons. Others will translate the descriptions.
In Quebec City, BAnQ and Wikimedia Canada will offer a transcription workshop of testimonies heard during the coroner’s inquiry following the 1918 Quebec City conscription riots. The transcripts will be posted online on Wikisource.
At the Gatineau centre, specialists from Wikimedia Canada will explain how the Wiki universe works and how to contribute to it. Specialists will also help people digitize their own photos.
In Sherbrooke, where registration is required, people can participate in a research session to find prints of businesses and institutions in the Eastern Townships to help build an architectural view of the region.
