Fort York finds digital allies at Fort Book

Early in 2021, the Vice Chair of The Friends of Fort York & Garrison Common, Andrew Stewart, and City Historian Richard Gerrard formed a small working group to address the significant number of fort-related archaeological records which have accumulated in the City’s possession and which are badly in need of digitization. The Fort York Archaeological Digitization Project was born. Its mission is the ongoing digitization of archival records from 60+ years of archaeological research on site. The materials include reports, field notes, maps, plans, drawings and scanned archaeological slides.

The idea is to link the new digitized material to original 35mm slides, which have already been digitized by board director Sid Calzavara. In the longer term, part of the initiative will be aimed at developing management and access strategies for the archaeological collections held in trust by Museums & Heritage Services.

In order to advance the project, a series of online meetings were held among Stewart, Gerrard, Neil Brochu, then the City’s interim Chief Curator, and Robert Bell, the Friends’ Executive Director. The group’s discussions led them to Internet Archive Canada and its team at the John Robarts Library (aka Fort Book).

The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.” It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications and games, music, movies and videos and millions of books. The advantage of using the Internet Archive is the assurance of quality of image, as well as its open access and longevity.

In October project team members met at the Robarts Library with Andrea Mills, Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada and Alex White, Operations Manager, Internet Archive Canada, where they were treated to a demonstration of state-of-the-art scanning equipment and an explanation of the digitization and archiving services available through the Internet Archive.

The first item has now been digitized and is available on the archive’s Friends of Fort York page at https://archive.org/details/friendsoffortyork. It is Excavation, Mitigation, and Research: A Summary Report of the Archeological Resource at Historic Fort York, by Catherine F. Webb, published by the Toronto Historical Board in 1994. This item was chosen because it summarizes all the archaeological work that had been done at the fort up until 1994.

This project is a real service to Toronto History Museums, which is chronically under-budgeted and under-staffed for this kind of important museum and library work. It continues the tradition that The Friends, under the direction of Nancy Baines, established 20 years ago when we began organizing Fort York’s books and papers and incorporating them into a properly catalogued library and resource centre, today housed in the Blue Barracks.