Legislative library adopts Sun archives

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This article was published 13/04/2024 (688 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More than a century’s worth of the Brandon Sun’s archives have found a new permanent home in Manitoba’s capital.

When the Sun sold its old building at 501 Rosser Ave. last year, its new home at The Town Centre mall did not have room for archival copies of the paper’s issues dating back to the late 1800s.

The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, with help from representatives from the Brandon General Museum & Archives as well as various volunteers, had the archives moved into a backroom of its historic Second World War-era hangar as a temporary measure to save them from being thrown into the landfill.

In the last week of March, the Manitoba Legislative Library arranged for a moving team to pick up the archives and bring them to Winnipeg, where they will be catalogued and preserved.

“Part of our mandate at the legislative library is to preserve the publishing history of Manitoba,” said Stuart Hay, the library’s head of reference services.

“We’ve been longtime newspaper collectors. We’ve got, I think, over 800 different newspaper titles in our collection. But for some reason, we have a big gap of Brandon Sun (issues) and it’s a mystery.”

Hay said he doesn’t know why, but the library had almost no copies of the Sun. The library is separate from the Archives of Manitoba, which preserves records rather than published work.

Taking in the Sun archives allows the library to fill in a gap in its collection. While the library has a microfilm collection for the Sun, Hay said researchers looking for good quality images from old issues often get better results by looking at the original print copies.

Currently, staff are sorting the volumes to prepare them for cataloguing.

“We’d like to wrap them up in heavy brown kraft paper,” Hay said. “And then they’ll get put on the shelves in the stacks. And as long as they’re kept out of the light and they don’t experience any big swings in temperature or humidity, they’ll be just fine for decades and decades.”

Some of the material is in better shape than others. However, Hay said it’s not just a matter of age. It depends on the quality of paper the issues were printed on as well as how they were handled.

For the archives in better condition, library patrons will eventually be able to handle them directly once they’re made available for public use. Items in worse condition will still be accessible, but museum staff will handle them for patrons.

Some are just so fragile that they might not be allowed to be taken out at all.

Beyond Manitoba newspapers, the library also has publications from trade and university presses, local histories and other materials published both in Manitoba and about Manitoba.

But an advantage newspapers provide for those looking for a glimpse into the past is that they offer a window into the time in which they were published.

“You can learn a lot about people’s attitudes to different sorts of issues,” Hay said. “You can see what was on people’s minds, what they considered important and what they didn’t consider important. As well, it’s just a good resource for finding out what happened at a certain time in a certain place.”

In Hay’s own work, he said he looks through newspapers all the time. Earlier this week, he said, he was able to track down something that happened in the St. James neighbourhood of Winnipeg in the 1970s through looking through old papers. He said he doesn’t think he would have found that information anywhere else.

Though the library sometimes culls old material, it does not purge the newspapers in its care. That means the Brandon Sun’s archives will be kept safe for the public going forward.

Hay didn’t know when exactly the archives would officially make their way into the stacks, but figured it would be sometime this year.

Stephen Hayter, the Commonwealth air museum’s executive director, told the Sun on Friday that the Sun archives’ stay in their hangar was largely uneventful except for a couple of visits for research purposes.

Even though the archives have left, the shelves that came with them from the old Brandon Sun building remain at the museum and will be used to store and organize its own archives and records.

“We’re grateful we could help with preserving them and really glad that the legislative library wanted to preserve them,” Hayter said. “While we could look after them, it was at a very low level. We didn’t have a proper climate-controlled space for them.”

Though Hayter acknowledged it would have been nice to find them a home in Brandon, he said he was glad a copy of the city’s history could be kept safe for many years to come.

“I am not alone in that — a lot of volunteers made that happen,” he said. “They were like-minded in that something needed to be done because we didn’t want to see that history lost.”

Hayter credited volunteer Gibb Bell for handling the archives’ pickup from the museum while he was away on vacation, as well as everyone else who helped move them out of the old Sun building in the first place.

He said the museum is always looking for additional volunteers to help out in various capacities.

Heritage Minister Glen Simard, the NDP MLA for Brandon East, told the Sun he helped arrange funding for the library to take in the archives so that the stories of Brandon’s past can be preserved for all time.

“We wanted to make sure that, having lost the ability to store them … that they would continue to be housed responsibly,” Simard said. “Being that we in Manitoba have an archival group that can do that, we looked into it and made it happen.”

The minister said the library will be a good home because it has professionals trained on how to preserve history, adding that their colleagues at the Archives of Manitoba are holding an open house today from 1 to 5 p.m. in Winnipeg where the public can take a look at historic maps dating back to the 1700s.

“It’s one thing to see that on a computer screen, but I also think seeing the real thing has a profound impact,” Simard said. “Preserving the stories of the past, I think, is extremely important, especially when you have the means to do so.”

A spokesperson for Simard said the cost of moving the archives from Brandon to Winnipeg was around $1,800.

“For more than 142 years The Brandon Sun has been instrumental in telling the stories of Brandon, western Manitoba and the province as a whole, and as a company we are proud of that legacy,” Brandon Sun managing editor Matt Goerzen said.

“The volumes of historic archival papers that have now been donated to Manitoba’s legislative library will offer more Manitobans a chance to read about our collective history, one that we have recorded a day at a time.

“These paper volumes are incredibly fragile — particularly the volumes from the first decades of the 20th century — and I’m exceedingly glad that our archives have found a permanent home where they will be cared for by those who seek to preserve our province’s history.”

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