Welcome to Archive/Counterarchive

Knowledge Architectures of Audiovisual Archives

This Working Group will address issues relating to building knowledge architectures for respectful and sustainable audiovisual heritage in Canada. 

More specifically, we ask: 

  • How can we enhance meaningful and responsive access to audiovisual materials of community cultural heritage archives and knowledges?

  • How can we use innovative archival praxis and appropriate technologies of audiovisual heritage to respectfully facilitate the respectful curation, preservation, and access of community knowledges? 

  • How can we address inherent cultural bias embedding in existing organizational structures and rectify inherently problematic language in current schematics to describe ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and identity? 

 

Goals:

  • Develop respectful protocols around knowledges that are community driven.

  • Create a respectful information sharing protocol that recognizes relationships and community sharing protocols, in collaboration with will be worked on jointly with the Intellectual Property (IP) Working Group.

  • Recognize the importance of meaningful relationships through respectful curation, preservation, points of access, and the protection of knowledges and cultural memory in archives be developed. 

  • Create a resource list of best practices, ontologies, respectful protocols, and ethical considerations for Case Studies, Working Groups, and a community of researchers to refer to.

  • Address inherent cultural bias embedded within existing organizational structures and rectify inherently problematic language currently located in metadata in schematics to describe ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and identity.

  • Practice iterative metadata processes, assessing how to set up metadata development processes that can be flexible for Case Study and each community.

  • Create a community of practice around the sharing, teaching, and intergenerational transfer of knowledge, while embedding situational epistemologies that honour voices and relationships of cultural memory praxis.

  • In collaboration with the Education Working Group, develop methodologies for ethical curriculum, creating a synergistic working model that integrates multiple ways of knowing, that can lay groundwork and create space for knowledges to be preserved and shared in its unbiased entireties.

Team Members
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Headshot of Camille Callison
Co-applicant

Camille Callison

Learning and Organizational Development Librarian
University of Manitoba
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

Camille Callison, Tsesk iye (Crow) Clan of the Tahltan Nation, was the first Indigenous Services Librarian/Liaison Librarian now the Learning & Organizational Development Librarian and a PhD student (Anthropology) at the University of Manitoba. Camille is Vice-Chair, Indigenous Representative, Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA-FCAB) & Chair, Indigenous Matters Committee, Copyright Committee member, chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, an Indigenous Partner on The Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce, and is on the Advisory Committee for the First Nations Concentration at UBC iSchool. She is a member of IFLA Indigenous Matters Section Standing Committee and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO Memory of the World Committee and Sector Commission on Culture, Communications & Information. Camille has presented extensively on the importance of respectful curation, preservation, access, and protection of Indigenous knowledge and cultural memory in libraries, museums, and archives and developing meaningful relationship with Indigenous communities.

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Collaborator

Stacy Allison-Cassin

Associate Librarian, York University
Indigenous Archives Gathering Steering Committee
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

Dr. Stacy Allison-Cassin is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her work is centered in the areas of knowledge organization, metadata, and knowledge equity, with a particular focus on linked data and music. A Citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, she engages in work and research related to Indigenous matters in libraries and the larger cultural heritage sector. With a deep interest in increasing access and visibility for non-textual materials and marginalized knowledge, Allison-Cassin is a passionate advocate for change in information structures and metadata systems within the library profession and across the wider GLAM sector. As an Associate Librarian at York University she has held positions as music cataloguer, digital humanities librarian, and as a member of the Department of Student Learning and Academic Success she focused on critical pedagogy with collection responsibilities for Philosophy and History.

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Michelle Lovegrove Thomson
Partner

Michelle Lovegrove Thomson

Senior Manager
TIFF Film Reference Library
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Michelle Lovegrove Thomson is the Senior Manager of the TIFF Film Reference Library, where her focus is on education, film preservation, and public services. In June 2019, Michelle curated the exhibition: “Film Farm: 25 Years of the Independent Imaging Retreat” at TIFF, celebrating and documenting the legacy of handmade filmmaking in Canada. She holds a BFA in Film Production from York University, and Master of Arts in English from the University of Alberta, and a Master of Information from the University of Toronto iSchool. She attended the Northern Exposure to Leadership Institute (NELI) in 2015, sits on the OLA Special Libraries Committee, and planned the 2019 OLA Super Conference Special Libraries Section.

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Collaborator

Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning

Queen's University
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Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is a Queen's National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge and Culture (ALKC), Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queen's University. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation and an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, she received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University (2018), and holds graduate degrees in critical theory (MA, Western, 2005), and in contemporary art (MFA, Simon Fraser, 1997). She points to her early childhood grounding in her mother’s Anishinaabe cultural lessons as her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity. Manning has wide-ranging interests in Anishinaabe ontology, critical theory, phenomenology, and art, investigating questions of Indigenous imaging practices, mnidoo interrelationality, epistemological sovereignty, and the debilitating impact of settler colonial logics. Her investment in archives stem from her family's land claim activism and the function of the archive in the colonial state, along with their counter archival counter narrative potentialities. 

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Partner

Raegan Swanson

Executive Director
The ArQuives
Pronouns
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Raegan serves as the Executive Director of The ArQuives, formerly The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. She holds a BA from Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and a Masters of Information from the University of Toronto iSchool. She has worked as an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute, and as the Archival Advisor for the Council of Archives New Brunswick. She is currently working on her PhD, focusing on the role of community archives in Inuit communities. She is a member of the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives Taskforce to respond to the “Calls to Action” Report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the co-chair of the Association of Canadian Archivists Indigenous Matters Working Group.

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