Manitoba has several regional heritage organizations that work tirelessly to preserve and promote the history of local communities. Below is an update provided by Al Thorleifson of the Pembina Manitou Archive on the work of the Partnership With Museums Project.
The Boundary Trails National Heritage Region Board in partnership with the Manitoba Heritage Grants Program have allocated funding to develop a regional approach emphasizing the relationship between museums, their related archival heritage, and their community. The goal of this current Partnerships With Museums Project is to find mutual, workable processes that enable our regional museums, archives and the BTNHR to share resources, ideas, and initiatives on an ongoing basis and provide support to museum volunteers by making available digital archival records which will support the work of each museum in the region.
Al Thorleifson has been hired to meet with regional museum staff, to set priorities for digital media, and to develop monographs which will be shared with regional museums which will support their own staff education and will promote public awareness of their mandate and resources.
The process includes each of the following steps:
- Tour of each museum/archive under strict COVID guidelines
- Review, with Museum/Archive Board and Staff members, each museum’s/archive’s highlights and discuss what makes each unique
- Review of concerns and challenges each Museum/Archive is facing
- Identification of BTNHR, Pembina Manitou Archive, and Manitoba Historical Society resources which would be available and valuable to each museum
- Identification of each Museum’s available resources which could be publicized, enhanced, protected, and used to promote their regional presence.
- Collaboratively outline the process for sharing these resources regionally using a digital web-based platform.
- Promotion of these resources, both digitally and as individual Museums, for use by students and researchers in the region and across the globe.
- Production of a report for consideration by the BTNTR board to select initiatives and consider actions recommended in the report.
- Production of a Comprehensive General Report/Monograph for distribution to each participating Museum and for inclusion on web-based platforms.
This work was undertaken starting the summer of 2020. Six monographs were published as a result of the 2020 season’s work – these reports are available online in the Pembina Manitou Archive web site’s Museum file. Hard copies of these reports are available by contacting pembinamanitouarchive@gmail.com Work continues during 2021/22 in partnership with other archives in the BTNHR Region.