It took longer than anticipated – a lot longer – but they finally did it.
The MusĂ©e HĂ©ritage Museum recently completed its St. Albert Oral Histories Project that has been on the to-do list for almost 40 years. It’s a treasure trove of information straight from the mouths of the founding families, and it used to exist solely on approximately 150 old magnetic audio tapes, the kind that don’t exactly last forever.
“We’ve had a lot of these tapes since the 1970s, from oral histories that both the St. Albert Historical Society did and that we did as well at the museum,” explained Vino Vipulanantharajah, the museum’s archivist.
The tapes contain interviews with prominent families and individuals from the community with names like Perron, Cunningham, and Chevigny. These people talked about their family histories, what life was like growing up in St. Albert, and significant events of the past.
The museum received a grant that allowed it to hire someone whose sole purpose was taking those tapes and digitizing them. It also drew attention to the preciousness of history in general and how important it is to take steps like this to preserve documentation such as this before the recording media gets forever lost to the ravages of time.
Vipulanantharajah said that they were still in pretty good shape though.
“We were worried about that because we knew that, over time, they were going to disappear. We were very happy with their condition. There were only maybe a few tapes that had some issues.”
The digitization process took several months of dedicated labour. The future goal is to put them online with the Archives Society of Alberta’s website at www.AlbertaOnRecord.ca.
Getting them online will be another process, unfortunately, but he said that anyone who wanted access to the tapes, or simply the summaries or transcripts of them, could get them from him. That was the major reason for undertaking this effort in the first place.
“It allows me to actually share the info now. Before they were just sitting there. Nobody could listen to them. We didn’t have the proper equipment to actually share it with anybody.”
For more information, contact the museum at 780-459-1528 or visit www.museeheritage.ca.
