In 2008, I had a meeting at the Environment Canada headquarters in Downsview, Ont. Other visitors probably get to see where they make the weather, but because I’m a historian, they showed me the old stuff.
We went down to the basement – it wasn’t quite the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but close enough – and staff walked me along aisle after aisle of weather observations: all of the original, paper forms that volunteers and paid observers had filled out, multiple times a day, across thousands of stations across Canada, from 1840 onward.
It was clearly a collection of national historic significance and, given the existence of climate change and the sheer span of observations across time and space, of potential value to climate researchers, too. It was being handled with care, but staff was well aware this was not a facility equipped to maintain material at archival standards. A massive steam pipe loomed menacingly on a nearby wall. And thanks to the building’s limited space, there were concerns about the collection’s long-term prospects.
So, lacking any authorization or plan, I offered to take the collection off their hands.
It has taken more than five years and many conversations with Environment Canada, but University Archivist Robin Keirstead and I have succeeded in bringing the collection to Western Archives on long-term loan.
In fact, the collection is bigger and better than we first believed.
As expected, there are all of the extant meteorological observations compiled by Environment Canada’s predecessor agencies between 1840-1960 – about 1,000 boxes in all. But there are also 250 volumes of journals, observations, letterbooks and correspondence related to Canadian meteorological and climatological history between 1828-1967.
This is a win, win, win and win.
First and foremost, it means this fragile paper collection of nationally significant historical material will be preserved in Western Archives’ temperature- and humidity-controlled High Density Module storage room – no looming steam pipes. At the end of the initial five-year loan period, Environment Canada may request the return of the material, but otherwise we would expect it will stay safely at Western.
Second, the material will be available to university and public researchers. For example, although Environment Canada has already extracted the data it wants from the daily observations to create the National Climate Data and Information Archive, it left unextracted and unrecorded some of the categories of data, many of the pre-1900 observations, and all of the written comments.
This, and much more, will be new ground, and the entire collection will be accessible to researchers in a way it never has been.
I already know of one graduate student planning to research proxy climate information such as dates of ice freeze-up and break-up. I intend to explore the 1871 creation of the meteorological service in the context of nation-building. Members of the SSHRC-funded Strategic Knowledge Cluster I direct, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, are discussing other possible research uses of the collection.
This is ‘big data’ of a non-digital kind, and exploring the implications and opportunities of that will take years. Once the collection is transferred, catalogued and available for viewing sometime this summer, I expect it will attract scholarly interest not only from around the university, but from around the country.
Third, the collection will be available for teaching, too. Look for my new, winter 2015 seminar course on climate history, presently untitled. Climate Change of the Past, Present, and Future? Climate is History? (Nobody gets the pun.) Cloudy with a Chance of History? I’ll take your votes.
And fourth, Environment Canada has granted Western license for the collection’s digitization. It would be a big job, but I would love to see this historical material available to researchers everywhere and to an interested public. The next step is to identify potential sources of funding, including perhaps seeking out Canadian foundations that have historical or environmental interests. (If you’re reading this, David Suzuki …)
From what Robin and I can tell, this may be the largest such archival loan arrangement between a federal agency and a university in Canada. At a time when university researchers and civil servants are concerned with the state and viability of federal department libraries, we hope the agreement between Western and Environment Canada will serve as an inspiration, even precedent, for other efforts.
We would be happy to discuss our experience with you, but we’re unlikely to become involved in any other such efforts for a little while – we have some boxes to look at.
Alan MacEachern is a professor in History and the director of NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, niche-canada.org. He can be reached at amaceach@uwo.ca.