Community Archives Volunteer

Organization
Treaty 8 Tribal Association

Location
Hybrid virtual/in person working environment. Treaty 8 Tribal Association’s temporary Vancouver office is located at Suite 405 – 402 West Pender Street where the Ridington collection is temporarily housed.

Supervising Librarian/Archivist:
Primary Supervisor: Amber Ridington, MA. Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator.
Secondary Supervisor: Denée Renouf, Archive Manager, Treaty 8 Tribal Association.

Purpose of the project:

The purpose of this project is to provide an opportunity for students to assist the project team of cultural and digital humanities experts with preparing materials in the Ridington Dane-zaa Archive for upload into Treaty 9 Tribal Association’s archive database (ArchiveEra) for formal repatriation and governance by source communities.

The Ridington Dane-zaa Archive (RDA) is the largest private collection of materials about subarctic cultures in the world. It contains an estimated 20,000 items collected with multiple Indigenous groups in northeastern British Columbia, Canada since 1964 by anthropologists Robin Ridington, Jillian Ridington, and Antonia Mills. While materials have been made available to communities regularly since the 1980s, community access to the full collection has been extremely limited.

This three-year project led by Treaty 8 Tribal Association with the custodians of the Ridington Dane-zaa Archive, will focus on completing the digitization of original materials, with a focus on texts, and transferring the digital archive to a community portal on the Treaty 8 Tribal Associations Archival Database. The project includes an extensive series of community engagement sessions so that the people whose heritage is contained in the archive, of their descendants if they are deceased, can articulate evolving Indigenous protocols for ethical use and dissemination of their heritage materials. Finally, through formal repatriation, this work will provide a model for Indigenous heritage reclamation and control.

This project is generously supported by a grant from the Council for Library and Information Records (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Summary of activities required to carry out the project:

Data migration preparation:

• Metadata and media formatting to meet the requirements for metadata crosswalking and bath of media to the T8TA ArchiveEra database
• Inventory to reconcile physical materials with digital surrogates.

Finding Aid preparation for First Nations and Indigenous family groups with materials in the RDA

• Data visualization may be required.

Metadata work including:

• Quality control/data cleaning: checking and editing records to standardized date formats, spelling of names and places, etc.
• Data entry: updating records with additional information from catalogues, permission documents, and fieldnotes.
• Linking related records.

Reporting on workflows and work completed.

Student skillset required:

• Proficient/Ability to learn: Excel, GoogleSheets, and CSV spreadsheets
• Proficient/Ability to learn: media management software to create Access and Preservation files that meet archival best practices.
• Database setup and administration would be an asset.

Expectations of the end result of the project, for both host and student:

Expectations for Student: The student will contribute to the preparation of materials for repatriation and the implementation of decolonial methodologies facilitating Indigenous data governance practices. This hands-on work will provide valuable professional skills that will be an asset for digital archive work and for collaborative work with Indigenous communities striving to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action for libraries and archives and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Expectations for Host: The Host will benefit from the professional skills of a trained archivist or librarian to help with archival description and arrangement and make materials in the RDA accessible to the source communities in their preferred form.

Time periods in which the project could be supervised:

• Winter Term 1 (September – December)
• Winter Term 2 (January – April)

Expectations are for part time work (12 hours per week) for three months with a total of 120 hours.

There is a possibility for ongoing paid work after the professional experience project is completed.

Is there a deadline by which the project must be completed?

This project is expected to be completed by Fall 2027.

Considering the project requirements, please suggest suitable coursework as pre-requisite or co-requisite:

Students in the First Nations Curriculum Concentration with a focus on collections and information management would be ideal. Both these courses would be an asset: LIBR 580 Collection Management, ARST 515 Arrangement & Description of Archival Materials

• ARST 585/LIBR 564 Information Practice and Protocol in Support of Indigenous Initiatives
• ARST 515 Arrangement and Description of Archives*
• ARST 535 Personal and Community Archives
• ARST 550 Management of Audiovisual and Non-Textual Archives
• ARST 554/LIBR 554 Database Design
• ARST 555 The Preservation of Digital Records
• ARST 556E/LIBR 514G Records Systems in Digital Environment
• ARST 556L/LIBR 514L Metadata
• ARST 575J/LIBR 514K IT Security, Information Assurance and Risk Management

Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis.

Organization
University of British Columbia Library, Digital Programs and Services, cIRcle

Location
The University of British Columbia Library, Walter C. Koerner Library
1958 Main Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
Canada
Map It

Supervising Librarian/Archivist:
Amber Saundry

Purpose of the project:

cIRcle is UBC’s open access institutional repository for published and unpublished material created by the UBC community and its partners. cIRcle has an automated feed from two publisher sources to receive Creative Commons licensed journal articles authored by UBC faculty members. Article content and metadata are delivered to cIRcle’s DSpace system, before library staff perform final metadata review/enhancement, and approval for deposit. This assists cIRcle in proactive recruitment of open access articles on behalf of researchers, with no work or intervention required from faculty.

Due to limited capacity and competing priorities, a backlog of articles from BioMed Central (including SpringerOpen) has accumulated in cIRcle’s DSpace workflow, totaling over 1,400 items from 2023-2026 as of Winter 2026. The purpose of this project is to contribute to processing of the current BMC journal article backlog following established procedures and guidelines, which involves performing metadata review/enhancement and item approval, in order to make these items openly available via cIRcle.

Summary of activities required to carry out the project:

The student will work independently within broad guidelines as part of the cIRcle Office team, and be encouraged to ask questions and contribute their own ideas. The project will primarily involve the following activities:

• Receive training on the DSpace repository system (where items will be reviewed and approved) and relevant unit-specific metadata guidelines and broader library standards, including Dublin Core and Library of Congress Name Headings
• Assess the volume and scope of work of the current BMC article backlog in cIRcle’s DSpace instance, and determine the average estimated time to complete review and approval on a per item basis, which will further assist in estimating project timelines
• Ensure each item is in-scope for cIRcle (e.g. has a UBC faculty author), and has not already been received by the repository (e.g. a duplicate item)
• Perform a general metadata review of each item to ensure that all expected metadata fields are present and accurate
• Add and/or enhance identified metadata per established cIRcle metadata guidelines and broader library standards
• Identify submissions with oddities /peculiarities for further cIRcle Office review
• Final report of project summary, recommendations, and deliverables (e.g. number of items reviewed during the course of the project)

In consultation with the cIRcle Office, hours of work may be scheduled Monday to Friday between 9am to 5pm. This project can be completed with a combination of on-site and remote work.

Expectations of the end result of the project, for both host and student:

At the end of the project, the student will have processed all or a significant volume of the backlogged BMC journal articles, enabling their open access via cIRcle. The student may also have recommendations for strategic processing of future similar content, to ensure timely access.

The student will have had the opportunity to develop their independent project management skills and work within an environment of established project deliverables and expectations. They will have gained hands-on experience and knowledge in reviewing and processing content via DSpace, using unit-specific metadata guidelines and broader library standards. They will also have further knowledge in broader digital repository best practices and workflows, open access, Creative Commons licensing, and academic scholarly publishing. This project therefore will have contributed to the student’s transferable, long-term knowledge and skills.

Time periods in which the project could be supervised:

• Winter Term 1 (September – December)
• Winter Term 2 (January – April)
• Summer Term 1 (May – June)
• Summer Term 2 (July – August)

Is there a deadline by which the project must be completed?

Though this project could be supervised in all time periods, it is preferable to have the project completed in Winter Term 2 (January – April).

There is no firm deadline for when this project must be completed, however, it is our intention to have all or a significant portion of the backlog processed within the standard academic term.

Considering the project requirements, please suggest suitable coursework as pre-requisite or co-requisite:

Required: Completion of the LIBR or ARST core courses

Any of the following are recommended:

• LIBR 511 Cataloguing and Classification
• LIBR 513/ARST 562 Metadata
• LIBR 567 Scholarly Communication and Knowledge Mobilization
• LIBR 582/ARST 556P Digital Images and Text Collections
• LIBR 574 Project Management in Information Organizations

Please apply by November 20, 2026.