This text is part of the special section 100 years of Acfas
The destiny of modern Quebec is intrinsically linked to science and research. There would probably never have been a Quiet Revolution without this handful of pioneers such as the botanist Marie-Victorin, the radiologist Léo Pariseau, the ecologist Pierre Dansereau, but also the naturalist Marcelle Gauvreau. Together or separately, they pushed back the limits of knowledge, laid the foundations of modern and French-speaking universities and organized scientific community life.
“Our documents reflect the explosion of research in French Canada,” says Maureen Clapperton, Director General of the National Library at Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ). “We can see very well what was happening in the social sciences, in applied sciences, but also the establishment of major public services. »
The preservation of Quebec’s scientific heritage is a shared responsibility, according to Cédric Champagne, director of the Archives and Document Management Service at UQAM. While the National Library receives copies of all publications, in the form of books, reviews or newspapers – paper or electronic – archival services such as its own must manage large quantities of institutional and private documents from large researchers, but also organizations as varied as Acfas or the Canadian Natural History Society. “When we took over the Acfas archives in 1981,” he says, “our rector was already saying that we could no longer write the history of science without going through the associations. »
“And it’s a heritage that is built up over time,” explains Vincent Larivière, scientific director of Érudit, the web platform that notably brings together publications in French in Quebec in the field of human and social sciences, as well as those of the rest. from Canada and beyond, for a total of approximately 250,000 articles available since its founding in 1998. “Social science articles have a much longer half-life than natural science articles. »
A collective effort
It is all of this put together—BAnQ, university archives, Érudit—that constitutes the collective scientific memory of Quebec. “Among Anglophones, scientific heritage, especially publications, is the property of large commercial publishers, whereas among Francophones, it is considered more of a public good,” says Vincent Larivière.
To illustrate the collaboration and complementarity between the various organizations, Cédric Champagne cites the case of the Acfas archives, shared between BAnQ and UQAM.
BAnQ has collected all of Acfas’ publications since its inception, both Annals of Acfasfrom 1935 to 1995, that the Acfas Bulletin from 1959 to 1983, the magazine The Young Scientist from 1962 to 1969 or Interface from 1984 to 2000. UQAM, for its part, manages rather the heterogeneous material concerning the life of the organization: minutes of meetings, strategic plans, directories of members, regional sections, management of awards, notices and memoirs presented, the letters patent, the photos, the correspondence with the associations, their common projects, the programs, roundels and badges of the congresses, up to the banquet menus.
It was further to a concerted effort by BAnQ and UQAM that the Acfas collection joined Canada’s Memory of the World Register, managed by the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, in 2022. “It is the culmination of a long, very severe process. But this inscription recognizes the great value of this corpus. These are unique documents that must be taken care of,” says Cédric Champagne.
This conservation work is all the more necessary since no archivist or librarian can assume the research that will be done tomorrow, explains Maureen Clapperton. A few decades ago, no one could have foreseen that everything would now be re-analyzed from the perspective of women’s access, sustainable development or the place of Aboriginal people in society. “Generational shifts mean that we never know what our corpus will be used for. »
The challenge of digitization
This heritage is of primary interest to historians, researchers and students, but Érudit and BAnQ also have the mission of responding to requests from the general public. “That’s why we support users a lot,” says Maureen Clapperton. We have specialists in old maps, but also printed matter, specialized magazines, prints, artists’ books. »
At BAnQ, approximately 3% of the archives and 14% of the contents of the National Library are digitized — an enormous amount of work that often requires prior restoration in order to simply manipulate or clean documents that time has made crumbly or illegible.
“Unlike Library and Archives Canada, which digitizes for preservation, BAnQ digitizes for dissemination, which is an additional challenge. And that’s why we’ve had tons of thanks since the pandemic for everything we’ve done. »
The challenge of discoverability
In the age of the Web, one of the major challenges of scientific heritage is its accessibility and its discoverability. This is the primary purpose of the Érudit platform.
“We work on quality metadata for good referencing, explains Vincent Larivière. We must ensure that our articles will be detected by the algorithms of Google and other search engines. It takes hyperlinks, for example, but also notes, sources in forms recognizable by engines. »
This formatting work is yielding big results: the number of Érudit users has almost doubled since 2018 to reach 5.6 million, for a total of 33 million page views in 2021 in around a hundred countries. And 75% of requests come from abroad, from France (21%) and the United States (14%).
Érudit is currently working in collaboration with BAnQ to convert old scanned files into PDF in XML or HTML formats. “We do retrospective indexing. The idea is that the old document is as well structured as the current article so that it appears among the first results of the search engine rather than on page 17.
For archives, this accessibility challenge is in a completely different sphere since it consists first of all in the work of physically organizing the boxes of documents. For the Circles of Young Naturalists alone, an organization founded in 1931 by Brother Adrien Rivard, this represents the equivalent of 70 cases on 22 meters of shelf. But the problem is the same for all the funds of organizations, researchers or those of institutions. “There is some cleaning to be done, to avoid duplicates, for example, and to put everything in order. Then everything is played out in the detailed description of the material that we have. This is how we give meaning to scientific heritage. »