Reports from the CFUW North Bay Archives Committee (Formed in September 2025)
By Caroline Haist
Update: November 2025
Much of the committee’s time in the last couple of months have been spent looking over what we now have in my basement and sorting through piles of loose paper we found in some boxes that came from Kaarina Tulisalo’s basement. She is still in the process of looking for material we think may still be there.
We have the two old binders dated 1941 to 1973 and year books for 2008 to 2016. These were described in old reports in 2016 written by club members Doris Toswell and Anna Petruzella, who were then our archivists. These reports are a good starting point as we continue our current job of searching for, paring down, and documenting the material that records our club’s history since 1941.
Members of our current committee took part in a November archives workshop on Zoom provided by CFUW National. We agreed that the most important advice we received was to get material out of members’ basements and if possible into local libraries. Other important advice was to keep records on paper.
If you opened the above link to reports in 2016 will have learned about our history with our local library. With that in mind Anna Petruzella has made several trips this November and concluded there is nothing left there belonging to our club She wrote down her findings in a report.
To help guide us we have compiled a list of annual reports and programs we have. These provide our club with the best look we have into our history. A list of presidents provides a glimpse, too.
Current Plan: December 2025
Moving forward we decided to leave the period from 1984 to 2007, for which there are no binders and little material, alone for now. We hope there may still be more retrieved from Kaarina’s basement and other sources within the club. We will continue to try to collect that material and store it temporarily in hanging folders and later put together binder(s) as we have for the earlier (1941 to 1983) and the later periods (2008 to 2019).
For the period from 2017 to the present, we have most of what we need in digital form. How and in what form we decide to preserve it on paper has yet to be decided.
For 2008 to 2019 we have books with lots of photos and will focus on those for now. Anna guided us through a process of whittling down these binders (2008 to 2019) at a meeting and followed up with a detailed plan sent to all members of the committee. Photos removed will be saved in envelopes for each year or added to the hanging folders for special projects such as Gift of Reading.
Plan for Preserving Information Now Mostly on Website: January 2026
After some discussion with committee members, Anna wrote up recommendations for moving ahead with the preservation in print form of documents and photos currently on the website for 2017 to the present. I shared this plan with the executive on January 7, and no objections were raised.