Demographic

Age: 35
Gender identity: Female     
Race: Caucasian, white settler
Indigenous: n/a
Class: Upper-middle class (has generational wealth)
Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): n/a
Education: Masters Degree in Public History
Language: English, French
Personal responsibilities: married without children; elderly parents in another province that she is moving into care
Location: Originally from elsewhere in Canada but now owns a house and works in the Lower Mainland

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Transcription – Transkibus (not collaborative)
• IIIF – Mirador 
• Storytelling – Ponga, HistoryPin

Brief Biography

Helen Landon (she/her) is a white settler millennial who lives in the Lower Mainland. She has a Masters in Public History and works for a heritage organization and is active on her neighbourhood advocacy group. Helen is familiar with technology, and is a skilled and frequent archival user. She knows how to navigate archival systems but is frustrated having to search hierarchically and prefers to search by subject. She is working on an EDI project to bring Black voices into her organization’s programming, namely through a walking tour using HistoryPin.

Character description

Helen really doesn’t like asking for help, because she feels like it makes her look bad at her job or like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. When she comes up against something she can’t solve she gets inwardly frustrated and sometimes she comes across as short or demanding to archival staff when she asks for research help.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Helen is employed by a local heritage organization to do community public history programming for all ages. Uses archives for primary source research as the basis of their exhibits, events, and a walking tour of neighbourhoods in the Lower Mainland using the app HistoryPin.
Community affiliations: Helen lives in Vancouver and is on her neighbourhood heritage advocacy committee. She and her committee members attend and speak at City Council public hearings and have an online presence reporting on development changes in her neighbourhood. She is the communications officer on the committee.
Represented in archives: Yes. Helen is a white settler often sees other white women represented in diaries, photographs, and other neighbourhood advocacy associations in her archival research. She was originally drawn to pursue post secondary studies in history because she felt connected to these women.
Professional affiliations: Canadian Historical Association, BC Museums Association
Access needs and mobility: Helen has no visible disabilities or impaired movement.

Motivations

Why: As a part of her organization’s EDI commitments, she is now trying to move their programming away from a largely white lens of the history of the Lower Mainland. This pilot project is her first foray into programming specifically focused for racialized groups in her community and she wants to do a good job. She is the only staff member doing this programming work and her all-white, upper-class Board is expecting an ROI for EDI.

Frustrations

Barriers: She can’t search collections by topic, specifically since she is looking for underrepresented and marginalized communities, she has to find evidence of Black people represented in the fonds and collections of largely white donors and collectors. She often wonders why archivists don’t add extra subject-based tags or metadata that can pull all of these items together, and finds the few instances of AtoM that do have subject taxonomies, aren’t helpful to her search and are still too broad. She understands that most things in archives do not get described at the item level due to time, budget, etc. but she is frustrated that it often takes twice as long to do these kinds of projects because she can’t immediately find results like she would in a library catalogue.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Helen is skilled with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. She prefers Windows OS but can use Mac when required (albeit slower).
Software: Helen is skilled with Microsoft products, Google products, social media, and video conferencing. She has no experience actually developing software but has been involved in a website update project to provide user experience.
Network connectivity: She has reliable home internet and has a mobile plan on her phone.
Experience with archival tools: Helen is a skilled user navigating Access to Memory, and uses it regularly for her public history projects. Only as an expert user does she feel like she knows what she is doing. When she tries to explain how to search by fonds/collection to members of the public who want to find some of the resources she uses in her programming, she runs into trouble explaining how archives structure information.
Experience with archival frameworks: She understands hierarchical arrangement of fonds/collections, but wishes there was better ways to search via subject or topic.
Comfort with learning technology: She feels like she can pick up new software easily, especially if she has access to free tutorials on Youtube or if a program has established documentation.

Goals

What do they want to do: Helen wants to find digitized photographs, oral histories, and diaries about Black individuals and communities in at the turn of the century in the Lower Mainland to add to Historypin. She also wants to share these photographs with a local Black community group and work with them on a collaborative event/exhibit.
What relationship do they want to the archives: A positive, and quick interaction: getting the images from AtoM or via email and having them ready to display ASAP.