My own little backlog project

Card from Beth – from Turkey (2001)

Most Archives have “backlog projects” on its annual work plan. These projects come about for a variety of reasons and most Archivists have worked on such a project at one time or another. Both personal and work projects get halted for a myriad of reasons – all of which seem valid at the time. As time passes, however, it gets increasingly difficult to both ignore and justify the reasons for not getting such backlog projects organized and completed – at least at work. Not having to report to anyone in my personal life on any kind of basis sometimes results in my own personal backlog projects lingering on for an indefinite period.

When I moved to Toronto in 2005, I brought a lot of stuff with me – a Budget truck full in fact. I tried to move up as much stuff as possible and included in the truck was one personal background project of my own – my scrapbooking backlog. I began scrapbooking in the early 1990s along with my Acadia pal Krista. We always claimed that we scrapbooked before it became trendy to do so. Although the scrapbooks of this time were not “archival” and did not have the “acid free paper” that became the standard for later books, they nevertheless hold our memories and served the purpose.

Upon returning from Japan, I made a scrapbook for each of my three years there. When I now look at them, I am so glad I did this. I received so many beautiful cards from my Japanese friends and students, and included so many lovely memories into these books I might have otherwise forgotten about. I continued to do this up until 2001, at which time my scrapbooking trail runs cold. I can’t recall why I stopped, but I did. For the last ten years I have continued to keep – but not organize. I simply kept adding “stuff” to a box. Ten years later when the box had reached its limit, I knew the time had come to bit the proverbial bullet.


I emptied the box and began organizing all the contents into its respective years from 2001 to 2010. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Everything fell into place pretty easily and before I knew it, I had almost a decade of memories labelled with sticky notes across my living room floor.












Some years contained a lot more documents than others. Here is the 2003 stack for example:















What did surprise me going through this bundle was what I saved. This included invitations to heritage events I never went to, Christmas cards from people I really wasn’t that close to, and envelopes – for everything! I did an initial quick round of culling and then bundled everything, year by year, into oversize envelopes. The scrapbooking backlog had officially made it through its first phase of processing.



In the course of my archival work, I now realize that everything cannot be kept. The process of appraisal can be a daunting one at its outset, but gets easier and easier with practice. I now have to use my archival appraisal skills for my own personal project. Since getting all my memories organized, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I should, could, and will cull from my collected memories. It’s always a much more difficult practice to apply to your own records opposed to those of a strangers. I am grateful, however, for a lot of what I kept. I saved all my cards and notes from Grammie and Auntie. Every time I come across one of these memories, my heart is warmed when I see their handwriting.





I am now looking forward to getting into this project and seeing what other memories I will unearth along the way.