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This summer, I worked on projects for both the 78th Fraser Highlanders historical society and the Black Watch Museum and Archives. Both organizations are dedicated to educating the public by preserving the memory of Canadian-Scottish military history. The 78th Fraser Highlanders historical society focuses on the 78th (Highland) Regiment of Foot, which was a military regiment active from 1757 to 1763 when it disbanded in Québec. The regiment

was raised in Scotland, and upon arrival in North America, members played a role in the Seven Years’ War, the Siege of Louisbourg, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the Montreal Campaign. The Black Watch of Canada is another highland regiment, raised in Canada in 1862 and still active today as a reserve infantry regiment. They have served during the Fenian raids, the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and various NATO and UN peacekeeping missions.

I had a hybrid work schedule, spending time working remotely as well as at la maison Louis-Joseph Forget. I was very fortunate to be able to do remote work, which allowed me to go on multiple trips to visit family and friends in Ontario while continuing to work. As a Master of Information Studies student, I am hoping to build a career as an archivist or librarian after I graduate. Being able to have work experience with archives, research, content management systems, and databases, was invaluable to me. I learned a lot in the first year of my program, but I wanted the experience of an internship so that I could apply my studies in practice to solidify my knowledge.

When I was looking for projects to work on at the beginning of the summer, I learned about a problem that the 78th Fraser Highlanders Association was facing, and I wanted to use what I had learned at school to solve it. The association’s genealogy project, the Fraser Highlanders Descendancy Project, looks to collect information about the original soldiers in the regiment and their descendants. The association had been collecting this research data using private database software but wanted to make the information available to the public so that they could cut down on the amount of research requests they receive. I looked into a variety of different ways that I could publicize the information without compromising the original database and came up with a plan to create a new, web-based database using Omeka, a free open-source platform which is geared towards cultural heritage projects. I copied data from the association’s private database and reformatted it for the Omeka website using metadata vocabulary and field names. I also added tags to each digital item so that servicemen could be linked to their descendants, other members of their company, and others with the same birth or death location.

The Black Watch Armoury, where the Black Watch Museum and Archive is located, is currently undergoing renovations. Because of these renovations, the storage space allotted for the archives is being downsized. While the renovations meant that I couldn’t work at the Black Watch Armoury this summer, it gave me the opportunity to reorganize the archival documents and boxes so that they could fit into a smaller space. This meant that some documents had to be recategorized and put into new folders and boxes based on their subject matter, and some documents had to be disposed of after careful consideration of their historical value. Whenever the physical location or status of a document was changed, the digital index had to be updated to reflect the new location or status.

I was quite fortunate to be able to align what I worked on this summer with my interests. I am very passionate about increasing public access to archival information, and I have been wanting to work with a web-based database. I also had to learn a lot about copyright law while working on the database, and this is something that I was largely unaware of before. Overall, this experience taught me a lot about digital options for increasing public accessibility to historical information, and about how to index and organize archives, both of which will be very useful for me in my future career as an information professional. I would like to thank the St. Andrews Society of Montreal, and the McEuan Scholarship Foundation for funding my internship. The award allowed me to finance my university tuition and expenses while gaining work experience in my prospective field.