Yarmouth County Museum adopting Plan B for digitization project
Papers from the early 1800s and earlier will eventually be searchable online
Missing criteria on a government job application form has put a digitization initiative at the Yarmouth County Museum & Archives behind the eight-ball.
Project workers at the museum had high hopes last year that the digitization process would be underway by now, however, they were unsuccessful in securing government funding for an employee.
Last September, archivist Lisette Gaudet met with an agent at Nova Scotia Works to discuss the best funding option to hire an employee. The job creation partnership program was decided upon because the museum already had a candidate in mind for the position.
In mid-November, the candidate was contacted and told she did not meet criteria for the program. The requirement was that she had to have been in the labour market for at least two years, but this was not cited on the applications or on the website.
Gaudet says she wishes the museum had been notified earlier.
“We have everything. Last summer one of our students digitized the oversize documents. We know how the machine works, we’re set to go,” she says.
“We are going to be doing it. We’re depending on volunteers and the summer students. There’s someone doing a work placement for their school at the end of this month so she’ll be working on that.”
Lisette Gaudet
When contacted by the Tri-County Vanguard as to why all of the criteria was not divulged to prospective applicants, Nova Scotia
Works replied: "The Job Creation Partnerships program is intended for unemployed, eligible individuals that have been previously attached to the labour force. All applications are assessed for Labour Force Attachment (LFA)."
“This criteria component is not new, and although it was outlined on promotional materials, it was not clearly outlined on our Job Creation Partnerships webpage. We can advise we’ve since updated the webpage to ensure it fully reflects the LFA criteria. We’ve also reached out to the applicant to assure them we’ve addressed their concerns and to apologize for any confusion it may have caused.”
Gaudet, meanwhile, says the museum is moving ahead with a Plan B for the digitization project.
“We are going to be doing it,” she says. “We’re depending on volunteers and the summer students. There’s someone doing a work placement for their school at the end of this month so she’ll be working on that."
The scanning will be a slower process. The museum had hoped to have from 1836 to 1960 completed this year but that may not be possible.
“It will continue, it may be just a bit slower than we had originally hoped for,” says Gaudet.