Soon, much of UW’s archives will be online

WATERLOO — Danielle Robichaud’s computer monitor is a window into a dark part of this region’s history — the national eugenics organization that was headquartered in the former Kaufman Rubber factory that promoted sterilization among working-class families.

As a digital archivist, Robichaud is putting some of the special collections and archives from the University of Waterloo online. She has been testing the platform since April and now has about 1,725 items on the site, including the papers and reports from A.R. Kaufmann’s Parents’ Information Bureau. The bureau was headquartered in Kaufman’s rubber factory at 410 King St. W. in downtown Kitchener, now a condo building at King and Victoria streets. Alvin Ratz Kaufman was a leading industrialist and one of the founders of the University of Waterloo — he wanted better engineers for his factory.

The bureau provided information about birth control options for women and vasectomies for men. There was a weekly clinic on the second floor of the factory where a doctor performed vasectomies. Copies of the consent forms can be viewed in this online collection.

Kaufman had a network of about 4,000 doctors across Canada working with his bureau. In one of his newsletters, Kaufman wrote about the attempted prosecution of one of the bureau’s social workers, Dorothea Palmer, in Eastview, Ont., in 1936.

“The arrest of Ms. Palmer and the trial took place under Section 207 of the federal Criminal Code, which forbids birth control activities ‘unless for the public good,’” wrote Kaufman.

was during the dark days of the Great Depression.

“Eastview is a small suburb of Ottawa where about one quarter of the population was on relief in 1936, and the local taxpayers paid less than five per cent of the 1936 relief costs of about $130,000. It was a suburb where birth control was really needed,” wrote Kaufman.

The prosecution failed to convict Eastman.

Another document from this collection is called General Information on Sterilization. It says, in part: “It is approved by many doctors and social workers. Homes are kept together by sterilization of the husband, or of the wife, as there is no further worry about pregnancy, and no more fear of having children for whom the parents can not properly provide.”

Robichaud encourages the curious to check out the site and provide feedback. In January, the university is planning a public launch of the digital archives, which includes materials on women’s studies, gender, sexuality, eugenics and early gay rights activity on campus.

“It’s just been a lot of ground work in terms of getting the records done and cleaned up, suitable for online use,” said Robichaud.

“We are finally getting to the point where it is online so it is exciting,” she said.

Robichaud is sitting at her desk in front of a computer in the basement of the Dana Porter Library, where the university archives and special collections are located. She clicks on a document, which tells another story about the region’s past.

In 1899, a man named Abraham Moyer kept a detailed journey of a trip from Kansas to Ontario and back into the United States, complete with photographs. Moyer visited Berlin and Waterloo on that trip. That journal, which was among the papers from the Shantz-Russell family, can be viewed online.

“It is really charming, basically a scrapbook or journal,” said Robichaud. “There are early photos of Berlin and Waterloo that are really incredible.”

Among the most popular items are photographs from the collection of more than two million negatives donated to the university archives by the Waterloo Region Record. The negatives are stored in a special refrigerator and are for phoThis tos taken between 1938 and 2001.

“Generally, our joke in the department is that people like cool pics, so I try to focus on the cool pics,” said Robichaud.

Digitizing an archive is a huge job that will continue for years after the site is publicly launched. Some of the material will never make it to the digital platform. The priority goes to materials that support the work of professors and students, fragile materials that should not be handled, and information frequently requested by the public.

“We get a lot of requests from people: ‘Do you have any pictures of this building that I am now starting a business in?’ Or: ‘Do you know what my house used to look like? My grandmother was in the newspaper, do you have the picture?’” said Robichaud.

Old, heavy books published 300 years ago require special scanners the university does not own. And even if it did, Nick Richbell, the librarian who heads the archives and special collections, does not want everything online.

“We want to keep some of our A stuff back too because we want people to still come in and see us, experience the wonder of touching this material,” said Richbell.