Andrea Eidinger, who ran a lively and informative blog called Unwritten Histories for quite a while, but let it lapse about a year ago, tweets to say she has been hired as head of the Library and Archives Canada website, where the blog was also informative but generally pretty dull in the past.
Congratulations! We look forward to improvements.
Update, November 29: In writing Saturday's brief note, I had not realized the scope of the task Andrea Eidinger takes on at LAC. Today's Toronto Star has a long story about the controversy over offensive and selective content on the Library and Archives website, particularly with regard to Indigenous topics.
I have noted in recent years that in seeking digitized documents via the Archives website, I'm often first redirected to expository narratives about what the Archives judges I should know or want to know about Canadian history. I never found these attempts at making the Archives into a kind of teaching museum very useful. I rather thought they diverted from the Archives' real job of facilitating access to its documentary collections. But once an institution has a public-facing online presence, the pressure to serve a large public -- and to keep the hit-rate up -- must be constant. In the always-online world, the relatively small community of researchers seeking documentary sources is now only one constituency for an archives.
