When you hear about archives, the image that comes to mind might be a dusty, cobweb-filled basement of an old building with two inches of dust covering old leather-bound books. But not at the Cochrane Public Library.
“Swiffer has made it so that we don’t have that much dust anymore. So that’s great,” laughs program coordinator Ardis Proulx Chedore.
She says the archives are open every Friday afternoon from 12:00 to 3:00pm, for you to go in and check out the vast local collection.
“Newspapers from 1910 to the present. And then we have phone directories, the high school yearbooks for the English and the French schools,” she outlines. “We’re collecting now the Commando School yearbooks. We have a very large photo collection of Cochrane and area.”
…And that’s just scratching the surface, or blowing the dust off the collection.
When it’s compared to a museum, Proulx Chedore says “pretty much”.
“If we have bigger items that are something that would just be display purposes, then we kind of have a partnership with the Polar Bear Habitat. So we send it that way, so they can put it in the Heritage Village.”
We’ll have more on the library’s archives on Monday, for our weekly look back at Cochrane history on Moose FM and My Cochrane Now Dot Com.