What makes an archive matter? Or a better question, what is an archive and what does it do for us today? Archives can be any sort of collections of preserved details about a specific group, community, or even family. Such things that may be found in an archive are newspapers, articles, letters, diaries, and even photographs. These things are usually collected by a group throughout their existence and passed down through many generations. There existence helps to really build a certain group or community and without there existence, knowing history about these groups or communities would be really hard and almost impossible. Archives keep a group alive and really defines who they are and what they have been through.

On thursday January 16th, 2014, my ASTU class visited the Rare Books and Special Collections part of Irving K. Barber Library on campus to see some real archives that have been collected over the past years and really tell a story about some history we have here in British Columbia. I spent a good amount of that time reading some comics that were written by some Canadian artists. These comics where very explicit and blunt in their ways but got their message across very easily. They brought up ideas around many religious problems and other problems regarding sexuality that the metro Vancouver area faces. They include many graphic photos and a good amount of heavy language.

At first glance, I didn’t really understand what I was reading and looking at. I was questioning how these comics where relevant and how they fit in to an archive. After some analysis and critical thinking, it was clear that these comics are archival materials because they reflect a past and talk specifically about a certain group of people. Since these archives are written by someone that is not associated directly with this group he writes about, i.e. the archivist, there way be silences that have occurred or his view of the events in his comics may be marginalized to fit certain standards. Either way, these comics become important archives that can help us to understand where certain groups in society where back then compared to how they are now and what might have been some challenges that they faced in the procession from then to now.