Memories and the Memorial: Developing and Managing Nursing Archives for Canada

Archives are a form of public memory comprising documents consciously preserved because of their vital links to contemporary experience. The purpose for keeping these materials is to provide the Future with roots in the Past. Memories are as important to society and to its various groups as they are to each of us as individuals. Bereft of a connection to what has gone on before, people soon lose a sense of their unique identity and with it their orientation to the uncertainties of the future. The fundamental importance of a remembered past is a truism acknowledged by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and, of course, by historians. But while the need of groups for a knowable past is a simple fact to state, the complex processes of building a historical memory are, by contrast, little studied and imperfectly understood. Historians and archivists, among others, have important roles to play. Historians interpret the past; archivists, by contrast, are the midwives to the birth of a useable past. Without archives, history is cut off from its most important source.