The idea of a museum began in 1958 with BC's centennial as a colony. Community members were busy celebrating the centenary and, looking backward, were inspired to look forward. People thought about preserving Shuswap history for future residents. The organization wasn't formed until 1963, when a registered society was created. The name was the Salmon Arm Museum and Archives Association. No collecting took place right away, there was no building or storage space. Cataloguing began in 1965, but it wasn't until 1967, with Pierre Trudeau as the Federal Minister for Cultural Affairs that the first museum was built.

Jump ahead to 1990, when the Salmon Arm Museum's board of directors created the position of Curator/Archivist. They hired me, Deborah Chapman to move the collection to a space twice the size of the old museum building. The archives was a small part of a very crowded collection. Don Rogers and I climbed over large artifacts to get to the office desks. The collection was new to me, I'd never seen it. I'm sure the fire inspector hadn't either.

Norma Harisch, then president of the museum, was worried I'd quit after seeing the basement. I didn't, I took on the job. But no one told me about the two other buildings jammed packed with artifacts at the Public Works Department.

The archival holdings were on two sets of shelves and in one filing cabinet. In that cabinet were over 900 glass plate negatives. The top drawer had a sign on it ...... "Do Not Open!" That posed an interesting archival problem. It was also spooky, like Blue Beard's Closet or Pandora's Box. Just how was I to move the collection without peaking inside?

Well the collection was moved to the basement at the current Salmon Arm Museum at Haney Heritage Park. As we unpacked, I realized I had a lot of work to do. I also realized what a wonderful collection we had.

The paper records were broken into broad subject areas, much like a public library system easy to find information on transportation, for example, but not easy to find records of what Jay Kew did in his spare time or what Ethel Stirling's dance card looked like when she met the captain she was to marry.

So I read the Archives Association of BC's Manual for Small Archives by Laura Cole. One of the things I looked for was some wisdom on what to do with a drawer labeled "Do Not Open!" There wasn't any. I took a course taught by the manual's editor, and resorted paper collections into their original provenance. We used the catalogue numbers to reconstruct collections. All of the 1988.57's, the Belli-Bivar Collections, went back together, were listed and put into three acid free boxes. We would never have been able to put the collections back into their proper order if they had not been catalogued carefully by previous members. We cross referenced, thanks to the computer, and organized.

Then a volunteer, Liz Murdoch, and I took another course. We organized each collection, using national descriptive standards set out by the Canadian Council of Archives. Then we researched people. We collected obituaries, contacted family members an and ordered photocopies of death certificates; You can find out a lot of information about a person from a death certificate, if it is accurate.

All this work, was done mostly winters, two days a week by volunteer labour. It has taken many years and we are still not finished. We are, however, in pretty good shape and passed visiting inspections by the Archives Association of B.C.'s archives technician and conservationist last year.

The collection has grown to 48 linear feet, 4000 plus photographs, over two hundred maps and, of course, nine hundred glass plate negatives. We are open one day a week and have four dedicated volunteers working on different projects. The Salmon Arm Museum's archives has a professional reputation, is endorsed by the Archives Association of BC and operates to national standards.

Our summaries of collections are posted on a provincial intemet site. We've come a long way since incorporation in 1963.