What is on the website now is just a portion of the museum’s full archive; the museum has about 10,000 physical images in their archive, so what is available online is about a quarter of their holdings. “What that means,” explains Nathalie Macfarlane, the Haida Gwaii Museum Archives and Curatorial Advisor, “is anybody with an internet connection can [...] access the archives online.”

Increasing the museum’s online presence has been a goal for quite some time, and the first step was establishing their own website. With the website in place, and built with the intention of holding lots of content, creating the eMuseum was the next step. “In terms of intensive work, it’s been two years to get to this stage,” says Macfarlane. To get everything to the point that it is at now, a lot of groundwork had to be laid, starting with getting the museum archive and information into a digital database, which required taking information from hard copies, and putting it into a digital form. “There was a tremendous amount of documentation to do,” Macfarlane says.

Making the archive more easily accessible is something with worldly possibilities. However, although this is something the Haida Gwaii Museum is excited to offer, their primary goal with the digital archive is to engage the local community. With the eMuseum established, the buzz around its potential has inspired some imagination of future ways it can be utilized by Haida Gwaii.

“We are hoping, also, that people will be able to give input on what we do have,” says Cherie Wilson, who was also very involved in the digital archive project. “We have unidentified photos of people, and we are hoping that community members will reach out and let us know [...] so that we can put a name to the face.” Wilson continues, “If we’re missing important events that happened on the islands, then hopefully community members will contribute to the museum; let us get copies of important moments of life on Haida Gwaii.”

Although not yet fully functional, the framework is in place for people to eventually be able to make accounts on the website and create their own collections. Pictures can not be downloaded or reproduced from the website, but users could still curate their own exhibitions directly on the website.

The digital archive not only extends the museum’s reach, but also has the potential to revolutionize the museum’s purpose to some degree. “The old idea of a museum was to collect original images or photographs, but now, with digital technology, the idea of a digital archive is that it is kind of like a community memory collection,” says Macfarlane. Pending community participation, Macfarlane looks forward to the possibility of it serving as a central database for the community’s images, collections, and memories.

The potential of the digital archive is very exciting for the museum, but that does not mean they’ve stopped building the archive. Digitizing the audiovisual collection has already begun, with cassette and reel-to-reel already completed. “There’s really valuable information there, because a lot of it is oral history,” says Macfarlane.

The Haida Gwaii Museum’s digital archive serves many purposes: it is a collective memory, a means of preservation, and a method to make Haida Gwaii’s history worldwide. All of these help make Haida Gwaii available to the world, but ultimately the archive is for the community.