Recent Acquisitions on Display at the Whyte Museum

By Kate Skelton, Processing Archivist

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Over the past few weeks, members of the Archives and Library team at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies have been working collaboratively with staff from the Museum’s Curatorial and Photography departments to help prepare for a new exhibit opening this month, titled Recent Acquisitions. This new exhibit will feature specially selected items which have been donated to the Whyte Museum recently, including photographs, blueprints, letters and more.

As the Whyte Museum’s Processing Archivist, I have been working up-close with some of these new acquisitions to ensure that items are properly organized, stored and recorded on the Whyte Museum Archive and Library’s database system before being put on display. In particular, I have processed donations related to the Kidney family (including Forest “Pop” Kidney and Ella Maud Kidney), Parks Canada employees and naturalist Aileen Harmon, Bruno Engler’s Veteran’s Ski Race (now referred to as the Bruno Engler Memorial Ski Race) and violinist David Zweifel. I have also worked with other recently acquired collections in preparation for the Recent Acquisitions exhibition, including those of David McDougall (the first owner of the Mount Royal Hotel), and the Wing family, who owned and ran the Dominion Café in Banff. Processing and drawing from these donations has led to the uncovering of some incredible personal stories and historical moments from the Bow Valley.