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- Jun 1
- 4 min read
Reflections on a Research Visit to Library and Archives Canada, November 2025
-Ling Jin
Getting to Ottawa from Winnipeg is never simple. One flight a day per airline, fares that are almost always expensive, and almost no flexibility when your research schedule depends on booking specific consultation slots at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). For our research team, this is not just a logistical inconvenience, it is a recurring reminder that accessing the records held there is, from the very first step, weighted against researchers based outside major eastern cities. We made the trip in November 2025 anyway. What followed was a mix of institutional frustration and, in one unexpected moment, something genuinely moving.
Getting There
The cost and inflexibility of flying from Winnipeg to Ottawa deserves to be named plainly. One flight a day per airline means that a delay or cancellation does not just inconvenience you, it can eliminate an entire day of reserved reading room access that may have taken weeks to book. The fares compound this, creating a quiet but real barrier for researchers working on limited institutional travel budgets. Geography should not determine who gets to do this work, but right now, it does. That is a systemic problem that institutions like LAC have a role in addressing.
Two of us, Ashley Austin and I (Ling Jin), from the Brandon Residential School Missing Children Investigation Project decided to take an alternative route to avoid the risk of delays and cancellations on the direct service. We drove to Winnipeg Airport and flew to Toronto in the early morning, a route offered far more frequently than the Winnipeg-to-Ottawa service, then took the UP Express train onward to Ottawa. It involves more steps, but it is cheaper and takes roughly the same amount of time overall. For researchers on a tight travel budget, it is a route worth knowing about.
Navigating the Building — and the Institution
Once inside LAC, the challenges shifted from logistical to operational. Different record types are held in different rooms, and it is not always clear where to go or who to ask. This would be manageable with a consistent point of contact, but staffing rotation meant a different person each day. Every visit required re-explaining our research, re-establishing context, and in some cases re-navigating requests that had already been made. Staff responsibilities also appeared unclear at times: it was not always evident who held authority over a particular retrieval or who to follow up with when something did not arrive as expected.
For researchers working with complex, multi-series collections, particularly residential school records, this kind of inconsistency costs more than time. It erodes confidence in the process and makes it harder to plan meaningful research in advance. Consistency and clear staff accountability are not small asks. They are the foundation of functional archival access.
The ATIP Release That Was Not What We Expected
One of the more frustrating moments came from an ATIP request we had submitted specifically to review records in person at LAC. Instead, the release came 4 months late, in digital form, and with all names redacted. For those outside this field: names in residential school records are not incidental data. They are the entire point. They connect a document to a child, a family, a community. Receiving a digitized file with names blanked out, on records over 90 years old for individuals whose loved ones are eager to get more information of, felt like a door being opened halfway and then held shut. We had followed the proper process, made the proper request, and still received incomplete disclosure. It is a pattern that is well documented, and one that urgently needs to change.
An Unexpected Discovery
And then, amid all of it, something wonderful happened.
In the course of our retrieval work, we came across a vinyl record of a Sioux Valley powwow, an audio recording we had not known existed and had not anticipated finding. It stopped us completely. Here, held quietly in the archives, was a recording of community, of ceremony, of life, something no written register or quarterly return could ever capture. It was a genuine surprise, and a reminder of why this work matters and what these holdings can contain when access is truly possible.
That discovery does not erase the frustrations of the trip. But it reinforces something important: there is far more in these archives than has been made accessible, and the communities whose histories live in these records deserve full, consistent, and properly supported access to all of it.
Looking Ahead
A research visit to LAC should not require navigating expensive and inflexible travel, daily staffing changes, unclear institutional processes, and incomplete ATIP releases just to do the work. These are solvable problems, and they need to be solved. For researchers working on Indigenous history, every barrier to access is also a barrier to truth, and to the people these records ultimately belong to.
We will be going back. We hope it is easier next time, for us, and for every researcher making the long trip to get there.
