Our archives in Stratford hold props and costumes, but we have a lot of electronic media as well--audio clips from our productions. Remember, we've had people like Christopher Plummer and William Shatner on our stage. Glenn Gould was the music director at Stratford. We have some real treasures of Canadian artists in our archives.
We have very well-maintained archives. It's a beautiful facility. We invite researchers to come in and use it. That's wonderful for universities, students, and people who can come. We would really like to be able to make those materials available in a digital format so that people can access them. There's an opportunity to package those materials into learning modules about original composition in theatre.
We didn't just grab classical music for The Matchmaker; we hired a composer to write the music for it, and we have that in our archives. We've built costumes from the ground up--authentic replicas of Elizabethan costumes, with people who dye the costumes and make the crowns, not the wigs. There's an amazing craft and art at the festival. Other organizations would have archives as well.
So it's very important to be able to share that as a source of pride for what cultural organizations do, and as a source of learning about what we do.