I'll start with your second question. I don't know if I can answer the third question, because I would say it would take us forever. Certainly, all of us come with our own perspective to history. I do think, however, that there is some agreement on a larger national narrative. I would not suggest that the writing of a national narrative is impossible; I would suggest that the writing of a national narrative gets bigger each year.
As to archival information and how we do this, I believe that the digital age is an opportunity for us to preserve documents in a way that didn't exist before. Of course, that's going to mean that we're going to have to be able to read those documents digitally. In 1990, had documents been digitized and saved on large square floppy disks, we would be in the unfortunate position of having to figure out how to read those documents. One thing that digitization allows for is the collection and preservation of documents in such a way that they can be shared.
Documents take up an awful lot of space. One of the problems that small, local archives face is their inability to deal with all of the materials that come to them. Within the last 50 years, and especially within the last 30 years, we've become much more aware of the importance of materials other than documents for the preservation of Canada's history. This is material history, and those artifacts are space-consuming. How do we preserve those? Regardless, I think it's important to do it.
As to how we tie museums together, I think that museums in small regions, or even in large regions, need to be encouraged to work together instead of at cross purposes. In the community that I live in—and I sit on the board of one museum—there is competition, and usually it's for resources. That's usually the problem. It's not a competition over the narrative; the competition is over who's going to get the funding to be able to do more work. Museums need to be encouraged to become part of the larger story, not just to preserve employment for themselves.
Local museums operate with important groups of volunteers. One of the archivists with whom I work in my own field is a volunteer archivist. She's over 80 years old. She drives from St. Thomas, Ontario, to Newmarket every time I want to meet with her to get into the archives. If those small archives aren't protected, we will definitely lose a critical part of Canada's history. It's not all in the national archives, or even in large provincial archives. In fact, as a historian who works largely in local archives, I think a very important part of our story is found in those places.