Canadian National Parks Association Collection

available at

http://openarchive.acadiau.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/CNPA

The Canadian National Parks Association (CNPA) was established in 1923 and became a national pressure group led by W. J. S. (Selby) Walker. The initiatives of the Association and of Selby Walker, a committed conservationist, were inextricably linked. For most of the 29-year life of the Association, Selby Walker was its executive secretary and spokesman, and when he died in 1952 the Association ceased to operate. For a list of primary source locations and secondary source background materials please follow this link. For a list of background materials sorted by theme please follow this link.

The documents that are inventoried in the following lists can be viewed and downloaded from the CNPA collection at http://openarchive.acadiau.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/CNPA.

 

Each researcher will have their own strategy for wending their way through the collection, but here is my suggestion:

  1. Review the inventory lists which are in .pdf format to find the document(s) that interest you - for example Bulletin #1

  2. Note the "Accession #" for the  document(s) - for example the Accession # for Bulletin #1 is B001

  3. Go to the CNPA collection in Open Archive http://openarchive.acadiau.ca/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/CNPA

  4. Search for the document(s) by using the "advanced search" function and searching in the Canadian National Parks Association collection by the Accession # - for example B001 will take you to an image of that document

  5. Click on the image of that document and you will be provided with information about:

    1. the date of the document, listed as "creation date" - Bulletin #1 was dated January 1, 1924 (01/01/24)

    2. the length of the document, listed as "extent" - Bulletin #1 is 4 pages long

    3. the description of the document, listed as "scope and content" - in the case of Bulletin #1 this list includes the headings of the Bulletin

    4. the portion of the collection in which this document resides, listed as "forms part of" -  Bulletin #1 is part of the CNPA/NPAC Bulletins, Newsletters, Circulars, Financial Statements, Executive Circulars, whose Accession numbers all begin with "B", ex. B001

  6. You can now find your way to a .pdf file of the document. Each document was scanned, saved as a .tiff file, converted to a .pdf file and lastly subjected to the "recognize text using OCR" process in Adobe Acrobat 

  7. At this stage, you can read through the document or search it by your choice of words - for example in Bulletin #1, searching for "national park" finds 57 instances and searching for "wheeler" (as in A.O. Wheeler) finds 3 instances.

  8. At this stage, you are now on your own as to how you use the documents in your research, but please give credit to this website and the Acadia University Open Archive collection.

Inventory Lists