HomeThe Feminist Snap ArchiveHow to Use the Archive

How to Use the Archive

The archive can be browsed in a number of ways: by item, by collection, or by exhibit. An item refers to one single artifact and its associated files and metadata. Collections are comprised of different items. For example, we have collections for every major student newspaper on the McGill campus and each of these collections contain articles from the same publication. Exhibits contain items that are related in some way - by theme, time period, or activist strategy, for instance - and use these items to tell a story and provide context about a specific feature of student activism at McGill. You can access these different modes of browsing by using the ‘Browse’ drop-down menu. 

You can also sort items by tag. Each item has been tagged with words or phrases that describe the subject of the material. Some of these are thematic (for example, ‘sexual harassment’ or ‘housing precarity’), while others refer to specific events relevant to the material (for example, ‘Equity Week’) or the form of the item (for example, ‘letter to the editor’ or ‘zine’). If you click on one of these tags, all items tagged with that phrase will appear. Please take a look at our tag glossary to see a list of all our tags and their descriptions. 

The archive also has a detailed search function that can be used to search for specific items by keyword using the search bar at the top of the webpage. Searching by keyword will retrieve all items that contain that term - either in the item's associated files or in its metadata. For example, if you search the term "Milton-Parc" (the neighbourhood adjacent to the McGill campus where many students live), search results include several student press articles that contain "Milton-Parc" in the text of the article. A more advanced search function is also available where users can narrow their search criteria by selecting specific collections or exhibits to search in.

We are in the process of creating two different timelines to represent the trajectories of student activism over time: one related to student activism around sexual violence at McGill from the mid-1980s forward and the other related to university policy development, focusing on the development of a sexual violence policy. These timelines will be chronological and will highlight key events in student and administrators' responses to campus sexual violence. Stay tuned for more!

If you would like to submit any materials to the archive related to student activism and student media related to gender violence at McGill, please contact us and include a brief description of the materials.