YRDSB Museum & Archives - OMA Awards of Excellence: Honourable Mention in Special Projects

Congratulations to the York Region District Schoolboard Museum & Archives, recipient of the OMA Award of Excellence in Honourable Mention in Special Projects.

No. 2 Construction Battalion, Canada’s only segregated unit of soldiers in Canadian military history, has often been represented by inaccurate and misleading details about its history in online resources. Actively responding to the York Region District School Board’s Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy, the YRDSB Museum & Archives created a special resource based on an archival primary source for educators, students, and researchers to learn and discover more about the story of No. 2 Construction Battalion.
YRDSB Museum & Archives built and launched a Google MyMap based on the digitized Nominal Roll of the No. 2 Construction Battalion. This easy, ready to use, customizable digital tool brings a fresh perspective into historical analysis, highlighting just one small part of the Black community’s response to the call for service during the First World War. Available on the yrdsb.ca website, this resource remains available to anyone who is interested to use it.

“It invites the public into the exploration. The site becomes a tool to launch curiosity and make students aware of the kinds of materials that archives and museums hold. It makes the material tangible in a way that a static display cannot begin to.”

– Kris Tozer, educator