This past year, the Ottawa Jewish Archives has made it a priority to focus on our presences online. With the pandemic pushing everything online it was important that we adapted and found ways to still connect with our community regardless of location.
The easiest way to achieve this goal was to increase our social media engagement. In March, the archives began posting daily stories and photos of events, places and people that the community would remember and have the ability to interact with. It wasn’t just the archives contributing, though. The archives encouraged people to submit their own photos and stories, some of which the archives did not have, to share with the public. We also regularly posted photos that were lacking identification in our database for people to help fill in the blanks. Both were really engaging ways for the public to connect with the archives while directly contributing to our collection and its history.
Photo: “Do you know who I am?” social media campaign from the Ottawa Jewish Archives. Photo: Teigan Goldsmith © Ottawa Jewish Archives, 2020.