Welcome to a new uncommonbonds.org!

Over the past few months, we have been working with our friends at Perfect Day in St. John’s, NL, Canada to update our home on the web. The foundation for the site remains the same, but you will notice a few important differences.

First, there is more imagery on this new site, including imagery of the records themselves. We recognize that for many people, imagery is the most important record type resulting from Labrador Inuit and Moravian missionary contact. Unfortunately, imagery is also a record type that requires considerable resources to properly contextualize and to make widely available. We do not have any new databases to share right now, but the updated Records page will help you to find imagery in different collections like Moravian Missions: An Illustrated Record of Missionary Work. We will also be using the Blog itself to showcase more imagery. 

“The Killinek Mail Sledge.” Photo by Berthold Lenz. Moravian Missions vol 22, no 2, 1924, p. 11.

Second, we have overhauled the Records page in order to make it easier for more people to find to find different types of digital records accessible on the web. Like the last version, most of the linked collections are accessible via Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative, but there are two new collections in the update: NL Books and Archives of the Moravian Church – British Province. There is more to come. We have also added a few collections of records here that can be downloaded directly: Aglait Illunainortut and Kampf und Sieg. In time, we hope to be able to add those collection to databases with search capabilities. As we develop those spaces, we believe that access to records like these should not be restricted. 

An iglovigak near Hebron. Photo possibly by George Harp. Moravian Missions vol 35, no 8, 1937, p. 57.

Third, the Blog is going to change. While we will still use this space to help interpret the records through longer posts, you may see different versions of those posts appear in other contexts, like Adventure Canada’s Mindful Explorer. We will also be using the Blog for shorter project updates like this and to showcase different aspects of the work. Since beginning the project in 2021, we have been able to expand the network of people that are involved in Uncommon Bonds beyond the original project team, and we are excited to share some of their work. We will also be using this space to foreground more Labrador Inuit voices in the interpretation of these records, beginning with the next post.

Labrador kajait. Moravian Missions vol 27, no 10, 1929, p. 77.

These changes are largely the result of our Advisory Committee’s response to the ongoing effects of COVID-19. When we first developed the idea for this partnership, we did not have plans to make the records centrally accessible via the web. Our idea was to decentralize access: i.e. to ensure there were different points of access for different types of users. Decentralization remains a core project objective, but what we learned during the pandemic is that this space allows us to curate and contextualize a greater range of decentralized records. Our goals with this re-designed space are 

1. To increase the publicity and discoverability for these records, especially to communities with limited bandwidth.
2. To provide more robust curation of these and other records rather than in the form of a printed Collections Guide. 
3. To do the above in a way that is more user-friendly and visually engaging for all users.

“Travelling in Labrador.” Moravian Missions vol 26 no 10, 1928, p. 79.

Our project has been very fortunate for the supports provided from all our partners and our funder, the Council on Library and Information Resources. Looking forward into 2022 and 2023, we are excited to continue to develop this space and, ultimately, to expand our focus to include many more records created because of contact between Labrador Inuit and Moravian missionaries. 

– Mark David Turner