For actors, designers, writers, and researchers of the stage, the importance of archival and library facilities is tremendous. Archival sources consisting of written correspondence between director and writer, costumes, props, moving images, or shards of evidence from which an historic plot is woven are instrumental to the crafting of a theatrical piece. In terms of the roles served both meeting creative needs and documenting the administrative or managerial output of theatrical activity, archival sources and repositories are of great value.

In a recent Canadian work, Lost Boys, actor and playwright R.H. Thomson brings to life the experiences of five Canadian soldiers in WWI as seen through the eyes of their great-nephew, played by Thomson himself. To create this biographical piece, the playwright sifted through over 700 letters written by his great-uncles and preserved by his great-aunt. The performance itself centres around a trunk on stage from which the actor retrieves the correspondence to read it aloud. In Nova Scotia, Antigonish-born writer Mary-Colin Chisholm searched through colonial correspondence for the creation of Strange Humours, an Eastern Front premiere that examined our complex history by exploring relationships between British soldiers, American mercenaries, and Mi'kmaq leaders. These are merely two examples of the many creative or "source" uses of the archive.

While personal, academic, religious, university, and specialized theatre archives provide rich primary sources from which plots may be formed and works crafted, archival repositories may also serve to house and maintain the output of company productions, festivals, and arts associations. A recent Globe and Mail article refers to Stephen Ouimette, a Stratford Festival company member selected to direct Timon of Athens, as going "to the Stratford archives to see how it had been handled last time the festival did it, in 1991." * While the Stratford Festival Archives stores the performance history of its festival, the Dalhousie University Archives has been actively collecting records from theatre organizations in Nova Scotia since the early 1970s in order to preserve the memory of provincial theatre and to render it accessible for research. Featured throughout this site are items from several decades of collecting activity, from early donors such as Neptune Theatre, the Theatre Arts Guild, and the Dramatists' Co-op of Nova Scotia to the newly-acquired material from Jest in Time Theatre and Two Planks and a Passion Theatre, to name only some.

*Conlogue, Roy. "The Bard You Know." The Globe and Mail Saturday, May 29,: Review 1