But there is another kind of resident LAC could invite: one whose output looks less like a mural and more like a key. Not a key to one door, but a skeleton key that anyone can pick up and use.
What is a hacker?
Not a cybercriminal. In the tradition of digital humanities, a hacker is someone who takes systems apart to understand them and reassembles them in ways their designers never imagined. A hacker looks at a digitized archive and asks: What could I build with this?
The model already exists. Australian historian Tim Sherratt has spent years turning the collections of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums into playgrounds for researchers and curious minds. His GLAM Workbench is a freely available collection of notebooks, visualizations, and tutorials that let anyone harvest data from archival collections, mine newspaper archives, and conduct analysis that would once have taken a team of scholars years. He has made the collection radically more useful, not by telling one story, but by enabling thousands. AI enhances the opportunity.
The archive is not just a place to visit. It is a dataset waiting to be explored, if only someone would build the door.
What a LAC Hacker-in-Residence could build
One skilled resident, embedded for eight months, could produce tools that compound in value for decades:
Potential projects
- Open notebooks for exploring census records, immigration data, and electoral histories
- Visualizations of demographic and geographic shifts drawn from existing digitized holdings
- Tutorials that make APIs genuinely accessible to researchers outside major universities
- Large-scale name indexing across under-explored archival series, surfacing individuals invisible in traditional finding aids
- Tools for connecting records across collections, linking military files with census and immigration data
This is not a critique of what a creator brings to the institution. But where a creator like Eric Chen makes you feel the weight of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a hacker could build the tools that let a researcher count and map how many families were separated. The feeling and the data are both necessary. They reinforce each other.
The creator tells a story. The hacker builds a stage on which many stories can be told.
Tools as radical access
LAC’s mandate is to make Canada’s documentary heritage accessible. Right now, much of that collection is technically accessible but practically inaccessible, sitting behind interfaces not designed with researchers or educators in mind.
A hacker’s output lives in a repository. A well-built notebook doesn’t stop being useful when the residency ends. It gets used, adapted, and extended for years by genealogists, teachers, journalists, and graduate students who can’t afford database subscriptions.
Canadian digital infrastructure for archival research lags behind comparable institutions in the UK, Australia, and the United States. LAC has the collections to compete. It needs the people to unlock them. A Hacker-in-Residence would signal that LAC sees its users not just as visitors, but as potential builders, and that it is ready to give one gifted, technically literate person the time and trust to make that possible.
The collections are extraordinary. Now build the tools to prove it.
Think you need to be a tech wizard to use AI for family history research? Think again.
Did you know that 
There are approximately 100,000 records post 1874 in this collection, added to 
An update to this 
This new collection contains 
If your family roots stretch into Devon, there’s welcome news from TheGenealogist. The site has just released the Lloyd George Domesday Survey for Devon, building the coverage.
On 12 May, MyHeritage added United States, Incoming Passenger Lists from Canada, 1895–1957 to its platform. The collection’s 5.2 million records typically include the passenger’s name, date and place of birth, last residence, departure point, and date and place of arrival, each linked to an image of the original document.