Stelco, Sears Canada and CN Rail: archival sources of advertising and marketing history in the Library and Archives Canada collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The archival records of Canadian corporations held by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) are a rich source of primary documents for the study of the history of marketing and advertising in Canada. The paper discusses the records of iconic department store Sears Canada, steel manufacturer Stelco, and Canadian National, the country’s largest railway, provide primary source material on marketing, sales, catalogues, promotions, celebrity endorsements, sponsorship of charitable causes and other areas of publicity. Additionally, discussing archival records provides a case study of the major archival processes involved in making historical documents available to researchers and the general public, including appraisal and evaluation, archival processing, preservation and digitisation. Design/methodology/approach The paper discusses and highlights primary source archival records for the study of marketing history. These archival fonds are unique primary source records that document three historically significant Canadian corporations and their roles in Canadian history. Findings The archival records of Canadian corporations held by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) are a rich source of primary documents for the study of the history of marketing and advertising in Canada. The records of iconic department store Sears Canada, steel manufacturer Stelco, and Canadian National, the country’s largest railway, provide primary source material on marketing, sales, catalogues, promotions, celebrity endorsements, sponsorship of charitable causes and other areas of publicity. Additionally, discussing archival records provides a case study of the major archival processes involved in making historical documents available to researchers and the general public, including appraisal and evaluation, archival processing, preservation and digitisation. Originality/value The archival records of Canadian corporations held by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) are a rich source of primary documents for the study of the history of marketing and advertising in Canada. The records of iconic department store Sears Canada, steel manufacturer Stelco, and Canadian National, the country’s largest railway, provide primary source material on marketing, sales, catalogues, promotions, celebrity endorsements, sponsorship of charitable causes and other areas of publicity. Additionally, discussing archival records provides a case study of the major archival processes involved in making historical documents available to researchers and the general public, including appraisal and evaluation, archival processing, preservation and digitisation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.028 | 0.073 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".