A Richford Librarian Photographs a Community Board. Images Sent to Montreal Collective Documenting Integration-Era Memory.

RICHFORD, Vermont — On a quiet Monday afternoon, Colette Aubin-Roy stood in front of the community board at the Richford Public Library, raised her phone, and took a photograph.

Then another. Then one of the third surface — the one that had been giving her pause since earlier in the week, when a handwritten patron note appeared on it asking, in careful bilingual block letters, whether anyone had thought to preserve the board as a record.

By the time she locked up, she had sent the images, along with a brief cover note, to a contact address for a McGill-affiliated collective that has been documenting integration-era community memory across the former border region. She had done it on her own initiative, without instruction from anyone official.

"I just felt the note had made the question harder to leave unanswered," Aubin-Roy said. "That's all, really."

The board itself — three hinged cork surfaces mounted near the branch's entrance — has been a fixture of the Richford library for at least fifteen years, predating the integration period by nearly a decade. In that time it accumulated what most community boards accumulate: lost cat notices, music lessons offered, church rummage sales. But starting around 2036 and continuing through the years of RONA's early settlement, it became something else without anyone deciding it should.

There are now handmade maps of family dispersal routes, transcribed in several hands. A laminated page of bus schedules from the old Québec transit system, obsolete now but kept. Photographs of unfamiliar faces, some labeled in French, some not labeled at all. A child's drawing of a bridge, signed only Mireille, 8 ans. A roster — written in the cautious language of people still unsure of what was permanent — of neighbors who had arrived from the Estrie and needed winter coats.

Aubin-Roy, who has worked at the branch for six years, did not create the archive. She is not sure anyone did, in any intentional sense. But she has, over time, become its quiet custodian — reattaching items that fall, moving nothing, asking patrons who try to take things home to consider making a copy instead.

"People keep adding to it," she said. "I don't think they always know that's what they're doing."

In her cover note to the collective, she explained the board's origins as best she understood them. She made no requests about what might be done with the images. As of Monday evening, she had not received a reply.

The board remains up. Nothing has been moved.