The Legislature Speaks project started with a simple problem: what to do with a bunch of old reel-to-reel tapes?

The audio tapes, which were used to record Yukon legislature sessions in the latter half of the 20th century, were deteriorating. Especially the newer ones.

The Yukon Archives hired a summer student to wade through stacks of written records, and a digitizing specialist was brought aboard.

Five years later, the history project is complete.

The Legislature Speaks: Voice Recordings from the Yukon Archives Vault 1961-2001 website, a joint project between the Yukon Archives and the Yukon Legislative Assembly, holds audio clips, biographies and photographs of elected members of the assembly between 1961 and 2001.

About 10 of these former members showed up at Wednesday evening's opening reception, held at the government administration building.

They included former commissioner Jack Cable, the evening's host and a Friends of Yukon Archives Society director, as well as Sam Johnston, the first aboriginal person elected as Speaker both in the Yukon and in Canada.

"We wanted to be able to capture the men and women who built this territory in their own words,” Ted Staffen, current Speaker, said at the reception.

"It was not necessarily for us, but for those generations who follow.

"When Sam Johnston's great-grandchildren come in here, they can push a button and hear their great-grandfather.”

Staffen said if Yukoners don't care about their own history, it's never going to get recorded. What generally happens with these kinds of things, he continued, is the history is recorded by a university somewhere far away.

"They generally get it wrong,” he said. "We're so lucky in this territory that we have the men and women who created most of our history, some of them still alive.”

The website allows visitors to listen to all but five members of the former territorial council and its successor, the current legislative assembly, from 1961 to 2001.

Lesley Buchan, the project manager with Yukon Archives, explained that the people who were left out just didn't speak on the tapes the Archives have.

She will now get in contact with them and ask them to read from Hansard so The Legislature Speaks library can be completed.

The summer student had a tough job right from the get-go.

"My advice to our student was to find something that was either significant, interesting, something that showed a policy change, something that talked about what was going on in the Yukon. That was our first hope,” said Buchan. "If we couldn't find that, then we would go for any voice.”

The student, said Buchan, found it especially difficult working with the written records from the earlier years, as a clerk had summarized discussions instead of recording them verbatim.

"It sounded great, and then we'd go to the clip and we'd think, ‘Oh, that's not really what they're talking about,'” said Buchan. "It was much more summarized.”

They then hired Whitehorse technician Tim Kinvig to find the snippet of voice on the reel-to-reel.

"It was really difficult; we had to find where in the day it was, and then had to go through these huge reel-to-reels,” said Buchan. "It was a real labour of love.”

Former house members had the chance to listen to their own voice recordings at one of four laptops set up at the reception. Buchan said she hopes they "really love it.

"Some of the subjects are quite controversial, but that was fine; it's what they said in the house. We weren't trying to change any of it,” she said.

Buchan stressed that the whole goal of the project was to showcase Yukon politics in the second half of the 20th century.

"So in some cases, it was pounding on the table, it was, you know, partisan,” she said. "That's what we were trying to show.”

The Legislative Speaks is now live and can be found at www.yukonlegislaturespeaks.ca.