Since 2008, Andornot has helped the City of Burnaby’s Archives and Museum develop the Heritage Burnaby website and collection search, and a 2022 upgrade added a wealth of new features.

The Heritage Burnaby website brings together the combined collections of the city’s museum and archives and includes archival fonds and descriptions, city council records, indigenous belongings, Chinese Canadian, Japanese Canadian and South Asian Canadian collections, popular historic images, oral history recordings, maps and plans, and so much more. Over 125,000 records are fully searchable online, including the full text of several digital books.

Audio-video recordings are immediately viewable within search results, large scale maps and plans may be zoomed in to view details not available in regular images, and documents and digital books may be searched and viewed either with search words highlighted or in a new flipbook-style format that recreates the physical experience of paging through the publication.

The site is powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface search engine, an Umbraco content mangement system for some of the content pages, and behind the scenes, a series of Inmagic DB/TextWorks databases for data management.

The site benefits from all the features added to our Andornot Discovery Interface since it was last upgraded in 2015, described in this blog post, such as an archival hierarchy viewer, to show a record’s position in a mini-finding-aid style view.

Try a search for a local person, or a landmark such as Hart House. A search such as this brings together a wonderful range of materials documenting the history of this building and its occupants, from photos, books and audio recordings to the council documents regarding its transition to a restaurant.

A brand new feature developed specifically for this site is the ability to both search and display Indigenous terms, names, languages and places not only in their Anglicized forms, using Roman letters, but also using the APA or NAPA phonetic character sets. While the underlying DB/TextWorks databases cannot store the necessary characters natively, Andornot developed a means to substitute Roman letters with APA and NAPA phonetic character sets on-the-fly during indexing into the Andornot Discovery Interface search engine, allowing both versions to be fully searched and displayed. For example, users may search for either Musqueam or ʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and view both terms side by side in all records that formerly contained only Musqueam.

Contact Andornot to discuss upgrades and enhanced features for your own heritage collections.

 

The Sylvan Lake & District Archives collects, preserves and provides access to records that tell the story of Sylvan Lake, Alberta, and the surrounding area.

The archives has been using Inmagic DB/TextWorks software along with the Andornot Archives Starter Kit to manage their archival collections since 2010. The Descriptions database now contains over 8,600 detailed records on the photos and documents in the collection, covering every aspect of life in Sylvan Lake back to the early 1900’s. Over 7,600 of these records include digitized photos and some have multiple photos for a total of over 12,000 images.

In 2022, Andornot assisted the archives with hosting and public access to this excellent local resource. In particular we provided:

1. Hosting of DB/TextWorks as part of our managed hosting service, freeing up local IT resources and allowing us to provide immediate and direct support for this software.
2. Development of a public search site for the collections from our Andornot Discovery Interface, now available at https://archives.sylvanlake.ca

As with all sites we build from our Andornot Discovery Interface, this site allows non-specialists to easily search and find items of interest, searching by keywords or the names of people and places. Features such as browsable lists of names, topics and places, spelling corrections and search suggestions, relevancy-ranked results, and the ability to narrow a search by facets such as subject, fonds, date, material type and description level all quickly guide users to resources of interest.

Users may immediately view thumbnail images and enlargements, save records to temporary lists and share them with family, friends and on social media, and provide feedback to the archives to help better identify photographs, for example.

Contact us for assistance modernizing your archival collections and making them publicly accessible in an easy to use site.

Inmagic DB/TextWorks has a lot of features you don’t find in a more generic database management system, adding over the years to suit the specific needs of the kinds of folks who use DB/TextWorks (often librarians, archivists and other cultural information managers) and their data.

One of the most often overlooked features is the subject of this blog post: the Insert Series feature.

This feature allows you to insert a predictable series of numbers or dates in a field. For example:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• January, February, March
• A101, A201, A301

The series is inserted as separate entries within a field you choose, and you specify the starting number, number of entries, and by much much each entry in the series should increase.

What a wonderful feature that can save time and improve accuracy over typing out a series by hand, but what’s the practical application of this?

The main intended use is when you’re cataloguing a journal or looseleaf for which you have many past issues and want to record not just a statement about all those issues, but the individual issue numbers or dates in a field. Rather than typing each individual issue number or date, have DBTextWorks enter them for you. If some issues are missing, you can then remove those numbers from the series before saving the record.

You can insert not only a numerical or alphanumerical series, but also a date pattern that increments by the day, week, half month, month and year. For example:

• Days: May 1, 2022, May 2, 2022, May 3, 2022
• Weeks: May 1, 2022, May 8, 2022, May 15, 2022
• Half-months: May 1, 2022, May 15, 2022, June 1, 2022
• Months: May 1, 2022, June 1, 2022, July 1, 2022
• Years: May 1, 2021, May 1, 2022, May 1, 2023

This could be used anytime you have data to add to a record that follows a predictable chronological or alphanumeric pattern.

It’s not the most exciting feature, but one to keep in mind as a time saving tool when you need it, and it’s little things like this that keep DB/TextWorks popular so many decades after it was first created.

The Insert Series feature may be found when editing a record by positioning the cursor in the desired field and choosing Edit > Insert > Series from the main menu.

The West Vancouver Archives collects, preserves, and provides meaningful access to the records that tell the story of West Vancouver, while the West Vancouver Art Museum builds awareness of diverse forms of contemporary and historical art, architecture, and design, engaging audiences with issues and ideas central to the community and the world beyond.

Their combined collections of over 35,000 archival descriptions, fine art, historic artifacts, photographs and more are now searchable together through a single interface at https://archives.westvancouver.ca

This site is powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI), indexing data from a series of Inmagic DB/TextWorks textbases the archives and art museum use to manage their collections.

A discovery interface such as AnDI encourages serendipitous “discovery” of resources and is now the standard method of searching in most major archives and museums, university and public libraries, and e-commerce sites. Users enter keywords to express roughly what they are looking for, then sophisticated search algorithms, with automatic word stemming and spelling corrections, present relevancy-ranked results. Facets allow users to then refine their searches easily and efficiently. 

Items of interest may be added to a selection list for printing, emailing, and sharing on social media, as well as requesting more information or photograph reproductions from the archives and museum.

For many years, Andornot has proudly sponsored professional association events and supported our colleagues through participation in conference trade shows. In 2017 we introduced our Andornot Professional Development Grant, and are pleased to continue to offer it for 2023.

$1,000 is available, to be shared amongst as many applicants as possible. The funds could be put towards any costs associated with activities such as:

• Attending an in-person or online conference, workshop, study session, event, lecture or other learning opportunity.
• Hosting our organizing such an event.

Costs that could be funded include the costs of the virtual or real world event (space, speaker fees, software fees, travel costs) or even the loss of income if you miss work to participate or organize the event.

We’re open to your ideas for what might benefit you and your work or career in these challenging times, so these are simply ideas. We invite you to also present something for which you seek funding.

The deadline for application is January 31, 2023 and recipients will be notified as soon as possible after that date.

Apply at https://www.andornot.com/grant