Skip to the content Back to Top

The Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity was established in 1990 to serve as the institutional memory of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. With records from the Centre’s inception in 1933, the Archives serves as the official repository for administrative, legal, and historical materials, and additionally houses selected personal records of artists and individuals associated with Banff Centre.

For the past several years, this collection has not been accessible online, only by consultation with the Archives. However, in working with Andornot this year, the collection is now searchable through an instance of our Andornot Discovery Interface, at https://archives.banffcentre.ca. Initially, about 10,000 records are publicly available, but many tens of thousands more will become so, after some clean-up and ensuring appropriate permissions are in place. The initial 10,000 records include almost 3,000 photographs, as well as 200 documents, the text of which is fully searchable. These documents include annual reports, posters and concert programs, amongst other materials.

Banff_Centre_Archives.jpg

In addition to building the https://archives.banffcentre.ca site from our Andornot Discovery Interface, we merged data from several existing databases into new Accessions and Descriptions databases from our Andornot Starter Kit, which comply with the Canadian Rules for Archival Description (RAD), and cleaned up substantial fields and records in both, for best presentation and searching in https://archives.banffcentre.ca.

All software and data is hosted by Andornot for a seamless experience by Archives staff.

Inmagic has released version 20 of the its popular desktop database management system, DB/TextWorks, with two key enhancements, as well as fixes for issues discovered since version 19. The two key changes are:

  1. Support for Windows Server 2022, the latest version of the commonly-used Microsoft server operating system; and
  2. A new Find Duplicate Records search feature that expands upon the Duplicated Terms feature added to the index browse in version 17.

DBTW20.jpg

If you upgrade from a version prior to 15 directly to 20, be sure to read the instructions about the necessary upgrade to your textbases as well as the software. If you're already using version 15 through 19, you'll have done this already.

Customers with a current Inmagic maintenance subscription will receive emails from advantage@inmagic.com with instructions for downloading this release. 

As always, contact us with any questions about this new release, to check the status of your maintenance subscription, for help upgrading, or to have us host your software and databases.

The Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, Alberta is home to the city’s museum, archives, art gallery and other cultural collections. A long-time use of DB/TextWorks to manage these collections, the Esplanade recently upgraded their public collection search engine to our Andornot Discovery Interface.

Esplanade_Gallery.jpg

The new site is available at https://collections.esplanade.ca and offers users over 140,000 records from the museum, archival and art collections. Online media includes photographs (one third of the collection), audio and video recordings, and large format maps that feature our image zoomer to allow users to see both the entire map and close-up details with smooth scrolling and zooming and no wait for large files to download.

Like all sites built from our Andornot Discovery Interface, the Esplanade collections search provides features such as browsable lists of fonds, names and topics, 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.

All software and data is hosted by Andornot from our secure Canadian data centre.

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.

Heritage_Burnaby_Saarch_Results_2023.jpg

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.

Heritage_Burnaby_Archival_Hierarchy.jpg

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

sylvan-lake-andi-gallery.jpg

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.

Categories

Let Us Help You!

We're Librarians - We Love to Help People