The St. Andrew's College Archives is dedicated to preserving the School's heritage by collecting and promoting records and artifacts of permanent value to its community. The School's archival records date back to when it was established in 1899 and offers a wealth of information about its history, culture, and students.

An upgraded online search interface built from the latest version of our Andornot Discovery Interface is available at https://archives.sac.on.ca and features all past issues of the school's annual Review and Andrean alumni magazine, with full text searching and the ability to view the document either in a flipbook format, with animated page turning, or in a more research-oriented viewer, with search words highlighted.

The search interface also includes thousands of photographs of sporting, drama, cultural events, teams, school buildings, Andrean soldiers, teachers, and students from the School's inception until the present time.

Andornot helped the school build a web search interface using earlier technology, and was pleased to upgrade it this year, as well as to host both the web search interface and the DB/TextWorks databases, from our starter kit collection, that the School, like so many of our clients, continues to rely on for day-to-day data management.

The School plans to add even more materials, documents and artifacts to the databases and site in the coming years.

Contact Andornot to discuss a similar project for your school or archives.

Along with many other enhancements added to our Andornot Discovery Interface in 2021 is a new flipbook style viewer that is particularly useful for browsing newspapers, magazines and other documents.

Similar to the existing PDF viewer built in to AnDI, no work is required on your part to use this feature. PDFs that are indexed in AnDI will be available to view within search results, with no extra software required, in either the existing PDF viewer, with search words highlighted, or in the flipbook viewer, which offers page turning animation, as well as zooming in and out. The intention of this feature is to recreate the experience of paging through material as you would with the physical item.

Having both PDF viewing options available in AnDI search results meets the needs of different kinds of users at the same time: the researcher looking for a particular name, place or words in a document, versus a more casual reader nostalgically reviewing digitized back issues of newspapers, for example.

See these publications in the Bulkley Valley Museum online collection for a live example of the flipbook viewer.

This feature is included in all new AnDI projects, while existing AnDI sites can be upgraded to the latest version of AnDI to benefit from this and all the other new features.

Since 1967, the Bulkley Valley Museum has built up a permanent collection of artifacts and documentary heritage materials that represent the human and natural history of the Town of Smithers, British Columbia, and the surrounding Bulkley Valley.

About 5 years ago, Andornot helped the museum to upgrade their DB/TextWorks-based collection management system, using our Andornot Starter Kits for archives and museum artifacts. We then used the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to build and host the site.

In 2021, the site was upgraded to the newest version of our Andornot Discovery Interface, with a refreshed graphic design and new features such as:

• a 'facet explorer' for searching names, topics and places before conducting a search;
• a large image zooming feature to smoothly zoom in and out of maps and plans, without having to download a large image;
• a flipbook-style viewer for documents, recreating the experience of paging through a newspaper or magazine;
• an audio player for oral history recordings, with individual tracks and a description of them available for viewing. This metadata was captured using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer and custom-integrated into the new AnDI site;
• the Disqus commenting system to encourage discussion of resources in the site, such as to help identify photographs of people whose names have been lost to history; and
• upgraded Google Analytics tracking (as described in this blog post) to help museum staff better understand their user community, how they use the site and what they are looking for.

The new version is available at https://search.bvmuseum.org, hosted by Andornot.

The Bulkley Valley Museum was one of the first adopters of our Andornot Discovery Interface, and we're delighted they are one of the first to make use of these new features too.

Whether you're an existing AnDI user, or interested in it for the first time, check out the many examples of public sites built from it in our Project Portfolio, then contact us to discuss how it could make your collections more accessible.

The Glengarry County Archives is the largest repository of historical records in eastern Ontario and contains the foremost collection of history about Glengarry County found anywhere.

Incorporated as a municipal corporation in 2013, the archives is the official repository for the records of the Townships of North and South Glengarry municipal governments and is mandated to preserve the records of individuals, businesses and organizations from the settlement period to the present.

In recent years, back issues of two local newspapers were digitized, and are now fully searchable using an instance of our Andornot Discovery Interface. The site is available at https://newspapers.glengarrycountyarchives.ca and includes issues of The Glengarry News from 1892 to 2020 and The Glengarrian from 1887 to 1910.

Users may search for people, places and events from years past right up to almost the present day. When opening the newspaper issue, search words are highlighted where they appear on each page, to help a user more easily find articles relevant to their search.

Unlike so many of our projects, this site has no database behind the scenes. Rather, the thousands of PDF files are well organized into folders, and the folders and PDF file names convey meaningful information, such as the name of the newspaper and its issue date. From this we are able to construct the metadata you see in search results. Primarily, though, the intention is to provide the best possible full-text search experience of the many articles in each issue.

The site and all newspaper issues are hosted by Andornot.

Andornot has designed and developed search engine and information management solutions since 1995, and has used primarily discovery interface style tools for the past decade. We’ve provided our own Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to many of our clients, and watched and learned from their questions and uses of the application

Over this decade of development, we’ve added many new features to individual AnDI sites, either at the request of clients, or based on our own observations and learning, as well as taking into consideration ever-evolving best practices in usability, accessibility and web design and development.

In 2020, we embarked on a project to take the best features and enhancements and roll them all up into a new version of AnDI. This version is now ready for use, both to upgrade existing AnDI sites and for all new ones.

With many software products that evolve over time, as more and more features are added, they sometimes become bloated and confusing. More is not necessarily better and it’s always been our intention to adhere to the Don't Make Me Think principle. So a user should not need to read search tips or help pages to use a tool and find what they are looking for, and should be able to understand the entire screen at a glance, without having to pause to decipher complex options.

This PDF describes some of the most significant enhancements in the latest version of AnDI, which complement the core features that have made AnDI such a powerful search engine. Sites built from the latest version will be added to our online Project Portfolio as they launch; however, many of the sites in this portfolio already have some of these features, so check them out in the example sites given below. Be sure to ask us about any features not listed here that may already exist or could be developed for you.