Burnaby's Charting Change Atlas wins ArchivesNext award

ArchivesNext is an American weblog with a monthly audience of 10,000 covering topics related to archives and technology. The award to the City of Burnaby Archives for "Best re-purposing of descriptive data" was shared with the Smithsonian Institute.

"One of the goals of the Charting Change project was to bring together Burnaby's heritage resources in a useful, accessible and interesting format that allowed our community to interact with and experience their history in a new way," said Arilea Sill, archivist for the city, in a press release. "The nomination and award announcement is a mark of success and recognition for the city as a whole for the creative approach it has taken in sponsoring such programs."

The Charting Change atlas developed by Andornot and the City of Burnaby allows users to see how historical events, ranging from First Nations settlement to the founding of Fort Langley in 1825, through to the Depression and post-war housing boom have shaped the community of Burnaby. Behind the scenes, the information shown on each map point is pulled from the existing Inmagic databases currently searchable from the Heritage Burnaby website.   Heritage landmarks, historic buildings, and neighbourhoods are plotted and linked to the records for photographs, artifacts, textual records and bylaws.

For more information on this project, see the press release from the City of Burnaby, the announcement on the ArchivesNext website or our earlier blog posts describing the project.  The atlas is available on the Heritage Burnaby website.

Our congratulations to the City of Burnaby team - it was a pleasure to work on this project with them. If you have ideas for enhancing access to your collections, be sure to contact us to discuss possibilities.