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.

 

The representation of people and places with Indigenous names is an ever more important topic in Canada. For many years, such names were Anglicized and represented using only letters from the Latin alphabet, such as these names of First Nations:

• Musqueam
• Tseshaht
• Squamish

For some time, there has been a movement to represent these names in syllabic or phonetic characters. For example:

• xʷməθkʷəy̓əm
• c̓išaaʔatḥ
• Sḵwx̱wú7mesh

For our DB/TextWorks clients, this poses a challenge. DB/TextWorks does not use Unicode to store data, so cannot natively store the syllabic characters, only those from Latin alphabets. 

However, our Andornot Discovery Interface has no trouble displaying characters from any character set, so can display Indigenous names and places in this more respectful manner, and also optionally still display the Anglicized or Romanized versions too.

The approach we’ve come up with for clients who use both DB/TextWorks and our Andornot Discovery Interface is:

1. Anglicized names only will still be entered in DB/TextWorks records. 

2. When those records are indexed in the Andornot Discovery Interface, the indexing process will look for these Anglicized indigenous names and places in some or all fields in the data, using a pre-created list of such terms. When found, the Anglicized term will either be replaced with the term using syllabics, or appended. For example, the end result could be:

• xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam)
• c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht)
• Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish)

This can be done in subject headings, place names, and large passages of text too.

We hope also to improve searching of these terms using the syllabic characters. Currently a user would be able to enter the entire term and find it (e.g. xʷməθkʷəy̓əm)  but we hope to also offer some or all of the search features that make the Andornot Discovery Interface so useful, such as stemming and wildcards and relevancy scores based on these terms. We’ll be working on this second step in the coming months. Contact us if this approach would be of use to you.

 

The Elgin Country Archives and Museum has used DB/TextWorks to manage their collections for many years, and has long made them searchable online using software from Andornot. They were one of our first clients to rebuild their online search using a responsive web interface that adapts to users screen sizes, from desktop down to mobile.

Now, they've rebuilt their online presence using our Andornot Discovery Interface, to provide the best possible search experience for their community.

The new site is available at https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca and features not only the holdings of the main Elgin County Archives and Museum, but also those of nine other museums physically located within Elgin County, but operating independently. This one-stop search gives the local community excellent access to local history resources.

Of almost 300,000 records available in https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca, over half feature digital media immediately available online. These are primarily photographs of local people, places and artifacts, but also audio and video recordings, PDFs and, new to this site, very high resolution fire insurance maps. These maps are made very accessible in the site with a zoom feature that allows users to smoothly zoom in to a high level of detail on small areas of the map.

When searching, features such as spelling corrections and search suggestions, relevancy-ranked results, and facets such as name, place, date, material type and more help user to quickly locate items of interest. Items may be shared on social media, saved and bookmarked, or easily submitted to the museum and archives to request more information, or order photographic reprints.

https://heritagecollections.elgin.ca also features the Disqus commenting system, which allows the local community to engage with other members and museum and archives staff, helping to identify people or places in photographs, correct errors, and discuss the rich history of Elgin county.