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The King Institute at Stanford University provides search access to an archival database of tens of thousands of speeches, sermons, letters, and other documents by and about Martin Luther King, Jr. Known as OKRA (Online King Records Access), the database includes descriptive information as well as holdings details for these resources held at repositories all over the United States.

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A search engine for this collection was developed from our Andornot Discovery Interface in 2017, and in 2023, this was upgraded to the latest version of this software. A wealth of new features were brought to the site, as described in this blog post, aiding researchers in locating items of interest.

The site is available at https://okra.stanford.edu/

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

The Centre du patrimoine (Heritage Centre) of the Société historique de Saint-Boniface is an archive and research facility dedicated to the preservation, study, dissemination and development of Francophone and Metis history in Manitoba and Western Canada. The Heritage Centre holds more than 500 archival fonds documenting every facet of life from culture to commerce, education to politics and religion to the economy.

In 2010-2011, Andornot helped the Heritage Centre to upgrade their DB/TextWorks-based collection management system. This also included a collection of 35,000 records of contracts between fur traders (Voyageurs) and companies engaged in the fur trade in Canada between 1700 and ca. 1822.

In 2016, thanks to a grant from the Library and Archives Canada Documentary Heritage Communities Program, the Heritage Centre was able to upgrade this web search interface to one powered by the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI). The site is hosted by Andornot at https://archivesshsb.mb.ca 

In 2022, the site was upgraded to the latest version of our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI), to provide users with all the latest features and meet modern browser requirements.

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AnDI offers features not available in the previous site, such as the ability to search the museum, library and Voyageurs collections together, a more advanced search engine, spelling corrections and search suggestions, and facets to help users narrow their search.

The interface is designed for both desktop and mobile devices. There are features that help users view enlarged images, and to play back video recordings without leaving the site. 

New to the site in this upgrade are large high-resolution scans of architectural drawings. Even on large screens with an image at full-width, it can be hard to see small details in an architectural drawing, so Andornot implemented an image zooming feature that allows users to see both the whole drawing and enlargements of selected portions without having to download a very large image file.

Other useful features include an RSS feed of newly-added records, and a selection list that allows users to save, email or print records, or request more information on them from the Heritage Centre. And last but not least, the Disqus commenting system allows users to engage in discussions with themselves and the Centre about records, helping to add or correct descriptive information.

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

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