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The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies aims to foster an appreciation of mountain culture by preserving, providing access to, exhibiting and interpreting materials related to the mountain cultural and heritage of Western Canada. Their collections include:

An Art Collection that spans the early 1800's to the present day and includes regionally created and related works by Canadian and international artists.

A Heritage Collection of artifacts that help tell the stories of Indigenous Peoples, artists, immigrants, guides and outfitters, climbers, surveyors, hikers, explorers, adventurers, skiers and residents of the town and area.

An Archives of over 800 fonds with approximately 350 metres of textual records, more than 700,000 photographs, and over 1,500 sound recordings, motion pictures and videos. Dating from the mid-19th century to the 21st century, these records document not only the people who created them, but also the broader social, political, and economic history of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

A Library of over 8,500 books, rare maps, periodicals and newsletters film documentaries, clipping files, and complete collections of newspapers from Banff and Canmore. Since 1971, the Archives and Library has also been the custodian of the Alpine Club of Canada Library, which contains over 4,000 books and periodicals documenting the mountain cultures of the world from the mid-1600s to current.

This wealth of resources is available for online searching at https://archives.whyte.org and powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface. The sophisticated algorithms and relevancy-ranked results in the search engine help users quickly find items of interest from the almost 100,000 records in the site.

Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

Unique to this site is a quick and easy online ordering system that allows users to order images for personal or commercial use and pay online instantly by PayPal, with high resolution images supplied by the museum for specific needs.

Underlying this site are databases managed with both Filemaker and Inmagic DB/TextWorks, the latter with our Starter Kits for Libraries and Archives for a consistent interface and fields across several databases.

DB/TextWorks has been around since the late 1990’s and we sometimes come across clients with databases that were developed almost that long ago!  Two recent projects we are working on involve rationalizing older databases to modern standards.   It’s amazing how old, ugly, inefficient interfaces can be spruced up through the use of one of our kits for libraries, archives and museums.  We use these as a starting point, and after updating field names to be as descriptive as possible, we import our query screens, report and edit forms and adjust these to show the clients fields.  If you have report designs you like, you can do this too!  Under Maintain > Manage Textbase Elements you can import and export forms from one database to another.  We like to color code our databases and it’s possible to open the exported forms in Notepad or other text editor and carefully edit to replace background colors. Archives_Accessions

Inevitably requirements change over the years, so we help clients review how fields are being used, and suggest adding or deleting fields to better handle their needs.  We also make sure to add automatic number and date fields, appropriate validation and substitution lists and work with clients to clean up their data by batch modifying or updating values through the validation lists. After so many years working with DB/TextWorks we have a lot of tricks up our sleeves, and often export data, adjust it in other software and re-import to split or combine fields.

If you need assistance with your databases, please check out some of our past blog posts that provide various suggestions for improvements.  Note that some of these reference older versions of DB/TextWorks so the location of functions may not be identical.

Spring Cleanup series:

Give your databases a new lease on life and contact us for a quote to help you love them again!

I live in Richmond, part of the Metro Vancouver Regional District, and have an interest in local history, so I was particularly interested when Andornot was asked by the City of Richmond Archives to help with a project on the origins of Richmond place names. 

The City of Richmond Archives is a long time user of Inmagic DB/TextWorks for managing their collections, and were instrumental in developing the set of linked databases that became our Andornot Archives Starter Kit. Over the past couple years we’ve helped the Archives upgrade their Inmagic WebPublisher-based online search system, which is available at http://archives.richmond.ca/archives/descriptions/ 

The new Name Origins search, available at http://archives.richmond.ca/archives/places/ features almost 500 records (and growing) that document and describe the history of Richmond streets, roads, bridges, neighbourhoods, and other landmarks. It’s easy to search by keyword or by type of place, and whenever possible, a Google map of the named place is shown. This database is updated by the Friends of the Richmond Archives, volunteers with a passion for local history. Launching this new database online was made possible through the Richmond Canada 150 Community Celebration Grant Allocations. 

As I worked in the web search interface to the database, I couldn’t help but search for places in my neighbourhood and around Richmond, and become captivated by the history of them. Now community members can access this information 24-7 and learn the history behind the names of streets, areas, and landmarks in their community.

Contact Andornot for options for your Inmagic databases and for search engines and other software to make your collections accessible online.

The Elgin County Museum, as well as the Elgin County Archives, in St. Thomas, Ontario, both use Inmagic DB/TextWorks to manage their collections. A few years ago, Andornot helped the archives upgrade their public search interface to a more modern design, using our Andornot Starter Kit web application.

This year we were pleased to help the museum upgrade their public search interface too. The museum's new look is available at http://inmagic.elgin-county.on.ca/museum/ 

Both interfaces continue to use Inmagic WebPublisher PRO as the underlying search engine, but with our modern Andornot Starter Kit web application in front. This app provides features such as automatic stemming and combining of search words, browsable indexes, a selection list for saving items, and a photo commenting feature. 

The overall design matches the Elgin County website for a more integrated look and adapts to the user's screen size, so it's just as usable on a phone or tablet as on the desktop.

Several other museums in Elgin County and St. Thomas also use this system to manage their collections. The public is now able to access these collections as well, many of which have been photographed. Users can limit their search to only records that have images available online.

"This is a much more user friendly way for our Museum Partners to manage their collections," says Mike Baker, Elgin County Museum Curator.

Contact Andornot to discuss options for bringing your search interfaces up to modern standards.

The Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) uses Inmagic DB/TextWorks to manage a library catalogue and databases of reports, manuals, and other literature related to transportation. The collection includes materials from governments, universities, associations and the private sector, both in Canada and abroad.

TAC approached Andornot to discuss upgrading the web search interfaces to their library databases to a more modern design with some new features. The existing interfaces, as well as the new ones, use Inmagic WebPublisher PRO for search and display, but were looking dated and didn't match the TAC website.

Andornot used our Andornot Starter Kit web interface for WebPublisher PRO to design new interfaces for three of TAC's DB/TextWorks databases. Each interface is available in both English and French, and the overall design matches the TAC website for a more integrated look. 

"The search interface for the library catalogue was functional but limited.  With few internal resources to dedicate to the project, we approached Andornot about using the Starter Kit to improve the appearance and features of the interface. The result was quickly achieved and a vast improvement over the previous forms.  I'm looking forward to seeing how members respond to these new search features." -- Glenn Cole, TAC Library

Key features of the sites include automatic stemming and ANDing of search words, browsable indexes, RSS feeds, book covers from Google when available, a selection list for saving items, and an interface that adapts to the user's screen size, so it's just as usable on a phone or tablet as on the desktop.

The three databases available online for public searching include:

  1. The TAC Library Catalogue database contains over 25,000 documents from major Canadian transportation agencies as well as many international organizations. Items may be borrowed by those with a one-time need for them.
  2. The Current Practices and Innovations database contains information on maintenance, construction, road safety and climate change.
  3. The Canadian Surface Transportation Research database offers information on research about a wide range of transportation themes, such as economics, the environment, soils and materials, highway and bridge design, construction and maintenance, traffic engineering, vehicle studies and rail transportation.

Many resources in these databases are available for immediate access as PDFs.

Contact Andornot to discuss options for bringing your search interfaces up to modern standards.

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