Andornot has recently completed several exciting upgrades to the Heritage Burnaby website. The Archives received funding to digitize and create a web search interface to audio interviews on cassettes or reel to reel tapes from the last fifty years.  These interviews give an intimate glimpse into the lives of the Burnaby pioneers, and cover a wide range of subjects.  One of the common themes is the struggles that the Municipality and Burnaby families faced during the 1930s when the City went into receivership and unemployment was widespread.

As an interview could be more than an hour long, each was split into 5-10 minute tracks.  Behind the scenes Inmagic TextWorks databases were established to capture information on the Master recording with metadata including the interviewee, date interviewed, interviewer and detailed biographical notes.  An image file showing either the interviewee or a relevant image such as the location or house discussed in the interview was also added.  Each track was then described individually and associated with the master record. Information includes the scope and content of each track, the date range, the subjects discussed and the historical neighbourhood. 

The new web interface allows users to search for any word or phrase across the descriptive fields, or by interviewee, subject or neighbourhood.  There is also an option to browse a listing of all the interviews.

Just adding a link for a user to click and then download an audio file was not an option.  Most users do not want to wait for a track to download, and they may not have an installed media player that supports the audio format.   Playback therefore relies on jPlayer, an open source HTML5 audio/video library which intelligently falls back to Adobe Flash when necessary to provide a consistent interface in all browsers.

“We are thrilled with the flexible and user-friendly interface that has allowed us to make these records publicly accessible for the first time.  By also adding the oral history database to the OneSearch feature on our site, researchers have the ability to find all related records, regardless of medium or format.  This will be an extremely useful tool for our users.”   [Arilea Sill, City Archivist]

Check out last week’s article in the Burnaby NewsLeader - Oral histories online provide fascinating look at Burnaby history or contact us for further information.

Andornot has hosted the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania Inmagic databases for the past three years.  This past month approximately 4,500 images from the H.L. Broadbelt collection of Baldwin Locomotive negatives have been uploaded and added to the archival records database.  We have edited the search interface to add an option to limit records returned to just those that have images.

"Andornot's skill in fine tuning search procedures to reflect the particular needs of our clients has been a real plus. They go the extra mile in extending Inmagic's already strong capabilities." (Jim Alexander)

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania maintains an extensive and significant Library and Archives of railroad history materials, including thousands of railroad history books and serials, several hundred thousand original negatives from rail fans, railroad companies and railroad equipment manufacturers, priceless collections of photographic prints, lithographs, timetables, original builders’ drawings and other historic ephemera. A general description of these holdings may be found on their web site.

The availability of the searchable web interface has resulted in an increase in public inquiries and praise from visitors to the site. Researchers can now perform initial searches for materials to help with research requests, photographic print orders and on-site visits. This outreach has greatly enhanced the usefulness and popularity of these unique railroad history resources.

In the Museum request for fourth year funding it was noted that Andornot’s “hosting has been highly stable, and their initial work in creating user-friendly search screens has been exceptional.”

We are looking forward to making continued enhancements to their site as funding permits. Please contact us for further information.

The City of Burnaby has just launched a new Heritage Burnaby website available at http://www.heritageburnaby.ca. As stated on the website "The goal is to provide a comprehensive and interactive community heritage website that brings together the 'personal history' of our citizens to create a wider understanding and appreciation of our city's 'collective memory'. Through Heritage Burnaby you can experience, learn and research about our community's unique history through online databases and exhibits that provide access to our heritage sites and landmarks, artifact collections, archival collections and the library's history resources."

Andornot Consulting was awarded the contract to provide software and database design services and began working on the project in July 2007. Preliminary design work involved comprehensive user-interface design and work-flow scenarios along with a multitude of data conversions from inter-related Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents from the city archives, museum, and planning department. In just over 6 months, the new Heritage Burnaby system was running with multiple search interfaces and eye-catching image displays all seamlessly integrated within the new web site template created by Atomic Crayon.

"Our City's initial project concept of an online database of historic photographs was able to grow far beyond our own expectations through working with Andornot. The team worked to create a website design that took our initial small project to a higher level to provide the public with a user-friendly comprehensive and integrated database of our museum, archives and heritage collections. The framework conceptualized by our staff in concert with Andornot has created a website that allows us ultimate flexibility to continue to create an elaborate online celebration of the cultural heritage of our community". (Jim Wolf, Heritage Planner, City of Burnaby.)

Behind the scenes, the City is running Inmagic Content Server Professional with desktop access to all the databases for administrative staff through CS/TextWorks and web access through the firewall using CS WebPublisher PRO. Andornot was able to speed the development process through the use of several Andornot add-on products such as Archives Online, the WebPublisher Developer Kit (WPDK), and Image Manager. The custom databases created for the museum and heritage landmarks use the same style and structure as Archives Online and both link to shared thesauri for subjects, names, historical and current neighborhoods. The web interface provides multiple methods of accessing the databases with quick and advanced search options, plus canned searches on popular topics, and image maps with embedded canned searches to allow users to quickly find all resources for a particular neighborhood.

Images can be viewed either with brief descriptive information or in a gallery view. Image resizing is handled automatically from one master image and multiple images are displayed on the full displays. (Try the sample search for automobiles in the artifact collection.)

A key feature of the site is the OneSearch capability, allowing users to search across all four of the main collections simultaneously using Andornot's OneSearch add-on.

This has been an incredibly exciting project for Andornot and we have thoroughly enjoyed working with City staff to deliver this project on a very tight schedule so that it could be launched for BC Heritage Week. We had some intense brainstorming sessions which resulted in the expansion of the original scope and many more ideas for continued future developments.

"Working with Andornot was a great experience with a diverse staff team from several civic departments. Andornot met and exceeded all of our expectations for delivery of a comprehensive database product that was user friendly and easy to upload our various data collections and adapt to our new webpages. Our project was infused with a sense of fun and spirit by the Andornot team which is reflected in the website. We could not have chosen a better consultant or product for this project". (Jim Wolf, Heritage Planner, City of Burnaby.)

Please contact us for further information.

This multi-textbase web site features a Library Catalog, Archives Collection, and Pictorial Collection catalogues. Each contains a Quick Search and Advanced Search interface as well as an auto-boolean script that automatically inserts the "&" operator when entering search terms to mimic a Google type interface.

Visit their catalogs @ http://www.rrmuseumpa.org/about/library/search.htm

The web developers for this project purchased our WPDK to customize the interface and add shopping cart functionality. They have also used the WPDK to develop many other online databases for their various collections. Visit the Glenbow Museum's Collections & Research web page @ http://www.glenbow.org/collections/search/

Below are some of the online databases @ the Glenbow Museum & Archives...

The Archives Main Catalogue contains descriptions of unpublished archival records, such as diaries, letters, and minute books, for over 3000 families, organizations, and businesses in southern Alberta.

The Library Main Catalogue contains descriptions of over 100,000 books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, and government documents relating to the history, art, Native peoples, and popular culture of Western Canada, with an emphasis on Calgary and southern Alberta.

The Map Collection Catalogue contains descriptions of over 5,000 maps relating to the exploration, settlement, and development of Western Canada, with an emphasis on Calgary and southern Alberta.

The Music Catalogue contains descriptions of over 300 pieces of sheet music (1867-1980s), and over 500 sound recordings (1914-2000s) written, published or performed by western Canadians, or which have a Western or Canadian theme.