Heritage Burnaby Upgraded with New Site and Features in 2022
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.
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.
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.