The Squamish Library is developing its historical collections and digitizing the past in order to collaborate in the future.
Rei Kitano, the library鈥檚 digital archive assistant for the summer, has been hard at work over the past five months adding a new element to the library鈥檚 online resources. She sifted through a box of records containing 600-some pieces of correspondence from the Squamish Board of Trade (now the Squamish Chamber of Commerce) dated 1926-1994 and incorporated them into a new online collection.
The library employed VITA (Video, Image, Text, Audio), a web-based toolkit that allows for the creation of digital collections. The program is a history catch-all, that is designed to accommodate online collaboration outside of the library.聽
鈥淓verybody has a story to tell and the more people that can contribute, the better, the richer the collection,鈥� said Kitano.
Kitano described one discovery she made about the Squamish municipality talking to Ottawa about how to deal with an ongoing problem.
鈥淸When] they were using carriages and there were livestock on the sidewalks, they were making things dirty and scraping the sidewalks,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hat was a major issue and you just don鈥檛 think about that.鈥�
Kitano uncovered many interesting bits of history, adding to the total of Squamish, but she also uncovered many unknowns.
Among the trade board records, she found a bunch of sketches of oil farms in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, but without accompanying background information.
鈥淢aybe Squamish was looking into these industries? I don鈥檛 know. There鈥檚 a link there that could be discovered further.鈥�
These outstanding questions were labelled as mysteries, with the idea that members of the community could help to fill in the gaps.
鈥淲e have the skeleton. Hopefully everyone would add more colour, fleshing it out,鈥� added Kitano. 鈥淲hat I learned was that every person has stories to tell. If we come together and are able to share stories, we have so much collective knowledge and hopefully this can be tapped into. Our mission is to connect our community to a world of discovery and learning. I think it鈥檚 a great way for everyone to join in.鈥�
VITA originated in Ontario and is being used by libraries, museums, archives, heritage and historical groups looking to build, manage and display digital collections of images, newspapers and oral histories.
The Squamish Library was able to do this work because of a $7,400 grant from the I.K. Barber Learning Centre in U小蓝视频 as a part of The 小蓝视频 History Digitization Program.
Before VITA, parts of the library鈥檚 historical collections were accessible online and the aim is to continue making more information available this way.
With the addition of VITA comes the potential for user participation. Instead of the library being the exclusive updater of historical records, now anyone
can contribute.
Squamish鈥檚 history collection on VITA can be accessed at:聽vitacollections.ca/squamishpubliclibrary/search
There is also a scavenger hunt (http://bit.ly/1o1JW06) within the collection. Participants have the chance to win a 2015 family pass to the Britannia Mine Museum or The West Coast Railway Museum.
