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Since 1967, the Bulkley Valley Museum has built up a permanent collection of artifacts and documentary heritage materials that represent the human and natural history of the Town of Smithers, British Columbia, and the surrounding Bulkley Valley. This collection is now available online for the first time at http://search.bvmuseum.com

Andornot initially helped the museum to upgrade their DB/TextWorks-based collection management system, using our Andornot Starter Kits for archives and museum artifacts. We then used the Andornot Discovery Interface to build and host the site.

The search engine contains records for over 8,000 of the museum's archival and museum holdings, including 5,000 digitized historic photographs. Highlights of the collection include information on:

  • area railroads and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway;
  • fossils, rocks and minerals and the natural history of the area;
  • telegraphs;
  • farming and agriculture; and
  • records from Smithers, Telkwa, Moricetown and Hazelton towns.

On the site, users can share their favourite items to Facebook and Twitter, and generate PDFs or print lists of items they are interested in. 

Users can also provide feedback to the museum via email on specific photographs and records. This form of crowd-sourcing will help identify people whose names have been lost to history, and even with hours of the website launch, was proving popular.

"Our new website is part of the Museum's ongoing efforts to make its collections more accessible to our local communities, enabling users from anywhere in the Bulkley Valley, or anywhere in the world, to learn about our local history. 

We are 30-60 minutes away from some of the communities we serve and collect from, so having our collections online is really going have an impact on access to history for local researchers and for use in the classroom by students."

- Kira Westby, Curator, Bulkley Valley Museum

The Bulkley Valley Museum was one of several recipients of the Library and Archives Canada Documentary Heritage Communities Program, which provides grants to select organizations for projects such as this. They join a growing list of Andornot clients who have selected the Andornot Discovery Interface to make their collections searchable online.

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

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