Sylvan Lake and District Archives

The Sylvan Lake & District Archives collects, preserves and provides access to records that tell the story of Sylvan Lake, Alberta, and the surrounding area.

The archives has been using Inmagic DB/TextWorks software along with the Andornot Archives Starter Kit to manage their archival collections since 2010. The Descriptions database now contains over 8,600 detailed records on the photos and documents in the collection, covering every aspect of life in Sylvan Lake back to the early 1900’s. Over 7,600 of these records include digitized photos and some have multiple photos for a total of over 12,000 images.

In 2022, Andornot assisted the archives with hosting and public access to this excellent local resource. In particular we provided:

1. Hosting of DB/TextWorks as part of our managed hosting service, freeing up local IT resources and allowing us to provide immediate and direct support for this software.
2. Development of a public search site for the collections from our Andornot Discovery Interface, now available at https://archives.sylvanlake.ca

As with all sites we build from our Andornot Discovery Interface, this site allows non-specialists to easily search and find items of interest, searching by keywords or the names of people and places. Features such as browsable lists of names, topics and places, spelling corrections and search suggestions, relevancy-ranked results, and the ability to narrow a search by facets such as subject, fonds, date, material type and description level all quickly guide users to resources of interest.

Users may immediately view thumbnail images and enlargements, save records to temporary lists and share them with family, friends and on social media, and provide feedback to the archives to help better identify photographs, for example.

Contact us for assistance modernizing your archival collections and making them publicly accessible in an easy to use site.