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Lisa Atkinson
Are you looking for archival records about Alberta’s history, institutions and personalities? Would your students like to view historical documents and images online at any time of the day or night?
The Archives Society of Alberta (ASA) has created three online databases for locating records relating to people, businesses, institutions and events in Alberta’s past. The Archives Network of Alberta (ANA) database contains descriptions of archival fonds (fonds are documents, regardless of their form or creation, used by an individual, family or corporate body in the course of that creator’s activities or functions) housed in the province’s archival repositories. Alberta InSight and Alberta InWord databases contain digitized archival images and textual records available at the click of a mouse. All three archival databases are accessible through the ASA website (www.archivesalberta.org/).
The ANA database contains 8,500 fonds-level descriptions of archival records pertaining to Alberta’s history. The database informs teachers, students and researchers where records are located, who created them, how voluminous the records are, what format they are in (for example, textual, photographic, sound recordings and film), and what types of records are included (correspondence, diaries, minutes of meetings, financial records, and so on). The database also provides links to other records in the database.
ANA’s sister databases, Alberta InWord and Alberta InSight, contain digitized images and textual records that have been selected by archivists from their own holdings. Unlike published library resources, which can usually be found in multiple locations or borrowed through interlibrary loans, archival materials are unique and normally can only be accessed in the institution in which they are held. The availability of digitized records online is therefore a boon to researchers who are unable to travel to do their research, or who need access to records outside of regular operating hours. As of November 2004, InSight contained nearly 24,000 digitized images, while InWord contained 655 documents (approximately 25,000 pages of textual material).
All three of Alberta’s archival databases have grown over the years. Alberta Centennial Legacies funding has made much of this growth possible by providing funding through ASA to archival institutions to complete fonds descriptions and records digitizing. More records are uploaded to the ASA website each month.
Teachers and students are encouraged to access the databases regularly to check what new records have been added, and to visit Canada’s national databases: Archives Canada (www.archivescanada.ca/) and Images Canada (www.imagescanada.ca/).
Lisa Atkinson is the archival program manager at the University of Calgary Archives.
