Resource centre going digital
Documents, audio, photos will comprise Inuvialuit database
Meagan Leonard
Northern News Services
Thursday, July 9, 2015
INUVIK
In three years, the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre's archive collection will be accessible online for the first time.
University of Alberta graduate student Robyn Stobbs, left, is in town to help Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre manager Cathy Cockney design a digital database of the centre's resources. - Meagan Leonard/NNSL photo
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The initiative, dubbed Digital Library North, has been made possible through a federal grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and a dedicated team of researchers from the University of Alberta.
Robyn Stobbs is working on the project as part of her graduate studies and came to Inuvik in May to conduct some preliminary surveys.
She says she has been interviewing residents of the community to determine what resources they are most interested in accessing and what kind of an online platform would be easiest to use.
She then plans to go through the archives and assess how the material could best be organized. At this point, she said they aren't sure what form the website will take or what it will look like.
"Hopefully soon we can build a mock-up and have people try and test it and say what they like and don't like about it," she said, adding people are excited to browse through photos. "A lot of the people I've talked to have a story to tell and they're quite interested in seeing the photographs go up online - photographs are a big draw."
Items in the new database will include documents, audio clips, text and photos. Stobbs says she imagines the format to be very visual, with some features of traditional online catalogues.
"I'd like there to be some sort of way to search by area, whether that's clicking on a map or having a drop-down menu, but also having images," she said. "It's helpful to have an image along with (text)."
Stobbs added the program will specifically benefit those trying to trace their family history and traditional language teachers in the communities.
"People are interested in looking up family history along with schools doing Northern studies," she said. "A lot of the language resources here we want to get up so that the teachers will be able to access those."
Ultimately, she says the goal is to bring more resources to rural communities as currently material can only be accessed at the centre in Inuvik.
"We want to create an infrastructure for a digital library for Northern regions ... and have more access to resources online so they don't have to come to the centre," she said - providing technology co-operates. "The hope is that Internet connectivity will continue to get better because there is supposed to be a fibre optic cable coming in."
The project has received approximately $300,000 from the federal government to be spread over three years. However, once the database is up and running, this will not be the end of the project. Stobbs says she imagines it as a fluid source people can continue to build on into the future.
"They're constantly creating new resources here so we don't want it to be static," she said. "We want it to be able to be added to."
