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Wrangell Newspaper Archive 12 Dec 2024 7:13 AM (4 months ago)

A digitized collection of newspapers from the city of Wrangell, Alaska, dating from 1898 to the present, is now available online at https://wrangellnewspapers.andornot.net

This full-text searchable site is powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface and allows users to search for people, places, events and more using keywords, then refine their search by newspaper name and date of publication.

Sophisticated algorithms ensure the most relevant issues appear first in search results.

Each issue is presented as a PDF, viewable immediately and with search words highlighted for quick navigation to pages and articles of interest.

A flipbook-style viewer is also available, allowing users to simulate on-screen the act of turning the pages of the physical edition.

The collection includes the historical newspapers The Fort Wrangell News (1898), The Stikeen River Journal (1898-1899), The Alaska Sentinel (1902-1909), and the Wrangell Sentinel (1909-present). The Sentinel is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Alaska. The collection will be updated annually to ensure continued access to Wrangell's ongoing story.

Andornot hosts the site as part of our Managed Hosting service.

Riverview Hospital Artifact Collection 11 Dec 2024 8:57 AM (4 months ago)

The Riverview Hospital is a significant part of the City of Coquitlam's history. The mental health hospital was constructed on 1,000 acres of land within the unceded and ancestral territory of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwitlem) people. When it opened in 1913, it was known as the Essondale Branch of the Provincial Hospital for the Insane and consisted of a single asylum building with extensive grounds and a productive farm known as ƛ̓éxətəm (formerly Colony Farm). Over the years the hospital grew, eventually consisting of dozens of building and housing thousands of patients. In 1965, it was renamed the Riverview Hospital, which remained its name until it closed in 2012. In 2021, the Riverview lands were renamed səmiq̓wəʔelə, which translates to Place of the Great Blue Heron in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm.

The Riverview Hospital Artifact Collection was originally compiled by staff and former staff of the Riverview Hospital. A staff committee started collecting historical artifacts from the institution in the 1980s, and this group was officially incorporated as the Riverview Hospital Historical Society in 1997. They collected equipment, furniture, objects and documents to preserve and share the story of the hospital, its staff and its patients.

When the hospital closed in 2012, the City became the custodians of this collection, and in 2024, it became fully searchable online at https://www.riverviewhospitalartifacts.ca, powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface, with back-end management using Inmagic DB/TextWorks software.

30 Years of Helping Cultural Institutions 5 Dec 2024 9:30 AM (4 months ago)

In 1995, our founding partners teamed up to sell and support Inmagic software and provide consulting services, database design and hosting to libraries, archives, museums, and a diversity of other clients.

Floppy disks! DOS! CRT Monitors! Horse-drawn modems! Such were the tools our intrepid pioneering partners used to build their business, and then oh boy, along came the internet. So they adapted and innovated. It's been constant adaptation and innovation ever since, to be honest. We are now experimenting with AI, named entity recognition and machine transcription or oral history recordings, to name just a few current projects.

In 2025, we celebrate our 30th year in business and feel incredibly grateful for the support of our clients, and the interesting projects we’ve been privileged to work on.

To all of you, we express a heartfelt Thank You for the wonderful opportunities you have provided us over these many years.

While we're celebrating this milestone anniversary, we also say a fond farewell to our partner Kathy Bryce. Kathy has worked with so many of you at one point, while guiding the business and mentoring new staff and partners. Kathy will formally leave Andornot at the end of 2024 and enjoy a well-deserved retirement, working in her large garden and on local community initiatives, especially those related to technology training for seniors.

Peter, Jonathan and other members of the Andornot team look forward to providing all the same service and support you are used to.

Norfolk County Newspapers 28 Nov 2024 3:25 PM (4 months ago)

The Heritage and Culture department of Norfolk County, which includes the Archives, has digitized over 60,000 pages of county newspapers from the 1860s to the 1970s, preserving the activities and changes of the county over that century. This collection is fully searchable online at https://norfolkcountynewspapers.andornot.net, a site powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface.

Users may search for people and places by name, and search by any words found in the text, then limit their results by year, decade and newspaper name. Each page may be immediately viewed online, downloaded, or shared with friends and family by email or on social media.

Norfolk County joins Bruce County and Glengarry County in making newspaper collections searchable in this way, through dedicated sites, and other archives that Andornot works with where newspapers are searchable alongside other archival collections.

Using AI Tools to Transcribe Oral History Recordings 1 Sep 2024 6:54 AM (7 months ago)

Traditionally, oral history recordings made by archives and museums were stored on tape, then perhaps digitized, and now are of course recorded digitally initially, often saved in MP3 format for public access.

Descriptive information such as the names of the interviewers and interviewees and interview date, plus keywords or subject headings representing people, places and topics mentioned in the interview may be recorded in a database record along with the digital file name or original physical format. Time permitting, individual passages within recording may be tagged with timestamps and keywords, using a tool such as the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer. 

For researchers interested in finding and listening to oral histories on specific topics or places, they are highly reliant on the descriptive cataloguing, as most search engines don’t have access to transcriptions of the interview. Such transcriptions have traditionally been very time consuming to create, requiring staff or volunteers to carefully listen to each recording (i.e. hours of listening) and accurately type the text into a document.

Fortunately, the current level of machine listening and transcription is such that these hours of work can be outsourced to computers. For recordings where the language is predominantly English and where the speech is clear, the accuracy of the transcribed text is as close to 100% as a human could be performing the same work manually. When the recording has audio artifacts, or the speakers are less clear, the accuracy declines, but again, in the same way a human transcription would be less than perfect. 

For languages other than English, the results vary from language to language, but may still yield searchable results, even if not a perfect word for word transcription.

When a recording has been transcribed to text, that text can then be indexed into and made searchable through a search engine such as our Andornot Discovery Interface. 

Machine transcription of oral history recordings is akin to optical character recognition of digitized print materials, both yielding a large quantity of text that helps users find resources of interest. Further steps can be taken on both these kinds of text to automatically identify the names of people and places within them, which can then be used to limit a search, or to create browsable indexes of terms.

If you have existing oral history recordings, physical or digitized, as well as print materials, that you’d like to make searchable, or make more accessible, contact Andornot to discuss using tools mentioned in this blog post.

Andornot’s 2024 Summer Intern 1 Sep 2024 6:40 AM (7 months ago)

Andornot has a long-standing commitment to professional development and to supporting our colleagues and clients in the cultural heritage sector. We attend trade shows and conferences and sponsor other events either through in-person booths or financial support to help the event proceed. For many years we provided an annual professional development grant to help clients attend conferences themselves.

This year we took on a summer intern, both to assist us with some research and development projects, and to provide some practical tasks and professional guidance to a new graduate. Our intern this year is not a graduate of a traditional library or archival studies program, but rather has just completed a Master of Data Science in Computational Linguistics degree, a field that is burgeoning but also of great interest and applicability to the work that libraries, archives and museums do.

We tasked Jarret with several research projects, including:

• using LLMs such as ChatGPT to improve the output of optical character recognition processes on digitized newspapers;
• using machine learning tools to transcribe oral history recordings to better enable full text searching;
• using named entity recognition tools to identify the names of people and places in digitized newspapers, other documents, and oral history recordings, to allow researchers to browse term lists and refine searches using facets, in addition to full text searching; and
• researching whether any current tools could improve searching of Indigenous language text.

Jarrett’s work on LLMs can be read here, while his work on named entity recognition is available in our blog here. Information on machine transcription of oral history recordings is availabe here.

We are grateful to have had Jarrett’s expertise this summer and will be making use of his research in upcoming projects.

Improving Search Filters with Named Entity Recognition (NER) 1 Sep 2024 6:33 AM (7 months ago)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a valuable tool for identifying names within a text, such as the names of peoples and places. Our summer 2024 intern, Jarrett MacFarlane, explored uses of NER with full text resources that have not been catalogued or described by a librarian or archivist. The intention was to extract names that could be used to filter a search, or to present a browsable index of names, for use in our Andornot Discovery Interface search engine. For the purpose of this project, he worked with local Ontario newspapers dating from the late 19th and early 20th century.

Jarrett developed an NER script which uses the natural language processing (NLP) library spaCy to automatically pick out names from documents. The script can then group similar names that are likely to refer to the same thing, and then can check place names against existing datasets of place names for accuracy. 

Depending on the quality of some historical documents, names may appear in many variations, with misspellings, differing formats, or partial matches. For example, “M. A. Smith,” “Mary A. Smith,” and “Mary A. Srnith” (an OCR error) are likely to all refer to the same person.

Some challenges with performing NER on historical documents include:

• Extracting names from historical newspapers where optical character recognition (OCR) may have introduced errors in spelling due to the poor condition of the original document.
• Ensuring the accurate representation of place names in cultural collections.

Our NER approach addresses these issues by first processing the text using spaCy’s transformer model to extract the names. We can then group together names that are partial matches, or likely to represent the same thing, using a technique called Levenstein distance to identify likely matches. For example, in historical newspapers, “Wm. Hart” would be a common shortening for “William Hart.” Because these two forms of the same name share a lot of letters in common and in the same order, they will have a very close Levenstein distance, which means we can identify them as likely to be the same name and group them together. This allows us to eliminate minor variations in the final name filters, and ideally present the most relevant form of the name for user filtering. For place names, we can check them against external datasets of place names, such as the Canadian Geographical Names Database created by Natural Resources Canada, which includes the Indigenous Place Names dataset. This helps ensure that culturally significant names are properly represented.

Jarrett’s work with NER this summer will appear in upcoming projects with digitized newspaper collections, and is available to be applied retroactively to existing sites powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface.

Burnaby Art Gallery Upgrades Collections Search 16 Aug 2024 7:09 AM (8 months ago)

Andornot has worked with the Burnaby Art Gallery for over 15 years and originally converted data from a legacy system into DB/TextWorks databases used to manage the collections internally. 

A publicly-accessible search interface to the collections was first launched in 2008 using Inmagic WebPublisher PRO software, then was upgraded to the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) in 2012. The Public Art collection was added with some updates in 2015.

Only minor modifications have been made since then, so the site was due for an upgrade to incorporate the latest accessibility and security updates as well as new features that have been added to AnDI.

An upgraded site powered by the current version of AnDI was launched in 2024 at https://collections.burnabyartgallery.ca with a bright and welcoming home page. Images representing areas of the collection invite users to click to browse, while AnDI's search features allow researchers to locate items of interest from the gallery's permanent and art education collections, library, and public art registry, brought together into this single search interface.

As with the recently-upgraded Heritage Burnaby website also powered by AnDI, this site allows users to both search and display Indigenous terms, names, languages and places not only in their Anglicized forms, using Roman letters, but also using the APA or NAPA phonetic character sets. While the underlying DB/TextWorks databases cannot store the necessary characters natively, Andornot developed a means to substitute Roman letters with APA and NAPA phonetic character sets on-the-fly during indexing into AnDI, allowing both versions to be fully searched and displayed. For example, users may search for either Musqueam or ʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and view both terms side by side in all records that formerly contained only Musqueam.

Contact Andornot to discuss upgrades and enhanced features for your own heritage collections.

Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania Upgrades Collections Search 14 Aug 2024 7:24 AM (8 months ago)

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania houses a world-class collection of artifacts, photographs and archival materials representing the extensive and significant history of railroading in Pennsylvania. Their collections range from massive steam locomotives to delicate pieces of dining car china, heavy track tools to fine art, lanterns and marker lights to station signs. Library and archival collections are searchable online through our Andornot Discovery Interface at https://rrmuseumpa.andornot.com.

A reference library is home a wide range of books, periodicals, railroad association and union publications, government documents and trade catalogues.

The library and archival collections are searchable online together through a site built from our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) and hosted by Andornot. Originally built in 2015, the site was upgraded to the latest version of AnDI in 2024.

Anyone interested in Pennsylvania history and railroad history in particular may search by keyword, then narrow their results by aspects of the collection, such as material type, decade, subject, railroad name and other facets such as these.

Features of the search engine such as spelling corrections, search suggestions and relevancy-ranked results also help connect a user with a resource quickly and accurately, and help to account for the many different spellings of railroad names that are found in the database.

At the museum, staff and volunteers use Inmagic DB/TextWorks to manage these databases.

Galt Museum and Archives Upgrades Andornot Discovery Interface 29 May 2024 3:09 PM (10 months ago)

The Galt Museum and Archives in Lethbridge, Alberta uses the Andornot Discovery Interface search engine for their cultural collections at https://collections.galtmuseum.com

Originally launched in 2018, the site was upgraded to the latest version of the Andornot Discovery Interface in 2024.

This modern tool provides features that users have come to expect, including spelling corrections, "did you mean" search suggestions, results ranked by relevancy, and facets to help narrow down the results further, such as by name, topic and date.

Once results are found, a user can save them for later review, share them on Pinterest, Google+ and other social media, or request more information from the museum and archives.

Like many museums and archives, the Galt has for many years managed their collections with Inmagic software. A series of DB/TextWorks databases continue to be home to metadata about the archives, museum artifacts, and a small library. The museum is running the latest version, so has access to many new features, but still within the familiar and easy-to-use interface they are used to.

Contact Andornot to discuss options for better management and searching of your cultural collections.