City of Edmonton Archives launches new website

The City of Edmonton Archives gave a heads up it has a new website that will be officially launched at city hall during Alberta Archives Week on Thursday, October 4, at 3:30 p.m. Archivists will be at the launch with tablets to demonstrate how to navigate the site.

The new website, which is a re-design of the old one, includes an online catalogue and what is described as a “powerful search engine.” The announcement indicated the online catalogue has finding aids about the collection, photographs, and digitized documents, although I couldn’t find anything marked, catalogue.

To browse historical photos, select Digital objects.

A guide on how to use the site explains how easy it is to search for digital items, and it is worth a quick review.

Until now, a large portion of the archives’ catalogue was only available to archivists, but that is changing with the new site. (Still, I have no idea where the online catalogue is.)

“Our goal is to have catalogue entries on items available to the public,” said Elizabeth Walker, Edmonton’s digital archivist. “This means people will be able to browse for themselves and not rely so much on an Archivist finding material for them.”

The website also hosts searchable scans of Edmonton’s current bylaws.

Overall, the website is clean looking and rather easy to navigate. The home page, however, looks like it is still under construction.

Improvements required
Moving forward, it would be useful to see a What’s New section and Featured sections on the home page, along with a link to the online catalogue. A filter in the left-hand margin to select a time frame or decade would also help reduce the number of results to a manageable amount.

The Quick Links in the top right corner of the home page are useless for the average researcher or genealogist and should be removed. Perhaps these links are in development.

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3 Responses to City of Edmonton Archives launches new website

  1. Ruth Ford says:

    I’m pretty sure by catalogue, they just mean database, not that there’s something separate.

  2. Thanks for posting this, Gail! My father was born in Edmonton, to American parents. My grandfather was serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later to become the U.S. Air Force) and was stationed at a military base there. I am hoping to find more information about that base for my family history.

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