The Hazelton Pioneer Museum
~ Hazelton Oral Histories Project Now Available on Arca ~
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What was it like to live in "The Hazeltons" in the 1950’s?...
Listen to Daisy Stokes talk about making birch syrup in the Kispiox Valley; “forty gallons of sap for 1 gallon of syrup,” says Daisy. It was great on pancakes...
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..or listen to June Nash, a mill worker’s daughter from Telkwa, recall moving out on her own after grade 10 to work as a cook at the Prince Rupert Bus Depot. For her interview she baked “an apple pie, a raisin pie, and a lemon pie,” and was hired on the spot. |
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Stories like these capture a rich depiction of everyday life in the Hazelton region and allow us to hold on to our shared history, to remember how things have changed and how some things stay the same--like the memory of a great slice of pie.
The “Hearing Hazelton History” oral histories project was originally undertaken from 1960-1990. The audiocassette collection captures residents and elders describing their lives and memories from an earlier time in BC's history. Interviews were collected from a region within a 50-kilometer radius of Hazelton, BC.
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Preparing the Hazelton Oral Histories Project used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to transcribe several type-written interview images into machine-readable text.
Scroll down to the Arca Administrators' Corner to learn more about OCR
and why it could be important to your collections!
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Arca Shared Site Program for BC ELN Partner Libraries |
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In spring, BC ELN surveyed partner libraries not currently participating in Arca to understand what barriers to participation these organizations might be experiencing. Several smaller partner libraries expressed interest in a shared repository, and the idea was brought to the Arca Advisory Committee for discussion.
The Committee approved a motion to build a shared site that will be launched later this year. It will offer smaller BC ELN partner libraries a low-cost option to participate in Arca, reflecting Arca’s vision “to seek opportunities to strengthen and build new partnerships, and build a community of practice that extends expertise, nurtures innovation, and cultivates collaboration”. This new initiative will bring all the benefits of our collaborative digital repository to partner libraries that might otherwise be unable to participate due to limited resources or small collections.
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YukonU: Circumpolar Research Comes to Arca |
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Located in beautiful Whitehorse, Yukon University is an innovative northern university serving 680 full-time students. Founded in 1963, the institution has evolved well beyond its origins as a technical college, becoming a hub, not just for higher education and training in Northern Canada, but also for important research on climate change. The Arca Office recently caught up with Nora Hehemann, Systems/Metadata Librarian at Yukon University to chat about “YukonU” and their new Arca partnership.
Yukon University has long been a member of the BC Electronic Library Network, but their decision to partner with Arca was initially spurred on by a mandate requiring any research supported by the Tri-Council to be made open-access. The Tri-Council are the three main federal agencies that provide funding for the distinctly northern questions the YukonU Research Centre is known for investigating. As Hehemann explains, “There is a lot of climate change research that gets done up here, biodiversity monitoring, and permafrost research; that circumpolar research we do in the Yukon is very unique, and the more open-access we can make it, the further we can disseminate that information.”
Beyond ecology and earth sciences, YukonU’s circumpolar research is uniquely grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, being guided by its very own Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge, Daqualama Jocelyn Joe-Strack, whose role is to uphold Indigenous values and practices throughout YukonU’s research, training, and knowledge sharing. Drawing on this commitment, the university is home to many valuable records and artifacts of Yukon First Nations that may soon be
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visible to a wider audience thanks to Arca. Among the items scheduled for the repository are historical broadcasts by Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon (NNBY) that depict many of the Indigenous self-governance activities that have occurred throughout Yukon’s history, including pivotal speeches and the ratification of self-governance documents which, as Hehemann explains, serve as valuable historical and educational resources for their students. Their Arca site could also one day be home to a rare, yet-to-be-digitized Inuit comic book, student theses, and other open educational resources.
It is clear that Hehemann is passionate about creating access to the wealth of resources that Yukon University has to offer. It is still early days for Yukon University’s Arca site, but with the unique and innovative activities taking place, their repository will certainly be host to some very impactful resources for students and researchers locally and abroad. “With the investment and expansion of online learning, the ability to have an open access repository is very important for those online learners. And also, for the type of research that is being done at the university, people globally being able to access that research is very important--it’s sort of closing a gap in a way,” remarks Hehemann.
For Yukon University, Arca membership represents a new step forward for open education, access, and fostering stronger partnerships within Western Canada’s institutional network. “Arca just made sense because it ties us in with all the institutions in BC," says Hehemann. "I think what’s exciting is the potential that the repository has. It is very flexible to work with, and also just being able to tell people we have this digital portal you can access and there is all this great stuff on it, and as the University expands, the uses for the repository will expand as well.”
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BCHDP Support Service Success |
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The first year of the BC ELN-BCHDP Support Service offered vital support to prospective BC History Digitization Program (BCHDP) grant applicants seeking to bring their unique collections online. Currently in its second year of a three-year pilot, the program provides small GLAM sector organizations with a range of support services to help them prepare and apply for BCHDP grant funding. This year, the BCHDP Support Service team worked with 24 organizations, resulting in nine supported grant applications for the 2022/23 BCHDP grant cycle. Of those nine, eight applications were successful!
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BCHDP Funding Recipients
Alder Grove Heritage Society
Alert Bay Public Library
BC Forest Discovery Centre
BC Society for the Museum of Original Costume
Centre for Socialist Education
North Vancouver District Public Library
Selkirk College
Tofino Clayoquot Heritage Museum
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Arca Administrators' Corner |
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Correcting OCR Errors with OpenRefine
The Hazelton Oral Histories Project (see top) contains many typewritten records of interviews with locals. Converting these documents to a machine-readable format is important because it allows a document to be electronically edited, searched, and stored more compactly. Digitization increases a researcher's ability to search collections and make those important correlations.
For Arca Administrators, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can be incredibly useful for electronically converting images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. However, transcriptions often contain inaccuracies that can be labour-intensive to correct. To aid in this process, the Arca Office suggests using OpenRefine, a powerful open-source tool for working with messy data. It can be used to correct OCR errors more efficiently than by manually replacing individual words.
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Arca Site Statistics
January 1-June 30, 2022
Most searched keyword:
MSW (Masters of Social Work)
16,614 visits / 35,422 searches / 60,634 unique pageviews
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Interested in hosting your collections in Arca?
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