The BCIT Archives is pleased to announce the launch of our new online search.
Screenshot of BCIT Archives & Special Collections database homepage. ‘Browse by’ and ‘Search’ circled.
This change is exciting for many reasons:
- It allows the BCIT Archives to make all descriptions and digital objects available in one place.
- It allows us to show relationships between records and between records and their creators.
- Researchers now have access to an Advance Search feature which allows for easy filtering of searches and easy adding of additional search criteria.
- Researchers can now easily browse digital objects, subjects, authority records (creators) and archival descriptions.
- There is a ‘Popular this week’ feature that show what other people have been clicking on.
The BCIT Archives will continue to invest time and energy into making more digital objects available as well as describing the textual records in our holdings. At the same time our goal is to provide useful context for all of these materials.
Explore BCIT Archives
Some favorite collections to browse include: The BCIT Historical Photograph Collection and the BCIT Student Association fonds, which includes digitized versions of the BCIT Yearbooks and the Link Newspaper.
The BCIT Archives would like to thank iSchool@UBC Professional Experience student Sarika Kelm for her fruitful time in the BCIT Archives in the summer of 2015. Kelm’s main project while here, was the rehousing, arrangement, and description of the Fernando Vachon series. For access to these, or any other original archival materials in our holdings, please contact the BCIT Archivist.
A note about citing BCIT Archives materials
Screenshot of the file level description of ‘BCIT and its place in education for the Canadian mining industry.’ Nested hierarchy’ and ‘Reference code’ circled.
Whenever crediting BCIT Archives materials as a source please quote the Reference code. The Reference code for all levels of description can be found at the top of each description in the ‘Identity area.’ The Reference code is a neat nested summary of each file or item within a collection, fonds, series or subseries – proceeding from highest level to lowest.
For example, a file level description Reference code of: F01-s02-ss13-f1, would break down as follows: F01 British Columbia Institute of Technology fonds, s02 BCIT Office of the President series, ss13 Subseries Executive presentations, f1 BCIT and its place in education for the Canadian mining industry file. The top left corner of any description you are looking at will display the relationships. You can expand or minimize levels using the triangle icons.
Why this software
The BCIT Archives chose the open source software AtoM for several reasons:
- AtoM was developed under the guidance of the International Council on Archives using international archival standards.
- Starting from archival standards ensured that the end result would be a software that was able to reflect the complex nature of archival records.
- It has an active community of users worldwide.
- This active open source community means that updates are frequent and user-driven.
- And finally, the lead developers on AtoM, Artefactual Systems, are our neighbours, based in New Westminster.
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