EMC Heritage Trust Project Awards for Archeion and Education Heritage Museum in Canada

EMC Corporation announced two Canadian organizations are among the worldwide recipients of the EMC Heritage Trust Project awards. ARCHEION, Ontario’s archival information network, and the the Education Heritage Museum both received grants that will help them boost access to important cultural collections.

To further its Information Heritage Initiative, EMC announced seven organizations from around the world will receive EMC Heritage Trust Project grants this year totaling approximately US$100,000. The Heritage Trust Project awards are given to organizations working on projects designed to protect and improve access to information in communities around the world. This year marks the third anniversary of the Heritage Trust Project. The recipients were chosen from 110 applicants based on factors including the potential size of the audience that would benefit from access to this information, the at-risk status of the information and how beneficial the EMC grant would be for the overall success of the project.

ARCHEION is an online catalogue of descriptions of archival records located in archives, libraries, historical societies and museums across Ontario. It provides Ontario heritage institutions with an easy means of establishing an online presence while offering online users free access to information about Ontario’s rich and diverse archival resources, including diaries, personal accounts, maps, films, photographs, administrative and genealogical records.

ARCHEION currently hosts collection-level descriptions, but is seeking to upgrade its operational platform to provide multi-level descriptions to an expanded range of participants via an open-source archival descriptive software called ICA-AtoM. ICA-AtoM allows for attractive and robust multi-level descriptions and the hosting of digital objects nested within a collection’s contextual hierarchy.

With the support of the EMC Heritage Trust Project grant, ARCHEION will launch a pilot to begin migrating to an ICA-AtoM platform. It will also invite participants with smaller archives throughout the province to a workshop to develop new skills and digital content to promote and advocate on behalf of their holdings. The aim of the workshop is to help these members upgrade their skills so they can fully engage with the exciting possibilities offered by new open-source software, more accessible digitization equipment and the social networking possibilities of Web 2.0 innovations.

The Education Heritage Museum is a joint project undertaken by the Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, and the Lower Vancouver Island Retired Teachers Association Heritage Committee. Since 2005, the Museum has collected, catalogued and displayed invaluable classroom artifacts donated by retired teachers in a searchable database.

On the website – still under development – researchers, students and teachers can download audio files, photographs and images of artifacts dating back to the mid-1800s. Professors can assign students to study various items as part of their course work. Students can then ‘publish’ their histories on the museum’s website. Community museums and archives can access the images and information to augment their own local collections. Museum offerings include a collection of fairy stories from 1881, a slate used by students in the 1920s, a 1915 math game for elementary students, and a health poster from 1945 promoting good bathing habits.

The University and the Lower Vancouver Island Retired Teachers Association will use the EMC Heritage Trust Project grant to scan or photograph approximately 3,000 remaining items to upload to the website. The digitization of these materials has the potential to expand the general public’s understanding of schooling heritage, to preserve aspects of social history that would otherwise be lost, and to improve research and teaching. Educational history has tended to focus on documents depicting political, regulatory and general philosophical movements, which tend not to reflect life in the classroom and how teachers actually taught. This project is significant in that it connects the past world of teachers and their classrooms to today’s future educators.

“We’re excited to have two Canadian organizations receive Heritage Trust Project grants this year,” said Michael Sharun, Managing Director of EMC Canada. “Preserving and protecting information is core to EMC’s business, so it’s gratifying to know we can play a part in ensuring future generations can enjoy and learn from key pieces of our country’s cultural history.”

“Each and every day, organizations around the globe are trying to digitize and preserve cultural and community artifacts for future generations,” said Bill Teuber, EMC’s Vice Chairman.  “This year’s EMC Heritage Trust Project grant recipients share our passion and commitment to capturing their local information heritage and, through these grants, will be better able to share this information with communities around the world.”

The five other recipients
of 2010 Heritage Trust Project grants include:

• Guizhou University, College of the Humanities – Guizhou, China
• Karveer Nagar Vachan Mandir – Kolhapur, India
• WIMSA Digital Library and Equitable Access Project – Windhoek, Namibia
• History Meeting House – Warsaw, Poland
• St. John Fisher College – Rochester, N.Y., USA

Formalized in 2007, the EMC Information Heritage Initiative advances the preservation of humanity’s information heritage and makes historical documents and cultural artifacts readily accessible via the Internet for research and education purposes. Over the last decade, EMC has donated more than $20 million to support numerous information heritage preservation projects for organizations such as Yad Vashem and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

“We’re excited to have two Canadian organizations receive Heritage Trust Project grants this year. Preserving and protecting information is core to EMC’s business, so it’s gratifying to know we can play a part in ensuring future generations can enjoy and learn from key pieces of our country’s cultural history," said Michael Sharun, Managing Director of EMC Canada.

“Each and every day, organizations around the globe are trying to digitize and preserve cultural and community artifacts for future generations. This year’s EMC Heritage Trust Project grant recipients share our passion and commitment to capturing their local information heritage and, through these grants, will be better able to share this information with communities around the world," said Bill Teuber, EMC’s Vice Chairman.