July 2009 Update

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee met on July 30^th for it’s quarterly meeting. On the agenda was the usual staff & project reports (including feedback obtained from the partners during site visits), the upcoming SDI proposal, and a review of the finances. The PSC is pleased to report that we are on budget, and are ahead of schedule in meeting our SDI deliverables for the year. The interim SDI report has been posted to the blog for those who are interested in reading it.

Site Visits

Karin visited 11 sites in July, in 3 of the 4 regions. She was also a CMAP evaluation team leader, which meant a few more days on the road assisting with this very important program.

CHIN Enrichment Project

This year’s enrichment project, formerly known as “Made in NS” has officially started. As you’ll remember, we are focusing on art objects this year, following the Chenhall sub-category. This includes paintings, prints, sculptures, carvings, drawings, sketches, Christmas tree ornaments, among other things. Jen Bawden, one of our research assistants from last year, is heading things up, and Anna Fitzgerald is this year’s research assistant. Anna comes to us from NSCAD University and is thrilled to be able to offer her expertise on art objects in your collections.

The girls need to know as soon as possible what objects you’d like to learn more about and then showcase on Artefacts Canada, so now is the time for you to select your 20 items and email Jen the list of accession numbers. You can pick more than 20 items if you want, and following is a short list of things that we’d like to see showcased this year:

1. portraits of early settlers & prominent Nova Scotians
2. paintings and prints of the Nova Scotia landscape
3. sketches & drawings of local buildings, ships, events etc
4. folk art of all shapes and sizes

We’re all very excited to see what you come up with, and look forward to showing the world our artistic side.

Data Cleaning (aka Lynn’s work)

As you all know by now, Lynn has moved to Ontario and so will no longer be working on data cleaning for us. But before she left, another 3 sites and 2978 records were cleaned.

Data Entry Support (aka Melanie’s work)

Melanie is still working away on Queen’s County Museum’s records, and is almost at the half-way mark.

Artefacts Canada Tally

As anticipated, with seasonal sites open and the Passage game plan in full swing, we are seeing a big increase in the rate of uploading. This month we made an upload record, with a whopping 16,943 records going online. That means that we now have a grand total of 103,717 records on Artefacts Canada!

Here are the current regional standings:

Southwest: 36,590

Central: 28,518

Northeast: 20,204

Cape Breton: 18,405

Congratulations to the Southwest Region for uploading the most records this month and reclaiming the top spot!

Blog Polls

We are still waiting to hear back from many on you about who is doing your data entry work. If you haven’t already, please check out the poll at the bottom of the page and tell us if Staff, Students, Volunteers, or a combination of these are working with the database. This information will be crucial to the Steering Committee as it plans future delivery and support methods.