December 2009 Update

Season’s Greetings

On behalf of Derek Watts and the rest of the ITCMA committee and project staff – happy holidays to all of the Passage participants. We hope that you have a wonderful and relaxing holiday season, and look forward to working with you in 2010.

New Year, Old Office

For those who haven’t heard, Karin is officially back in the ANSM office on Marginal Road in Halifax. This means that you can track Karin down even more easily. She can be reached at the main ANSM line or toll-free number, her cell, email, and through Skype.

Also, we want to remind anyone who has a link to the old FNSH website that this should be updated to the new ANSM website. This is not something that we can do for you, so please get your webmaster to update the information.

The ANSM office will be closed from December 19^th until January 4^th.

Renewal Contracts

This year’s contracts have been sent out, so keep an eye out for them in your mail. Please sign & return these with payment to ANSM as soon as possible, and note that this year’s deadline for returning the contracts is January 31^st.

CHIN Enrichment Project

The deadline for this year’s CHIN project is January 31^st, so if you haven’t finished adding the enriched information & images to your database and uploaded to Artefacts Canada, now is the time to do it. This year 26 sites are participating, which means that we will have over 500 newly enriched records with images on Artefacts Canada before February. Let us know if you need help fulfilling the funding obligations and getting your records online. We are here to help.

Equipment Purchase

As you all know, we have been working on a bulk purchase of several small pieces of equipment for participant sites. Thank you to everyone who gave us other equipment suggestions as well, since that helps us determine and better meet your needs. Our order has been placed, which means we will be looking at ways to facilitate delivery & introduction of the equipment. Stay tuned in the New Year for more details.

Artefacts Canada Tally

With our CHIN Enrichment Project deadline fast-approaching, we are now seeing enriched records with images being uploaded to Artefacts Canada. 12,314 new records have been uploaded so far this month, giving Passage sites a grand total of 145,104 records on Artefacts Canada.

Here are the new regional stats:

Southwest: 64,736

Central: 34,333

Northeast: 24,901

Cape Breton: 21,134

Congratulations to the Southwest Region for uploading the most records this month. Honourable mentions go to Fort Point Museum and Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame, two new Passage sites who together have almost 6,000 records online.

Blog Polls

This year Karin has asked Santa for one thing – that all the Passage sites will vote in the Loan Management poll at the bottom of the page. Please help make her wish come true.