Thursday, February 11, 2010

BUILT HERITAGE RESEARCH DATABASE ONLINE

The University of Waterloo’s Heritage Resources Centre has developed the Canadian Built Heritage Research Inventory. It is a "work-in-progress" database highlighting research on built heritage in Canada. The site is searchable, interactive and flexible. The public is invited to contribute annotations or commentaries on the titles found and are encouraged to make suggestions about new information that should be on the inventory.

New titles and annotations received from users will be added to the database.

Searches can be made by author, title, keyword, reference type or all fields. Reference type includes books, conference proceedings, dissertations, laws, journal article, magazine article, newspaper article, and web page.

The data base is available online at: http://fesdevtest.uwaterloo.ca/hrcresearch/index.php

While currently there are non-Canadian titles included the eventual goal is for this site to provide primarily Canadian sources that are not easily found on other databases such as the US National Trust for Historic Preservation, or the Getty Institute.

The inventory is growing, and to date includes 775 titles from a broad range of sources. However, the Heritage Resource Centre is looking to broaden the scope of resources in the inventory. Does anyone in the Canadian heritage community have references to share? Do you know of any recent Canadian research published? Please send it to hrcinfo@uwaterloo.ca.

The work so far is a result of a combined effort involving several players. The Heritage Canada Foundation (HCF) has been a forum over many years for discussions on education in heritage. Since its 2007 Conference in Edmonton the HCF has sponsored a Roundtable on heritage education. There has been an ongoing effort to coordinate heritage education activity across the country. The University of Waterloo's Heritage Resource Centre took on the responsibility of assembling this research inventory or database. In this effort the HRC has been supported by funding from the Canadian Forum for Public Research on Heritage a SSHRC Strategic Cluster Project administered by l'Institut du patrimoin, University of Quebec at Montreal.

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