ANA UPDATE

Since early 1994 the ANA Task Force of the Archives Society of Alberta has been developing the Archives Network of Alberta (ANA). The aim is to compile a database of fonds-level descriptions of the archival holdings of all archives in Alberta. The goal of the Task Force is to provide electronic communications capability to all members of the Society and to allow researchers access to the database from any access point in Alberta.

ANA is now at a point where it needs to start expanding by having all archives contribute information to it. It is hoped that archival institutions in Alberta will enthusiastically support the project by adding to it.

Early in 1996 an idea developed to make contributing to the database easier by preparing a template on computer disk, so that inputting would be a matter of just filling in the blanks.

Although the Provincial Archives of Alberta was a member of the ANA Task Force it had not made a very large contribution to the database at that time. With words of encouragement from the other members, particularly Susan Kooyman of the Glenbow Archives and Paddy Lamb of the City of Edmonton Archives, the Provincial Archives agreed to be one of the first to test the template idea.

During the late spring of 1996 the Provincial Archives used the template, which had been developed by Paddy Lamb, to add a few fonds-level descriptions to the few that were already in the database. The template disk was then returned to Paddy, who transferred the data to the database.

The template automatically provides prompts for the Inmagic fields used in the database and eliminates the need to memorize or look up the tag symbols. We found that it indicated the information needed very clearly. It was very easy to use, and the data entry went very quickly.

The template is available from Paddy Lamb. He can be reached at 403-496-8722.