Registration for the 2014 Municipal Heritage Forum is now open and we have two fantastic keynote speakers who will present their work as it relates to our theme: New Ideas for Historic Places: Conservation through Technology and Innovation.
Kayla Jonas Galvin is deeply involved in creating social media content. She tweets at @jonaskayla and has her own blog Adventures in Heritage. Kayla works as the Heritage Operations Manager at Archaeological Research Associates where she runs the Twitter (@araheritage), Pintrest (ARAHeritage) and LinkedIn Accounts. She sits on the board of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, which focus on heritage education and advocacy in Ontario. There she is the social media manager for their Facebook and Twitter (@arconserve) accounts and Editor of their ACORN magazine. Her previous employment at the Heritage Resources Centre at the University of Waterloo involved managing their social media and communication, as well as developing Building Stories, a crowd-sourced survey of historic places across Canada.
Kayla will be speaking about how social media can assist in the conservation of local historic sites. Kayla will explain the power of social media to conserve local heritage places and how you can tap into it. She will give a brief introduction to the social media sites of Facebook and Twitter as well as introduce Building Stories, a crowd-sourcing site. Drawing on her experience managing multiple platforms for businesses and not-for- profit organizations she will share practical lessons on how to use each effectively to engage your community.
Larry Laliberté is a librarian with over ten years’ experience working with GIS and spatial data. Currently he is the GIS Librarian at the University of Alberta where much of his work revolves around analyzing and synthesizing spatial information at many scales, across many disciplines, in various formats. Over the last decade, he has developed and maintained an online collection of historical maps of Manitoba and recently, taken a great interest in developing best practices for the long term preservation of digital geospatial data.
Larry’s presentation will focus on how Historical GIS can be used to link collections. Over the past ten years, many historical library collections have been digitized (textual, numerical, photos, maps) and made available online; however, they often exist on standalone platforms isolated from other digital collections. Using the 1913/14 Fire Insurance Plans of Edmonton as an example, Larry’s presentation will highlight how thinking spatially about local digital collections and combining the power of GIS and geovisualization can open up interesting ways of linking collections.
Please join us October 16th and 17th in Lacombe to hear these heritage advocates share their knowledge.
Written by: Rebecca Goodenough, Municipal Heritage Services Officer
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