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2006

2006: Headlines, Hotlinks and Historic Places: Heritage in an Electronic Age

2006 Conference proceedings (PDF)

Ottawa’s old train-station-turned-conference-centre was the site of our October annual conference. The three-day event focused on new technologies for sharing information and raising public awareness of conservation issues. They included the digital reconstruction of buildings, creation and management of inventories and registers, rehabilitation project management, practical information on promoting conservation through web and internet communications, and how to work with the media.

The 200 delegates—who ranged from planners, architects, educators and curators to students, volunteers and advocates—were inspired by keynote speaker Elizabeth May, former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. In her energetic talk on “Why Heritage Matters,” Ms. May said that many of the tools and strategies used to move the environmental movement from the fringes to the national stage can be adopted by the heritage conservation sector. Knowing how to “tell your story” builds relationships, grabs media attention, influences politicians and “turns people around to your point of view.” (For highlights of Elizabeth May’s keynote address, turn to page 40.)

Gilles Morel, director of the Société de développement de Montréal, introduced the highly successful Old Montréal website. The site provides “one stop shopping” for a varied audience while promoting the historic quarter to potential visitors. In 2005-6, it topped one million hits! The site is packed with practical content: parking maps for tourists, area tours, a timeline of its history, a photo gallery, an important architectural inventory, a guide to renovation and restoration work, and much more. Another web-based tool was presented by Dr. Adriana Davies of Alberta’s Heritage Community Foundation. The Alberta Online Encyclopaedia is a new tool for public engagement and heritage dissemination. It has had more than 1.5 million site visits that lasted longer than 20 minutes. Dr. Davies stressed that digital resources are good vehicles for demonstrating the relevance of collections, historic buildings, landscapes and other heritage resources while also providing enormous scope for partnerships—both private and public. (See www.vieux.montreal.qc.ca and www.albertasource.ca.)

The full conference program included sessions on preservation planning using computer “visualization tools” and on heritage management using electronic repositories. Delegates were impressed with a range of case studies from in-motion height controls to protect historic views in the nation’s capital to a systematic maintenance database for Winnipeg’s heritage property to an award-winning inventory system developed for 7,000 heritage buildings in Brantford, Ontario.

Representatives from the conservation movement in Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States discussed the value of developing registers of national heritage places and compared similar problems each faced in digitizing inventories. Launched in 2003, the Canadian Register of Historic Places—a listing of sites from across Canada recognized by federal, provincial, territorial and local governments—has 6,000 listings, with 20,000 expected by 2014.

The Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) in Ottawa took front place for its amazing digital reconstruction of Montréal’s boulevard Saint-Laurent, commonly known as “The Main.” The significance of an evolving streetscape focuses on the relationship between people and place—a relationship that is difficult to capture using traditional methods of heritage recording. The CIMS technology transported delegates to “The Main”—a designated national historic site—using an interactive, immersive 360-degree digital environment as seen from the pedestrian’s perspective. This interdisciplinary studio, with members from the fields of architecture, industrial design, information technology, electrical engineering and cultural studies, works to integrate content production and applied technical research.

The management of large heritage portfolios, particularly those owned by federal government departments like Public Works and Government Services Canada and the Department of National Defence, was examined in a plenary session led by Julie Harris, principal of Content Works Inc., and was followed by a round table discussion with government representatives. A huge inventory of post-WWII federal buildings still need to be evaluated for their heritage significance, yet we lack a long-range real property management policy that includes sound protection and commitment to reuse. Challenges include providing managers of federal heritage properties with the tools they need to protect heritage character, address the shortfalls in Treasury Board Policy, and sustain the growing federal heritage portfolio.

The HCF annual conference also offered a half-day preservation planning mobile workshop focused on four geographic clusters of heritage planning activity, and a series of walking tours of historic Ottawa—including the Byward Market area. HCF would like to thank all who contributed to the insightful discussions that helped to shape the conference program and those who willingly shared their knowledge and their passion at the Ottawa event.