A new online tool is available to the public to search the City’s archives.

The new public portal will allow the general public to search record aides dating back to the 1880s for Fort William, Port Arthur, and the City of Thunder Bay, along with surrounding areas, which have all been digitized.

This will allow people to look up the City’s corporate history.

Even though the aides had already been digitized, they were only accessible through a program used at the Archives.

Christina Wakefield, an archivist with the City, told Acadia News “the new program has much better search capabilities and is accessible to everyone on the internet.  This unique program also allows us to attach documents to the catalog entries, such as photo thumbnails and pdfs”.

The City Archives is continuing a program to keep archiving more documents and digital items.

Wakefield went on to say that “a majority of our photographs have been digitized and any new photographs we receive are digitized as part of their processing.  Digitizing our written records is a much more involved and time-consuming process as they are much more fragile than photographs.”

They are hoping to add some new equipment as part of the expansion to help with this process, prioritizing the records that are accessed the most and are the most fragile.