My Kimberley Walking Tour Work

Rack Card to advertize Walking Tour

Last spring, before birding season, I got wind of a volunteer opportunity where I could use my skills in digital photo editing, databases, and word processing AND learn some local history. I had great fun!

A local senior and the local Museum had gotten funding from the federal New Horizons For Seniors programme to research, write, and publish a walking tour of my city. Seems the group had been working on it for a few months already and was ready to get down to writing the text. There they hit the "Word" wall - how to format text and scanned photos, and work on it at home AND on the Museum computer, which didn't even have MS Word! They were making a valiant effort learning all the software for scanning, photo editing, and word processing - but were beginning to realize the task of digital publishing combined with researching and checking facts was a tad bit bigger than they'd anticipated. Good thing I stepped in.

We tried Open Office on the Museum computer but the logistics and software really didn't work very well for our purposes so we just used the museum computer to view our Word files and scan photos. Fortunately, they had an excellent scanner and accompanying software, a Kodak, and the photos were all 300 px resolution - commercial printing quality.



Old Newspapers
Going through old newspapers is a very time-consuming process. Our small museum doesn't have scanned versions of their documents. Some newspapers are on micro fiche in Victoria.  (Since finishing this project, Google search has done away with their "Timeline" search feature and now, as far as I can tell, old newspapers such as the Calgary Herald, are only available through paid search websites.) So, it is back to actual newspapers, yellowed, dried out and crumbling, bound in large, thickly covered books which must be handled carefully and with cotton gloves.

Wouldn't it be great if there were such a thing as a mobile scanning truck that could go out to all these smaller museums and scan their newspapers. (OR get digital copies of any micro fiches.) You'd need a scanner that worked from above - the big book of newspapers would be lying flat, open and the scanner would move over it. Then just flip the page (carefully) and do the next pass. All that history digitally searchable would be fantastic!

You know, the most frustrating thing about the old newspapers is that they never included the street addresses in their ads. We were trying to figure out exactly where various businesses were in the city centre and get the relative positions of the buildings in the photos we had, but - no addresses back in 1925! Even now, most of the buildings don't have their street number on the building.

With newspapers being chronological, I set up a database containing each item of interest (businesses, in this case) so that when we came across a reference, we could just write in the info on printed pages for each item (with a photo at the top) rather than on scraps of paper, or having to drag out several big books of newspapers looking for one item. But, it didn't work for multiple researchers for whatever reasons.

One troublesome street

Spokane Street, between Wallinger Ave and Deer Park Ave proved problematic. The buildings seemed to shift over the years - two buildings were combined, or two burned down to be replaced by a single building, businesses moved back and forth across the street, etc. 

In the top photo, the buildings on the far left were built later or not shown in the bottom photo. That means this is NOT the same building as the one on the left in the bottom photo.

Photo manipulation to the rescue! I was able to prove, by comparing photos taken at three different times, and matching the shapes, that there were two sets of buildings with similar shapes (a tall one on the left, with a little pup / annex on the right), not just one. This means that the current "Black Forest" business on the corner is in the building on the far left of the top photo, not the building in the bottom photo.


We used this photo for the cover of the walking tour book as shown in the top photo.


Top right photo: To advertize the book, we made up a "Rack Card" to send out to various Visitor Centres. For this, I took a photo I had of my daughter taken at Fort Steele a few years ago, and blended it in to a modern photo of Kimberley's Platzl which some desat and outlining on the left. It looks like you are stepping back in time. Looks good! Don't you think?!

Anyway, after many edits and rewrites, and discussions of what to include, the book was printed in October 2011 and is now available for purchase for $6 at the Kimberley Heritage Museum or Kimberley Chamber of Commerce Visitor's Info Centre.

It features three little walking tours of our city and tells about the businesses, the community facilities, and some of the pioneers and includes maps - also done by me.

Map of Kimberley "Townsite"

MBP Fonds

Here's a screen shot of what I am working on - scanning and archiving family photos - don't ask me why, because I don't really know - because it is there, I guess.

Anyway, I got a database, I am linking the photos to it and posting some on my flickr. Someone may be able to tell me who the unknown people are. If you do, please feel free to post in comments on the flickr page.