Thanks to funding through the Digital Access to Heritage component of Canadian Heritage’s Museums Assistance Program (MAP), the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum has been able to take significant steps toward digitizing its collections holdings. In August of 2023, we shared details on the successful completion of our blueprint scanning project, which was the first step in our larger goal of digitizing the museum’s expansive collections and archives.
From September through to the end of December 2023, we welcomed two Digitization Assistants to our team. They both played a key role in supporting our digitization goals by creating and maintaining digital images and metadata of artifacts in the museum’s collections. The project planning commenced with each Digitization Assistant taking on a list of around 1,000 objects, arranged into sub-groupings by the year they were donated to the museum.
The Digitization Assistants worked through their lists to locate each item and update the description of the object recorded in our database, adding new researched descriptions for any that were missing. Following this, they photographed each object from at least two different perspectives and edited the images ensuring both accuracy and quality. Our Curator tracked progress each week and coordinated translation of the object titles and descriptions into French, to ensure the records can be accessible for bilingual audiences. After three months, we had updated and photographed a total of 2,000 3-D objects. Finally, a new collections search was integrated into our website, allowing the public to view many of these artifacts for the first time.
As Canada’s Cold War Museum, we aim to increase interest in, and provide a critical understanding, of Canada’s Cold War story. Thank you to the Digital Access to Heritage component of MAP for supporting us in this digitization project to preserve and share important stories told by the Cold War artifacts held within our collections.
Interested in taking a closer look at Canada’s Cold War history? You can now search through the Diefenbunker’s extensive list of 3-D artifacts by using our new online collections database. We invite you to learn more about specific items in our collections, spanning between 1945 and 1991!
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