Welcome

Wish You Where Here - Saskatchewan Postcard Collections

"Main Street. Gravelbourg. Sask."
[19--?]

The purpose of this site is to provide historians and "ferrophiliacs" with an alternative tool to assist with image research. In a single window, it displays in a compact and uniform style the basic information for the railway-related images available online at major Canadian archive institutions. The presentation mimics indexed photo albums. All the images are sourced directly from the relevant archive's server, at the best resolution available whenever it is appropriate. Users can then simply peruse each image in turn without having to jump back and forth between search-form, search-results, description and image-download pages.

This project arose out of our efforts to help an archivist correct the titles of certain railway records. Questions like "Haven't I seen a better or related version of this image somewhere else?" often occurred. Or, on a more problematic level, "Isn't the caption at variance with another institution's posting or the published literature?" Or, more fundamentally, "Is this caption correct?"

Archivists are first to acknowledge that they are not historians. It's not their mandate to be all-knowing on all subjects. Rather, they document, preserve and make items available to researchers. Imagine how daunting it is to have an estate donate an ancestor's shoe box of old photos. Archivists are then pretty much at the mercy of whatever is scribbled on the face or back side of the original photo, or on the envelope the item came in, etc. And that's if they are lucky! Then there are instances when volunteers are called upon to assist with the documentation. In a true story related to us, one such volunteer turned out to be dyslexic! Needless to say, the resulting records were rather confusing. Moreover, there are occurrences of simple human errors when captions and keywords are mistyped or omitted, rendering the associated records invisible to any "obvious" search attempt.

This site offers a straightforward, uniform and compact way of perusing these railway-related online images. For each institution, any given record is linked to its immediate neighbours in accordance with their reference codes sorted in ascending order. Moreover, users can bookmark any particular record so as to make it a simple matter to continue any interrupted viewing session. A clipboard mechanism is also provided, allowing a researcher to add and remove references to records of interest across all the archives. Finally, if a user's browser is HTML5 compliant, than the image records can also be annotated locally.

The presentation requires JavaScript be enabled for total functionality. All bookmarks, clipboarded records, annotated entries and access logs rely on calls to the IndexedDB API for retention between viewing sessions. Note that legacy code is in place to transfer your previous site cookies and the content of your local storage automatically to the database.

So be very selective at least when clearing your data via the browser itself or third party cleaners. For a protracted research period, might we suggest installing a different browser and dedicating its use to this site. Finally, as with many presentations involving frames, users always face the problem of having a compact presentation turn into an overcrowded one. Thus, this site was developed with a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. Using anything less is not recommended. The one-window-for-everything was a mandatory design principle for this site.

Explorations

In this section, we take a closer look at certain topics that have particularly caught our attention. Various videos, images from public archives and our collection are brought together with any extracts from the literature in order to provide the historical background. If any conflicts in the facts are encountered, attempts are made to resolve the contradictions as best possible.

Controls

Various clickable icons appear throughout this presentation. Below is a summary, grouped according to their associated functionality:

Selection
= View this Record
Displays the selected/associated record. Appears in the top left frame and will appear in the bottom right frame as part of a listing of either search results, the clipboard content, annotated records or the update history display.
= View Previous Record
Displays the previous record in an archive's list in accordance with the lexically ascending order of the record numbers.
= View Next Record
Displays the next record in an archive's list in accordance with the lexically ascending order of the record numbers.
= View First Record
Displays the first record in an archive's list in accordance with the lexically ascending order of the record numbers.
= View Last Record
Displays the last record in an archive's list in accordance with the lexically ascending order of the record numbers.
The aforementioned icons will appear with a different background colour whenever their links point to records that have been previously viewed. This tracking of viewed records is locally based and will only persist between viewing session as long as the browser's site data is retained. You can always view and delete some or all of the contents of the site's IndexedDB storage unit. It is named "Idb4Portal" and can always be inspected at any moment via the browser's developer tools.
= Auto-view Previous Records (1 sec. delay)
Activates fast automatic display of the previous records in sorted order. The viewing delay is set at approximately one second. However, rendering times can vary as it depends largely on the archive server's current CPU load and the user's download speed.
= Auto-view Next Records (1 sec. delay)
Activates fast automatic display of the next records in sorted order. The viewing delay is set at approximately one second. However, rendering times can vary as it depends largely on the archive server's current CPU load and the user's download speed.
= Stop Auto-viewing
Cancels the current auto-viewing mode. It will replace the auto-view icon that was clicked on previously. Note that one can change direction by simply clicking on the opposite auto-view icon.
= Printer Friendly Page
Displays the basic information of the currently viewed image record in a new window/tab that is suitable for printing.
= View Full Size Image
Displays the high resolution version on the current image in a separate window/tab. Available only for some records.
= View Location on Map Below
Intra-document jump to a map showing the location of the item displayed. Available only for some records.
Bookmarks
= Bookmark Record
Sets an internal link to the archive record currently being viewed. The archive panel will be refreshed to reveal an additional button in the form where xxxxx denotes the reference code of the bookmarked record: clicking the latter button will display this record. Bookmarking any other record from the same archive will replace any current one: useful when simply perusing one record after another over multiple sessions.
= Cancel Bookmark
Replaces the above bookmark icon whenever the associated record is being viewed. Clicking this button deletes the bookmark. The archive panel will then be refreshed in order to remove the button for the bookmarked record.
Clipboard
= Add Record to Clipboard
Updates the clipboard with the corresponding record number of the associated archive. The archive panel will be refreshed in order to update the clipboard button , where nnn denotes the number of records currently help by the clipboard: useful when researching a topic and marking all the records of interest from various archives.
= Remove Record from Clipboard
Replaces the above clipboard icon whenever the associated record is being viewed. Clicking this button removes the clipboard. The archive panel will then be refreshed in order to update the record count.
Notes
= Annotate a Record
Pops up a frame allowing the user to add a local annotation to a record. This feature is only available for HTML5-compliant browsers. It again utilizes the IndexedDB feature of a browser. Thus all notes will persist as long as the user doesn't clear their user data. Whenever a note is created or deleted, the archive panel will be refreshed in order to update the notes button , where nnn denotes the number of annotated records.
= Edit Annotation
Replaces the above annotation icon whenever the associated record has an existing note.
Basic controls for managing a note.
Search
= View Update History
Lists the new or modified records for the corresponding archive. These are shown grouped in reverse chronological order.
= Show Matching Keywords
Occurs only within the search panel. It displays all the keywords that match the selected first character (case insensitive).
Frames
= Collapse Frame
Allows the listing of search results, clipboard, annotated and updated records to be minimized. The height of the frame will be reduced to a preset minimum height.
= Expand Frame
Allows the listing of search results, clipboard, annotated and updated records to be maximized. The height of the frame will be expanded to a preset maximum height.
= Go to Frame Top
Scroll the contents of a frame back to the top.