Northwestern Ontario artists build platform to support Oral History and Community Heritage
The Melgund Township Oral History Project Archive began earlier this summer as part of our weekly storytelling club and arts programming, where artists and community members come together to share stories, create, and learn across generations. What started as informal gatherings of voices, drawings, songs, and performances has grown into a dedicated effort to preserve and celebrate the lived history of our township. The archive reflects this spirit of creativity and connection, blending oral histories with interdisciplinary arts practices to ensure that community memory is both preserved and continually reimagined.
This new community history archive is a dynamic digital platform designed to preserve and share the rich, multifaceted history of a local community. Its primary purpose is to serve as a central, publicly accessible repository for a wide range of historical materials that might otherwise be lost over time.
The application provides an engaging, gallery-style interface where visitors can explore collections of photographs, watch oral history videos, and read personal stories. Organizing content into distinct categories and offering a powerful search function, the archive makes it easy for community members, students, researchers, and anyone interested in local heritage to discover and connect with the past. The platform is built to be a living collection, continuously growing as more contributions are added.
The application is structured to capture detailed and meaningful information for each item in the archive. Beyond a simple title and image, each record can include a wealth of contextual data. This includes a detailed narrative or story, the date the event occurred or the item was created, and a list of searchable keywords. To ensure proper attribution and aid further research, the system also records crucial archival metadata, such as the name of the original creator (like a photographer), the person or institution that provided the item, the physical location of the original artifact, copyright information, and the item’s original format (e.g., “Photograph,” “Newspaper Clipping,” or “Video”). This approach ensures that each record is not just a digital object, but a well-documented piece of history.
For administrators and contributors, the application provides a secure, user-friendly backend system for managing the archive’s content. Authenticated users have access to a personal dashboard where they can submit new records through a detailed form, review and edit their previous contributions, and manage the visibility of their items by setting a status to either “Submitted” (private) or “Published” (public). The platform also includes robust system settings, allowing administrators to customize the archive’s public-facing title, manage the predefined lists of categories and languages available for cataloging, and even perform bulk data operations like exporting all records to a CSV file for backup or importing new collections from a spreadsheet. This suite of tools ensures that the archive can be managed efficiently and grow sustainably over time.
You can visit the platform as it grows at: https://melgund.netlify.app
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