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Success Stories
The Fortress of Louisbourg: A Virtual Tour of Cape Breton
If
you’ve ever imagined what life was really like in Canada’s early days,
The Fortress of Louisbourg is a magical web site that transports
you to the 18th century for a virtual tour of one of Cape Breton's most
beautiful tourist attractions. The federal government began the reconstruction
of the Fortress in 1961 to provide work for unemployed coal miners and
turn Louisbourg into a living history museum. Today it is the largest
historic reconstruction in North America.
The project was carried out under contract to Industry Canada’s SchoolNet Digital Collections program, which gives people 15 to 30 years of age entrepreneurial and technology-based job experience converting collections of Canadian material into digital form for display on SchoolNet. The SchoolNet Digital Collections web site has grown to become possibly the largest single source of Canadian content on the Information Highway.
This past summer a team of young people brought the story of The Fortress of Louisbourg into the 20th century by placing it on the Information Highway for the enjoyment and education of Canadians across the country. Project manager Joan Cunningham said many positive things came out of this experience. "Every team member developed web design skills and gained confidence working with Internet technology," said Cunningham. "At the end of the project, they were proud of their achievement."
Cunningham explained that the quest for historical accuracy was the biggest challenge facing the team. "The Fortress staff were very generous with their time on this project," she said. "They supplied between four and five on-site historians to edit our work. The team learned how to work meticulously, with tight deadlines." Cunningham said that every article went through five to seven edits, and team members often had to start over in the interests of getting the story exactly right. "No one really minded," she said. "We knew at the outset that this had to be perfect, and we were determined to do a good job."
The attention to detail comes through loud and clear, from the delicate images of the fleur-de-lys background to the carefully scripted stories of pioneer life. Cunningham explained that above all, the team wanted the web site to be interesting. There’s something for everyone; you can search the Parish Genealogy records for your ancestors or sample colonial recipes for a typical meal or explore the Fortress through the interactive map.
There’s also humour and an obvious enjoyment of the task at hand. The team members, who take a bow at the end of the site, appear cheerfully decked out in 18th century dress. They include Danielle Boone, researcher and translator; Matthew MacNeil, programmer and system maintenance; Lisa Cleary, researcher; Caitrian MacNeil, artist, image editor and researcher; Chris Lahey, researcher and image editor; and Joe Ward, genealogy editor.
Jamie Bonaparte, programmer, image editor and researcher, summed up the advantages of his experience with this SchoolNet Digital Collections project in these words: "I recently had an e-mail from a computer professor at Dalhousie who had heard about this project. Not only did he mention that he may use some forms of this "problem-based learning", but he also offered me a job!".
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