How to Use This Site

This archive is meant to be a place to store and display the history of shelters in Alberta. Various documents from a variety of areas and perspectives are available for the public to view. Below is a brief description of how to use and explore this website and its items.

Items

When you click on an item, you will see all its related metadata. More information on what each piece of metadata refers to down below.

In addition, you will see all the Item Sets the item belongs to, which refer to the collections that the item is a part of. You can click on a Item Set to see all related items, or go to Collections to see all items connected by a theme. Items sets will also provide information of which sets are a part of of other collections.

You can also click on the item itself near the bottom of the page to view it in full.

Browse

The Browse function is used to sort through all items or specific collections of items. For a more detailed search, you can click on Advanced Search at the top of the page. Here you can search by tags, item sets, and other properties of items such as title, date, and class of item. This website uses Dublin Core and so it might be most useful to use Dublin Core properties for searching through items.

You can also use the Search bar at the side of the page to search through all the items on the website. For example, if you type in "children", it will show a list of pages that have children related to them, as well as a list of items that have children related to them. You can try this with a variety of terms.

To Browse through all items, go to Browse All Items.

Collections

Collections are groups of items collected into a similar theme. For example, the Children and Youth collection has a variety of items pertaining to children and youth, particularly as it relates to family violence and child welfare. If you have a specific topic you are interested in exploring, collections are a good place to start.

For a more in-depth description of each collection and its sub-collections, go to Collections.

Metadata

Metadata is data that provides further information about the data within this site and is used to organize materials according to a particular standard. Below you will find detailed descriptions of what each piece of metadata means with examples.

Metadata Element	Example	Description
Title	Danger Assessment Medicine Wheel	Title or name given to the item.
Description	Danger Assessment worksheet with Medicine Wheel framework.	A short description of the contents of the item will help you to know whether or not the item will meet their needs before they open it.
Type	Text	The broad nature of the item (e.g. Text, Image, Video)
Date		This is not the date the item was added to the archive, this is the date on which the item was created or the date the event the item is about took place etc.
Creator	Campbell, Jacquelyn	Person/People or entity primarily responsible for creating the item.
Contributor	An interviewee	Person or entity that contributed to the item (can have multiple).
Rights & Rightsholder	Copyright The Silent Witness Project	Only filled in if the item’s copyright is held by someone other than the ACWS
Format	PDF	The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the item.
Extent	2 pages	Size or duration of the item.
Language	eng	Language of the item, entered using the ISO 639-2 three letter language code (See the full list).
Spatial Coverage	Edmonton, AB Canada	The location where the subject of the item is from, or where the event the item discusses took place; items may have more than one location field, indicate which location represents who/what.