Kempleel blog 7: Acadian Heartland

Acadian Heartland: Records of the Deportation and Le Grand Derangment, 1714-1768 is a project by the Nova Scotia archives to digitize a number of their records with regards to the political situation and eventual expulsion of the Acadian French from Canada after Britain took over the region in the early 18th century. This subject is surprisingly obscure in the modern United States history curriculum, though doubtless given far more attention in Canada.

Collection Principles: "this Website presents documentation which began as primary records, written down at the time and preserved in the years afterwards; these documents provide a factual account of events leading up to the Expulsion, first-hand descriptions of the Expulsion itself, and additional relevant documents from the aftermath years." They also claim to have the largest digital collection of archival sources for this subject/period.

Object Characteristics: For the largest digital collection, they only have five digital books, all of which were published more than a century after the period (although the first few books are reprints of much older records). They were all scanned with corrected OCR, and are full-text searchable. No images of the original pages are viewable, just the text. There is also a collection of images relating to the period, including portraits of major players and a lot of romantic engravings used to illustrate the poem "Evangeline." The text is presented in pages, a similar format to JSTOR, and the images can be enlarged from a thumbnail, but do not otherwise have a particularly stellar resolution. There is even a map, of old Acadie, but you have to download viewpoint mediaplayer to view it.

Metadata: Presumably, all the materials are held by either the Nova Scotia archives, the progenitors of this project, or their allies the Nova Scotia’s Office of Acadian Affairs and the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. The books are sited as sources, but are not cataloged for where they may be found in a collection. Image metadata is more inclusive but still fairly sparse, detailing the artist/progenitor, the date, the medium, and the collection they are housed in.

Intended Audience: The website mentions the archives desire to bring these somewhat obscure documents to a wider audience. I'm sure that given the popularity of genealogy projects, there are probably many Acadians in North America who might wish to utilize this, as well as students of early North American history. The website lists many, many links to other web sources of information about the period.