Webmaster notes
15 May 2008
A fair amount of work has been done on the site as of late. However, I'm looking for help. I can no longer do this alone or at my own cost. This has become too much to manage for one person. A committee is being formed with the goal of fundraising enough to make the website work for the next five years. If you're interested in assisting in this committee please contact me.
There's currently at least six months of backlogged material to scan and upload, photos, documents and more. After doing some thorough analysis of the site, I've come up with a more accurate quantity of pages, at 10,700 pages.
The goal of this website or mission statement, has been and continues to be:
"To preserve the history of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and create an online archive for army cadets, CIC officers and staff across Canada."
Already this has been achieved, but there is a very long way to go. The daily use by, 1000 visitors per/day, proves it success already. However, there are several important objectives that need to be met in order for the website to be successful:
1 - The site needs to be bilingual. All cadets and staff should be able to learn about our history, in effect, who we are in both English and French. This goal will be expensive but achievable.
2 - Locating and securing by electronic means, photos and documents relative to army cadet history. Photos and documents are scattered across the country in archives, newspaper archives, museums, public libraries, cadets corps, ACSTCs and private collections. The total number is unknown, but realistically there are millions of photos 'out there'. In the National Archives in Ottawa, there is approximately 100,000 to 500,000 pages of documents on disbanded cadets corps alone as well as several thousand photos dating from 1910-65. That is many man-years of work in itself. Many former school corps have archives, trophies and other memorabilia. Wouldn't it be great to digitize everything in one place?
3 - Working with individual cadet corps across the country to create a system where their history, on an annual basis could be maintained. A single corps has several significant events over the course of it's training year: FTXs, Nov 11 Remembrance Day parade, promotions, biathlon and shooting competitions, sports events and of course the ACR. Digital photos are the norm, parents and/or officers take photos as a matter of course. Even just 200 photos in one year, a very conservative estimate, could be sent via CD/DVD or FTP to the history site. There currently 400 active corps x200 photos equals 80,000 digital photos per year. That easy.
Any ideas or suggestions is appreciated and encouraged. If we all work together, this will be a very successful web site.
Francois Arseneault