Saskatchewan Council for Archives and Archivists

As part of the SCAA's mission to promote the use of Archives, we have maintained the Saskatchewan Archival Information Network (SAIN), with the help of the University of Saskatchewan. SAIN initially was established in 2000 and has gone through many transformations since. It is a network of information about archival holdings in Saskatchewan and currently consists of two databases, one containing descriptions of archival collections and the other descriptions and digital scans of photographs in our members' collections. One of the most significant transformations was the deployment of the software platform "Access to Memory" or AtoM. This piece of software is open-source, developed by Artefactual Systems in British Columbia, and has been implemented by most provinces and territories including Archives Canada at the national level. AtoM allows our members to directly enter their descriptions into the database, without minimal help of SCAA staff. The AtoM software also has the ability to handle all the differing levels in archival description making SAIN a powerful research tool. This ability has made it possible to merge SCAA's two databases into one. In late 2019, SCAA, in partnership with the U of S and Artefactual, undertook the process of merging the two databases of SAIN into one. The merger project was concluded at the end of March 2020 and the new "MemorySask - SAIN" merged database was to be publicly launched but, due to the COVID-19 outbreak had to be postponed. The University of Saskatchewan's IT staff, who host the database, have been dealing with other priorities since that time and therefore, SCAA and U of S have made temporary hosting arrangements with Artefactual. This has allowed members to begin to contribute to the new database and can help facilitate some of our members to work from home. We are now looking to mid to late September for the public launch of MemorySask - SAIN. This will allow the public to conduct research and searches of the full content of both databases at once, including the ability to search within different photograph collections. Please watch this website for further news on this project.