Who are we?

We are a group of returning post-secondary students who were interested in learning the art of web design.  NVIT's college librarian, Jim Bruce, thought it would be a great summer project, and we felt it was important to digitize and make available the Interior Salish  legends recorded in the works of James Teit.   As well, we felt that this was an excellent opportunity for us to begin archiving local history before the N£e?kepmx culture loses too much.  This work is for our grandchildren and future generations.

For information about our project members, see our teampage.

What did our project involve?

We began our project July 19, 2002.  After scanning the original manuscripts, we began the task of putting the images through "Omni Page Pro" which is an optical character recognition program (OCR) that  distinguishes and reads the text and images that were scanned, and differentiates between the two.  The text was broken into viewable "chunks" which were saved as MS Word documents.  After seemingly endless files were created doing this, the text was transferred to Netscape Composer for html coding and moved to our preview site for testing.  Further additions and modifications required a new project, and work continued off and on for almost two more years.  This is indeed an extensive project, as anyone viewing it will determine.

Elders were consulted about Teit's work, and project members went out to the sites to capture them.  Armed with a digital camera, a hand-held recorder, and informed consent forms, we sought out Elders from the nearby community to assist us in our project.  We found them to be warm, generous, and deeply caring about our project.  Some even remembered James Teit, which was incredibly lucky for us.

As well, Sigurd Teit, James Teit's last surviving son, gave us permission to view material that Teit recorded.  During the summer, through the Nicola Valley Museum Archives Society, we met with Sigurd,  which proved to be very informative and interesting.  He had some stories to tell of his father; however, his father passed away when he was seven, leaving but a few memories.  Sigurd sat on the board of the Nicola Valley Museum & Archives, and continued to play an active part in the legacy of his father.  It is with great sadness to inform you of his passing on  November 5, 2002.
 

Sigurd Teit, March 7, 1915 - November 5, 2002