The City of Brantford deserves recognition for its impressive presentation of built and cultural heritage through the Brantford Heritage Inventory. Begun in 2001, the Heritage Inventory has developed into what is now the largest and most ambitious documentation of built heritage in a medium-size municipality in Ontario or even Canada.

The Heritage Inventory is completely web-based and is easily accessible with a high-speed Internet connection. It is intended to make information on local built heritage widely accessible to the public and to the education community. Users are free to download information for their own purposes.

The main objectives of the project were to:

• provide information that establishes the architectural and historical importance of selected properties within the city
• create a highly searchable inventory of properties on a corporate database platform
• integrate Heritage Inventory data with other municipal databases such as Financial Information System (FIS) and Geographical Information System (GIS)
• make the Heritage Inventory available as a public research tool on the Internet

The sheer size of the Heritage Inventory is impressive. The City was divided into eight study areas that roughly followed ward boundaries. The Heritage Inventory now contains almost 7,000 records located in the older areas of the city. This represents roughly 40% of the total number of properties in the city. To date, over 32,500 digital photographs have been taken and are stored in the database.

Additional features include:

• a heritage index
• an architectural glossary illustrated with Brantford examples
• historical maps
• a gallery of historical postcards
• regularly updated links to a wide range of heritage resource information on the Internet.

Jury Comments

The jury was impressed with this web-based tool that enables ready access to a large inventory of buildings. While the jury felt the Heritage Inventory would have benefited from an overall street map, it concluded that the web site was a remarkable and award worthy achievement.

In addition to the above, two further presentations were made this year. We are pleased to acknowledge the following Award of Merit recipients, and we refer you to previous Forum editions for a more complete description of these projects.

HERITAGE COMMUNICATIONS: Award of Merit

HERITAGE COMMUNICATIONS: Award of Merit