About

A library of environmental knowledge

Over the years many high quality reports have been written by experienced researchers about the extraordinary ecosystems on Bowen Island, BC, and throughout the Salish Sea. These documents may live in boxes, attics, and the memories of the people who wrote and read them. After at time, the information can be trapped inside. The Bowen EcoLibrary was created so that these reports could see daylight. We emptied banker boxes and combed through old emails, looked for well data online and compared bespoke GIS layers.

The EcoLibrary is built on a WordPress website using a Brazilian library plugin called ‘Tainacan’. It describes each ‘Item’ with up to 30 metadata points and provides multiple search tools to make it more discoverable. Once found, documents can be opened, compared, analyzed and shared.

Most items consist of something like a PDF and its metadata: title, date, description etc. This gives people using the search system (and AI for those who use it) a structured way to discover information they’ve never seen, or that used to be around and disappeared. This same organization makes it more discoverable by search engines as well.

See the Contribute page for more information about our mission going forward.

This project of the Bowen Island Conservancy was funded by the Sitka Foundation, with our thanks.

Bowen Island Conservancy Tech Team
info@ecolibrary.ca

Project Lead: Jeff Matheson
Designer / Digital Collections: John Dowler
Tech Advisors: Bob Turner, Will Husby, Alan Whitehead