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When Stephen Taylor read a CBC Nova Scotia story about the imminent closure of Parks Canada’s Canadian Register of Historic Places website, he knew he had to act.
The register is a national searchable database of historic places recognized by federal, provincial, territorial and local governments.
It contains about 13,500 listings and is slated for decommissioning this spring.
“Reading into it… I felt it would be a tragedy to lose that resource,” Taylor said.
“I felt there was a huge urgency to preserve it, ironically preserving our history, even though that was the point of the original website.”
As a partner and chief technical officer at Shift Media Strategies, Toronto-based Taylor knows a thing or two about web technologies.
That weekend, Taylor used artificial intelligence tools to download all of the data on the old Parks Canada site and rebuild it using modern web standards.
Stephen Taylor is a partner and chief technical officer at Shift Media Strategies. (Stephen Taylor/Shift Media Strategies)
The new site, called Heritage Guide Canada went live online within 24 hours of the news story being published on the CBC News website.
The site is not a copy of the original site; it features a cleaner and more modern layout that is designed to be easier to use and navigate.
Taylor said he also added features the old site lacked, including a “near me” button for visitors to find heritage locations nearby and dedicated pages for towns and cities.
He said the cost for designing and operating the site is minimal.
The site is hosted on a low-power computer called a Raspberry Pi which is also used for some of his other work.
The bandwidth used to serve the pages to users is also well within the limits of his existing paid plan, he said. Taylor is operating the site as a free public service.
He said he plans to add additional features including a smart search function that understands questions and not just keywords.
Taylor said preserving history is important at a time when Canadians are grappling with external threats and reaffirming Canada’s place in the world.
While he’s content running the website using his own resources, he said he’s open to other options.
“If the government changes course and decides to rescue the initiative, I’m happy to even give them the website if they find it’s a better website than their own,” he said.
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