Articles and Papers

Here are some articles, links to articles and guides with useful information for both parishes and museums. 

1. Virtual Tours for Museums and Historic Sites. A Literature Review. The purpose of this literature review is to help us and others create effective and engaging on-line virtual tours and interactive exhibits for museums and historic sites.
2. A Guide to Security and Risk Reduction for Canadian Parishes. The guide provides tips and suggestions for reducing risks to your church from arson, theft and vandalism. With the availability of low-cost, solar-powered security devices (cameras, lights and alarms), most parishes can now afford to enhance their security. 
   
   Here are some links to related articles regarding the effectiveness of the various security technologies.

• Is there Empirical Evidence that Surveillance Cameras reduce Crime?
• Do Surveillance Cameras deter Crime?
• How Well do Security Cameras deter Crime?
• Do Security Warning Signs really deter Criminals?
• Do Security Signs really deter Crime?
• Fighting Crime with High-Quality Signage

3. A Guide to Developing a Parish Disaster Preparedness Plan for Canadian Churches. This guide provides step-by-step information for a parish to prepare a plan to survive, and continue to operate after a major disaster. Forms are provided to help you collect, organize and store for safe-keeping the information and critical documents that are essential for recovery and continuity of services.
   
   
4. Here are some articles that we found with useful information and suggestions regarding technology and museums.

• Why do people visit art museums?
• Digital Ideas for museums in a post-pandemic world
• Virtual Tours: High interaction cost, moderate usefulness 
• Evaluation of virtual tour in an online museum

5. The Technologization of a Parish – How the Internet helped us survive the pandemic. This article describes how one parish in Edmonton used the Internet to implement regular livestreaming, and build an online store for donations, food and bakes sales. These technology enhancements enabled the parish to survive, and thrive, during the Covid-19 pandemic. The experiences and lessons learned would be useful to other parishes considering similar modernization. 
   
   
6. Preserving Ukrainian Canadian Heritage Music. This article describes the motivation, reasons and results for creating the Music Library as part of our Pioneer Churches on the Prairies website. The rationale was to digitize, preserve and share the diverse heritage music of the Ukrainians that settled in Canada in the 1900s. There were hundreds of choirs, performers and bands that made recordings on tape cassettes, LPs and CDs. Since this media is becoming obsolete, digitization is the only way to preserve the music for future generations. The article also showcases some of the more interesting artists from this era.
   
   
7. Digitizing Ukrainian Canadian Heritage Music. This short technical article describes the methods and procedures we use to digitize music from cassettes, LPs and CDs. It explains the hardware and software that we use, and some of the audio editing procedures used to clean up and/or remaster the music. 
   
   
8. Pioneer Churches Annual Report 2023. This is a detailed report of tasks, activities, events and acomplishments of this project to the end of 2023.