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News Articles - Arts Heritage website launched

Arts Heritage website launched: CKUA clips included
Devon Dispatch News, August 06, 2004
By Kim Peterson

(Copyright Devon Dispatch News 2004)

A hundred years of printing, concerts, novels and dance is now at your fingertips.

Alberta’s Arts Heritage website, is an educational tool documenting everything from the early rise of vaudeville theatre in the province to the growth of new media arts, was launched Aug. 4 at the Edmonton Art Gallery.

The Heritage Community Foundation, an Edmonton-based non-profit organization, cut the virtual ribbon to the website and demonstrated its contents to partners and notable members of the arts community.

Ken Regan, general manager for CKUA Radio Network, was on hand to help bring Alberta arts to a global audience. More than 500 hours of CKUA sound-clips are included throughout the site, supplementing text with short samples of old broadcasts, including Arts Alberta, which was hosted by Tommy Banks throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

“Now, through the Arts Heritage website, these moments, these people – are preserved for a new generation and for worldwide audience,” Regan said.

The Heritage Community Foundation has digitized years worth of broadcasts from the radio station, which Regan said helps further a goal of CKUA’s, to capture the arts, artists and social conscience of a community.

“Art is more than just beautiful paintings and sculptures,” he said. “It represents the legacy of social conscience of a society.”

The website includes sections on performing arts, literary arts, visual arts and new media, which are further divided into biographies of artists and profiles of events throughout the province.

“We want the arts not to be a private guilty pleasure – but a source of community pride,” said foundation director Adriana Davies. “We will now have a major presence of Alberta arts on the world wide web, accessible to everyone.”

The five-year-old foundation received more than seven million hits on its 28 educational websites last year, which are funded through various sources, including the federal government. Their other projects have included sites on Alberta’s Italian community, an examination of Treaty 8, and Women of Aspenland each accessible through the portal site, www.albertasource.ca/.

Alberta Arts Heritage can be found at www.abheritage.ca/abarts/

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