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Welcome to Name Drop

Name Drop is an opportunity to explore your interests, tap into your community knowledge, and apply both to centuries of Nova Scotia history. This is your chance to tell us what you see in historic images. Do you recognize the location or the timeframe? You may be able to name the people and events in the image. Maybe you look closer and notice the name of a business on a sign in the background, or a style of dress, breed of horse, model of car, badge on a uniform, or endless other possible small things. These are all important to us. The more detail we learn, the more connections we can make between collections and with communities across the province.

The current collection available is: J.A. Irvine: The Great Outdoors, 1895-1905

As a Name Dropper, you will be able to use pull-down menus to choose words and also use the free form text fields to tell us more about what you’re seeing. Provide as little or as much information as you like – provide us a list, enter a date, or tell us a story. We invite you to be our partner in making collections more visible, relevant and accessible.

Name Drop Tips

• You don’t need to sign in, but doing so will help you retrieve input you might want to go back to.
• Save your work frequently – every 15 minutes – if you don’t save before you navigate away from the page, your work will be lost!
• Study the image, zoom in and see the detail and read the caption to see what clues you can discover for the image you’re working on.
• Tap into your community knowledge and share it with us. Can you name people? Streets? Buildings? Events? Clues in the image (like style of cars and clothes, visible signage, street names) can help you guess at details like the decade the photo was taken.
• If you choose to list what you see, separate multiple words or phrases with a comma.
• Look at more images in the provided collection and see if there are identified elements that might help in understanding the one you are working on.
• You can choose up to 3 themes from the pull-down menus. These use standard language and will help us with sorting and allow for better searching and accessibility.
• You can enter a more specific location that can be found on Google Maps.
• You can choose a county from the pull-down menu.
• Contact us or join the discussion on Facebook — ask others if you get stuck on a detail, find something interesting or have a tip to share with us.

FAQs

Q: Do I have to register?
A: No, registration is not required. You may use your name but it is not mandatory. If you enter your name you will be able to search for images you've been working on. Our system will not track you nor contact you. You can simply skip login but you won't easily be able to find the images you work on.

Q: I’m stuck! What do I do?
A: Invite the “crowd” to help you. Join the discussion on Facebook and help each other. Contact us and we’ll try to help too.

Q: What happens to finished images? 
A: Input given by ‘Name Droppers’, once reviewed, will be downloaded and added to online collections at //archives.novascotia.ca/virtual/. This will enhance searching by words, dates and locations and allow our collections to be more accessible to a wider audience.