The Bowen/Nexwlélexwm
EcoLibrary
Collecting forty years of regional science
The EcoLibrary is a standalone museum website, home to digital documents that may have been be forgotten or neglected, but remain relevant to the environment and planning in the Salish Sea. It features reports, data, educational materials, photos and maps (graphic & GIS) from government, non-profit and other sources. The current focus is Bowen Island/ Nexwlélexwm. We hope to host work from all around the Salish Sea.
It features a detailed catalogue built for discovery, with advanced search features. For each item in the library there are over two dozen data fields, such as name, author, date, document type, etc. There is a field that describes each map and graphic inside the documents as well. This helps surface resources in these large documents that may otherwise be missed.
Find & share missing or pivotal studies
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 GIS layers.
Ask the Library
The library has a ‘RAG’ AI feature and chat, which is useful for questions rather than catalogue search. Ask it something like “what is the state of drinking water on Bowen Island?” and it will read across multiple documents to give you an overall answer with linked references and ideas for followup questions.
A friendly but comprehensive interface
Sharing studies you think more people should see
The documents all have some relationship to Bowen Island and to ecological practices. Reports and presentations on the environment anywhere in the Salish Sea have relevance to Bowen. We would like to extend the collection, but have very limited resources at the moment.
If you have high quality documents of regional or Bowen-based relevance, we would be happy to add them to our ‘to do’ list. In order for us to do the to do’s, we’ll need contributions from our loving community! We are very grateful for the Sitka Foundation for funding the project to this point.
Donations are happily accepted by the Bowen Island Conservancy, the home of the library.
The other best support you can give is to use the Library and let us know how it’s working for you, great ideas you’ve had and stories about what you’re discovering in the stacks.
