Produced by the Société de développement de Montréal under an agreement between the City of Montréal and the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, hosted and disseminated by the City of Montréal, the site contains two main sections. One provides general information tailored to a broader public; the other deals in detail with the historical district’s heritage. Both approaches are dynamic, even though the second is more specialized.

With material provided in both English and French — and a few parts in Spanish and Portuguese — the information for the general public remains popular, but it is the heritage sections, available for the moment in French only, that are receiving an increasing number of visitors. During the first quarter, visitors consulted one or another of the 580 building fact sheets more than 13,000 times monthly. Including Web pages devoted to historical figures, public artworks, streets and public squares, the 975 computerized fact sheets currently available received a monthly average of 23,000 “hits” during the three-month period. One possible source for understanding this growth: the education sector.

Jehanne Lazaj has joined our team for a two-month period as the final part of her training. We’ll let her tell her story:

“I am a heritage curator and public service employee intern with the French Ministère de la culture et de la communication, currently in training with the Institut national du patrimoine in Paris. As part of my active learning of methods of heritage study and enhancement, I am doing a two-month internship with the Société de développement de Montréal. Intrigued and impressed by the ergonomics and scientific quality of the Old Montréal site and the diversity of its information, I was hoping to learn about its ‘other side’. As a specialist in industrial heritage, I am contributing a modest brick to the building by conducting a study of the façades of the district’s approximately 150 warehouse stores, in order to classify them.”

The buildings that Jehanne is studying were erected between 1850 and 1880 and constitute an important collection that testifies to the transformations in 19th-century Montréal business. They are currently the subject of a research project at Université du Québec à Montréal, a initiative that is directly related to Old Montréal’s heritage inventories. Jehanne’s contribution will be as useful for the research project as for enhancing the Web site’s fact sheets.