By Jessica Lovell
Guelph Tribune

Guelph will soon know exactly how many public statues, historic plaques, photographers, painters, theatre companies and such are in town.
With the help of a $70,000 grant from the province, the city is embarking on a cultural mapping project that will include the cataloguing of all the community’s cultural resources – from arts and cultural industries to natural or built heritage.
“It’s a program we’ve been wanting to do for some time,” said the city’s general manager of arts, culture and entertainment, Colleen Clack. Currently, the city has only anecdotal information about its cultural resources, but over the next year or so staff will be working to turn that information into quantifiable data, Clack said.
The data will then be used to create a web portal, “so that people have a one-stop shop for information related to culture and heritage resources in Guelph,” said Clack.
The entire project is expected to cost around $160,000, with $70,000 coming from the Ministry of Tourism and Culture’s Creative Communities Prosperity Fund, which was launched in 2009 to help municipalities undertake cultural planning activities.
“The business sectors have long recognized that research like this is important,” and governments are now starting to recognize it too, Clack said.
The remainder of the project funding will be contributed partly by the city, in the form of man-hours, and partly from corporate contributions and in-kind support, which is being facilitated by the Guelph Chamber of Commerce and the Guelph Arts Council, two partners on the project, said Clack.
“The bulk of the project will be done in 2012,” said Clack. The city will be working with the chamber and the arts council on the first stage of the project, which will involve data collection, she said.
The city will be bringing in part-time staff to do research and data collection, but part of the process will also include public forums, in an effort to connect with as many different people within the cultural community as possible, she said.
Stage two will be creating a usable database, and literally mapping the cultural resources, which will be part of a searchable website.
“If somebody is coming to Guelph to do a movie shoot, they could look up how many lighting designers there are in town,” said Clack, providing just one example of the site’s usefulness.
The database will also be used to guide the city’s decision making, she said. It will provide baseline information, so that if the city is undertaking efforts to increase the number of artists working in the city, it will be able to know if those efforts have been successful.
It can also be used to attract business, as a city’s culture is one of the things businesses will inquire about when deciding where to locate. “It’s about telling our story and telling the story of how culture is supporting the local economy,” said Clack.
When the database is complete, it will be maintained by city staff to keep it up to date, she said. “We want to be able to bring forward cold, hard data and keep it current,” she said.