The FirstVoices development team has been working hard on the new FirstVoices release. All new updates have been prompted by the hard-working Language Teams and community members, whose valuable feedback, ideas and suggestions have been crucial in making FirstVoices a better platform.

If you have questions about any of the updates listed below, or have ideas for ways to improve FirstVoices, please contact us at: hello@firstvoices.com

Table of Contents

• What’s new?

  • FirstVoices Shared Media Library

  • Text-Only Batch Uploads

• What’s next?

• Got feedback?

What’s new? ​

FirstVoices Shared Media Library

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There’s a new option when you are selecting images to use on your dictionary entries, songs, stories, custom pages, or alphabet characters: the new FirstVoices Shared Media Library! This is a collection of over 900 beautiful illustrations by Indigenous artists, created specially for use on FirstVoices sites.

• Ever struggled to find an image for a hard-to-illustrate word like “welcoming” or a phrase like “how are you”? Try searching the shared media library! We asked talented Indigenous artists to illustrate common words and essential phrases used on FirstVoices sites. These include abstract words like feelings, ideas, greetings, and questions, as well as beautiful representations of animals, food, body parts, family members, seasons, activities, and more.

• Access it by clicking “Add Image” as usual, and then selecting the “Shared Images” option.

• You can use any combination of your own uploaded images and the shared images.

• Remember that these images are only for use on FirstVoices. Thank you!

We raise our hands to all the artists who contributed their gorgeous artworks: Adam Lewis, Al-Lisa McKay, Ayla Brown, Bonny Graham, Cadence George-West, Chantelle Trainor-Matties, Clair Shannon-Akiwenzie, Cori Johnson, Damian John, Darcy Luke, Eli Gloor, Emily Pearson, Jamin Zuroski, Jordanna George, Joshua Conrad, Kaija Heitland, Kara Froese, Karlene Harvey, Kinepikw Designs, lessLIE, Letitia Loughridge, Lisa Wilson, Natasha Lepine, Noelia Nicaela Leon Coico, Sarah Jones, Stacia Goodman, and Trinity Babichuk.

This art library was partly funded by a grant from Canadian Heritage.

Text-Only Batch Uploads

The first phase of the new batch uploading tool is ready for your data! We want to invite anyone with a text-only batch to send it in for uploading. We are hard at work putting the finishing touches on multimedia uploading, but if you have a spreadsheet of dictionary entries with no audio or other media, we can get that uploaded for you now.

If you have any questions, contact the FirstVoices team at hello@firstvoices.com

• Knowledge Base: ​Add multiple entries in batches

What’s next?​

Got feedback?