Monday, March 11, 2019
Canadiana collections - including archival material, government publications, periodicals, monographs, annuals, and newspapers - are free to access by any member of the public since January 1, 2019.
A merger between Canadiana.org and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a partnership of 75 Canadian universities, means users around the world can now discover over 60 million pages of Canadian digital documentary heritage - the largest online collection of early textual Canadiana in the world.
“Historians and digital humanists in Canada and abroad have been working with digitized documentary heritage to explore our history, culture, and identity. The content in the Canadiana collections has been used by researchers for decades. Removing the paywall and thereby increasing access to this essential corpus of Canadian heritage will allow researchers to use tools and technologies to do their work more efficiently and more collaboratively,” says Ian Milligan, Associate Professor of History, University of Waterloo.
The Canadiana collections include three flagship collections:
- Early Canadiana Online and Canadiana Online: comprised of Canadian monographs, periodicals, government publications, newspapers and annuals and amount to over 19 million pages
- Héritage: developed in partnership with Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and CRKN, includes 900 collections of 41 million pages of archival materials and scans of microfilm taken from some of LAC’s most sought-after archival collections
A statement from CRKN states that the archival community will continue to add to these collections, and pending updates to the platform will "increase ease of use and access to the collections, eventually making them more readily available in research settings and to the general public."
