New Canadian History Digital Archive

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The following news release is from Newswire.ca:

OTTAWA, May 11, 2015 /CNW Telbec/ – Canadians now have at their disposal the most important online research tool ever created about the history of their country.

Canadiana.org, a digital initiative of extraordinary scale, is a joint effort of 25 leading research institutions, libraries and archives working together with the goal of creating Canada’s multi-million page, comprehensive online archive.

Do you want to stump your friends with trivia about early hockey history? Are you searching family roots in Canada? Perhaps you’re working on a project for Canada’s 150th birthday or searching for information about a relative that took part in the Great War. Canadiana.org‘s online resources can provide answers to these questions and much, much more.

Canadiana offers more than 35 million pages of primary-source documents in 21 languages, including languages of our First Nations.

“Last year was a tremendous year of accomplishment”, said Canadiana.org Executive Director, Ron Walker: “Our member libraries have absolutely transformed the way Canadians access and study information about their past. Canadians now have a superb resource to help them in all manner of historical research.”

Chronicling the people and institutions that shaped Canadian history from the 1600s to the mid-1900s, the digital collection is already of major value for researchers. The majority is available free of charge: from school children, their teachers, family historians, and genealogists, to scholars in a wide variety of fields. Other content is available at a nominal fee, to help defray the hefty preservation costs.

The Canadiana.org team is also rolling out a campaign designed to increase public awareness of the initiative. The campaign, “Be Curious”, is highlighting little-known historical facts about Canada through social media. The goal is to bring Canadian history to life by distributing it through modern communication channels.

About Canadiana.org
Canadiana.org is a non-profit, charitable organization founded to preserve Canada’s print heritage and make it accessible for future generations, with a special emphasis on material that is rare, scattered or at-risk. With support from its partners, Canadiana pioneered the first large-scale online collection of Canadian print heritage, containing a mix of digitized microfiche as well as thousands of full-colour scans from over 230 lending institutions.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads-up.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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