By Sandra Nicholls, Senior Writer, Library & Archives Canada
I am in Grade 5. Can you help me with my project? My question is, what kinds of instruments did the First Nations use?
As part of my school project, I have to conduct an interview with someone knowledgeable about Oak Island. Any pictures, maps, graphs, booklets, articles or memorabilia that I could use would be greatly appreciated.
Hi! I am a Grade 10 student looking for a primary source document on Japanese internment camps. Anything helps.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of questions that Library and Archives Canada (LAC) reference staff get every day. Our staff respond in person, by email, or on the phone, but more and more we connect student and their teachers with digitized source materials – rich content from our collection, readily available, and easy to find online.
This is the way of the future.
LAC has a fascinating collection of digital resources: 100 Stories, which offers a personal glimpse into the records of men and women who served in the First World War; a dedicated site on New France, which includes databases from LAC and other archival institutions; and the John Bell Canadian Comic Book collection, which includes 4,000 comic books from the Second World War right up to 21st century zines.
(And if you want to know how we digitize a comic book…just go to LAC’s Discovery Blog: Superheroes of the Digital Universe, posted August 17, 2016).
LAC’s digitized records and databases are vast, varied, and fascinating. They include immigration and citizenship records, census data, French-Canadian newspapers from 1808–1919, patents, Canadian Olympians, passenger lists, sheet music, even mail order catalogues! Want to know how much baby bootees cost in 1919? Go to the Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue, 1918–1919. (Hint: they cost less than a dollar!)
We also have archived digital resources on our website, which can easily be retrieved. These are organized by subject—everything from shipwrecks to the North West Mounted Police to UFOs to the diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King.
The full list is on our website, but here are a few examples:
- First Among Equals (Canada’s Prime Ministers, a site for children)
- The Canadian West (Settlement in the Canadian West)
- Life of a Rock Star (Geological Survey of Canada)
- LAC Learning Center (Educational resources)
Although we no longer run the Learning Centre, the information it contains on a wide variety of topics, such as how to use primary and secondary sources, is still useful. There are also comprehensive teaching units and strategies, lesson plans, ideas and activities for the classroom, quizzes, games and guides on using primary sources, as well as workshops for professional development.
If students are looking for digitized visual materials organized by theme and subject matter, they can check out LAC’s Flickr site. These intriguing albums cover subjects as varied as firefighting, Anne of Green Gables, fore-edge paintings, bicycles, storms, World War One posters, and sugar shacks.
They are often linked to LAC’s blog, or to podcasts, where students and teachers can find out more.
LAC is also the custodian of all kinds of war records, and recently, three of LAC’s military archivists played host to a group of Canadian Army Cadets to explain just what some of these records mean.
The event was organized as a three-day event with the Canadian War Museum. Although the cadets had reviewed service files online, meeting with the archivists gave them the chance not only to ask questions and get answers from experts, but also to experience the real documents first-hand, including maps, burial registers, and even trench newspapers—underscoring the importance and the thrill of genuine records from the past.
Imagine their excitement as they discovered LAC’s collection of war diaries from the First World War, daily accounts of actions in the field:
“The Company Commander, after a hard-fought action, sits down by the stump of a candle in a captured dugout to give his pencilled account of the battle. The results are compressed into iron limits of the battalion diary.”
Aitken, W.M. Canadian War Records Office: Report Submitted by the Officer inCharge. January 11, 1917, p. 2, RG 9, series III-D-I, vol. 4746.
These records can be viewed online in our War Diaries of the First World War database (archived). The site contains contextual information and help for researchers, and there is also an updated website.
Encounters like this one remind us that the digital world has moved us beyond an information world. Users are interested not only in information, but also in experience. Take the Coltman Report.
William Coltman was hired by the Governor of Lower Canada to investigate the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1818. The battle involved fur trade rivals—the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.
Today, this 521-page report is one of the best sources we have on the fur-trade war and is a key document in the history of the Métis Nation.
LAC teamed up with Our Digital World to create an online tool so that members of the public could transcribe individual sections of the digitized report. Within a month, the text of the entire document had been recorded, and an event that took place long ago suddenly sprang to life. LAC will continue to use this tool for new projects down the road. Watch for the announcements on Twitter, Facebook, and our website.
This is just one way we can use the power of digital technology to fuel the imaginations of students, teachers, and future historians.
But we know there is more we can do. That’s why we’ve taken the lead in launching Canada’s National Heritage Digitization Strategy.
The introduction to the strategy points out that “leveraging digital technologies makes it possible for memory institutions to provide immediate access to their holdings to an almost limitless audience.”
Not to mention the almost limitless pool of resources and primary source material.
We’re talking books, periodicals, newspapers, government records, posters, rare books, theses, artefacts, photographs, documentary art, film, video, audio recordings, maps and more.
And not just at LAC. To cover as much territory as possible, the strategy will draw on the collections of public and private archives, libraries, museums, galleries, associations, non-profit organizations, corporations, and other memory institutions.
Just imagine what that might look like!
To a student struggling with a heritage fair project, another researching a First World War soldier, or a teacher looking for visual resources to help create a curriculum on indigenous history in Canada, it might well look like a treasure map!
The heritage digitization strategy is all about conversion—taking oral and written history and turning it into digital media.
The digital world has created a natural 21st century commons—putting collective knowledge and information in shared and collaborative spaces for all to use.
That includes students of all ages, and teachers who are working hard to incorporate all that the new technology has to offer.
Wikipedia, YouTube, the Digital Public Library of America and the Canadian Heritage Information Network are just a few examples.
The proposed strategy is based on successful models from around the world, including those in the Netherlands, Sweden, and New Zealand. All of these strategies are based on a single premise: to make digital content more accessible.
The digital content will help us and our children understand the past, document the present, and prepare for the future.
At the heart of the strategy is the need for collaboration rooted in the possibilities of innovative partnerships and new kinds of connections between a variety of institutions.
LAC has been particularly successful working in collaboration with the Toronto Public Library and the TD Bank group on the TD Summer Reading Club. Not only does it promote reading and encourage the imagination, it reinforces the fact that libraries, and the librarians that run them, are among the most important educational resources we have as a society.
The program was first offered in Toronto in 1994 through a partnership with TD Bank Group and Toronto Public Library. Since 2004, TD has continued to be the leading sponsor of the TD Summer Reading Club with Toronto Public Library and LAC as program partners. The TD Summer Reading Club is offered to over 2,000 public libraries across the country and reaches over half a million children each summer.
Although the summer reading club is not a digital project, it illustrates what can happen when organizations work together towards the goal of education and learning. In 2004, 436 library branches participated, and by 2014, there were over 2,000. In 2004, total participation was 20, 778, but by 2014, that number reached 631,899. And from a modest number of 1,738 total programs in 2004, it has risen to over 35,000. The reading club’s website is updated each year to reflect that year’s theme, and includes a number of online activities for young readers.
In the meantime, we invite you to access LAC’s resources online. Happy exploring!
