“Digital text” seems to be one of the latest buzz words being used in the library field. We have seen a huge growth in this area in the last decade; and I believe this trend will continue as we provide access to more and more resources on the Web. The product under review is no exception. Early Canadiana Online/Notre Mémoire en Ligne is the creation of the Canadian Institute of Historical Microreproductions, in collaboration with the libraries of the University of Toronto, Universitâ Laval, National Library of Canada, and the Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec. The purpose of this project is to provide Web access to “a digital library of primary sources in Canadian history from the first European contact to the late nineteenth century.” CIHM has always been a leader in preserving Canada’s pre‐1900 history on microfiche for distribution. Established in 1978 as a non‐profit charitable institute, its goal is to locate, catalogue, preserve in microfiche format, and provide access to Canada’s printed heritage. Now, it has expanded this service to actually providing scanned, searchable images on this new Web site, currently at no charge.
Special subject focus has currently been placed on literature, women’s history, travel and exploration, native studies, and the history of French Canada. These areas were selected because of their research and teaching value, both nationally and internationally. CIHM predicts that this site will be used both by Canadian educational institutions and at Canadian studies centres abroad. CIHM’s microfiche is already comprehensive in these disciplines and the publications in this pre‐1900 time period are in the public domain; basically meaning that copyright is not an issue. The history of French Canada was also selected because this material complements an already existing online collection created by the Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec (http://www2.biblinat.gouv. qc.ca/texte/t0323.htm). A comprehensive description of each of the selected collections is detailed on the Early Canadiana Online Collections pages. Suffice it to say, there is more than enough detail on each of the subject areas to decide if you want to search the site. The project has 3,300 titles and 550,000 images accessible from this site.
After selecting your choice of English or French language pages, the clearly laid out search screen appears. The search mechanism, which uses MultiText search software, is fairly basic, allowing you the options of searching for terms in either full text, title, author, subject, or publisher. You also have the option of using Boolean ORs, ANDs, or exact phrase matching. There is also a limit by language (English, French, or both) function. All of these options are useful in limiting your search to produce the most relevant results. If these functions are not to your liking, you can browse by either title or author. What is not currently available are an advanced search screen and any help pages to assist you with your search criteria. Owing to the complexity of a full text database, advanced search features that allow you to search specific fields in combination would be an excellent addition to the current basic search screen.
Search results are initially displayed by a bibliographic citation list, with the resulting number of hits at the top of the page (e.g. 32 matches in 26 documents). Each citation includes all title, author, and publication information, as well as subject headings and a link to the exact pages where your term appears if you performed a keyword full text search . This makes manoeuvring through extremely large texts very simple. Each bibliographic citation is linked to a document which then links to each individual scanned page of the text. This allows for faster loading than trying to store several hundred pages at once. The Document Pages box also notes title pages, tables of contents, illustrations, and even blank pages. All other pages are listed numerically.
By simply clicking on the appropriate page number, the scanned image appears. This image can be sized to either fit on your computer screen or be large sized for easier reading. A lot of this very old material is in script and enlarging the page size makes it much more legible. Lastly, the image can be viewed and saved as a pdf file. All of this process of searching and retrieving has been made possible by using optical character recognition (OCR). While CIHM admits that this method is not fully accurate owing to the age and scripts used in the materials, they still present the scanned image as is. The scanned images were actually made from CIHM’s existing microfiche collection; and some of the original materials were brittle, or bound, and loss of information was inevitable. From my searching, however, a very small percentage of material viewed was illegible. Overall, the sheer content of this site outweighs any smaller problems.
This site was financially supported by some major philanthropic societies including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Birks Family Foundation, as well as several others. I believe this financing has paid off with an extremely valuable resource for anyone interested in early Canadian history and development. This elegantly laid out site, with its various scenic views of various parts of Canada taken from the National Archives, is easy to use and produces very valuable results. I would highly recommend adding this site to any academic Web site that has an interest in the subject area.
