Digitization

Canada’s research libraries, public libraries, archives, and museums have rich collections of rare or unique materials of immense social, cultural, and historical value.  The professional and personal pursuits of Canadian citizens and scholars are considerably aided when these materials become available online in a well-organized and high-quality manner. Digital access to our national patrimony will have very positive results for research, education, further cultural production, and national pride and unity.  Digitization is not only important for greater accessibility by Canadians (and others around the world who wish to learn about Canada), but is also important for the long-term preservation of our documentary heritage.

Benefits of digitization

  • Digitization allows for ease of use and widespread distribution of and access to materials that in analogue formats may be rare and distant or fragile and at risk of loss.
  • Digitization greatly improves access to documents when the digital files are made available and findable on line.
  • The text of digitized documents will also be searchable when text indexing is created during the digitization process.
  • Digitization is important for the consultation of documents by the print disabled if the digital files are in a format compatible with text-to-voice reading tools.
  • Since, for most purposes, it will be sufficient for researchers to consult a digital version of a document when available, digitization is also an element in the preservation of analogue documents: the analogue document will be handled less, so will survived longer, and if it should be lost, the digital version, at least, will still be available.

Canadiana.org has digitized or coordinated the digitization of and developed a web portal for many Canadian heritage documents, which become available to all Canadians and to anyone in the world with Internet access.

As digital content is growing rapidly, research libraries need to consider how they will initiate, manage, and preserve digital initiatives.  Library and Archives Canada (LAC) reports that “clients want to discover and access information online; LAC's digitization program helps make the collection known and improve access to it” (LAC, 2008).

When digitizing content, research libraries and partnering organizations face a number of critical issues to resolve including the cost, the scope, the audience, and copyright.  Research libraries must determine whether the content to be digitized needs to have copyright cleared, whether with a known and locatable rights holder or, in the case of an “orphan” work, through a licensing process set out by the Copyright Board of Canada.  Many historical documents, because of their age, may be in the public domain and so not subject to copyright.

A controversial mass digitization project has been Google Books. ARL (the Association of Research Libraries) provides a helpful overview of the most recent settlement document concerning Google’s scanning of copyrighted works, along with current guides and statements outlining details and considerations around the Google Books project.

Several CARL libraries have been working with the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ to digitize and make available online parts of their collections.

CARL has encouraged digitization of Canada’s documentary heritage in responses to federal government consultations and in its recommendations for the federal budget.  It also supported an LAC-organized pre-conference workshop on the topic.  Some useful links include the following:


Some additional examples of major Canadian and international digitization projects: