Saturday, August 31, 2013

Library and Archives Canada and Canadiana.org announces partnership

Last week, I reported on the new digitization partnership between the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadian.org (see blog posting of Aug 23rd  “Some land records are being digitized”), and now it has been made official.

The LAC has agreed to a “large-scale digitization partnership involving about 60 million images from numerous collections”.   

A couple of things caught my eye –

This will be a ”10-year agreement with this longstanding partner (which) covers the digitization, indexing and description of millions of personal, administrative and government documents, as well as land grants, war diaries and photographs. There will be no change for those Canadians who wish to access these collections at LAC.

The go on to further say that “Canadiana.org also will also transcribe millions of handwritten pages, and create related descriptions. Enhanced search tools facilitating access to these records will be available to Canadians free of charge at LAC, as well as at hundreds of subscribing libraries in regions across Canada. For a small monthly fee, Canadians will also be able to use the enhanced tools online to conduct advanced searches without leaving home

Notice that the press release says nothing about newspapers. And what will be the fee? And when will this take place?

It also sounds as if you want to see these records free of charge, you will have to visit them at the LAC in Ottawa.