FEATURE
Archives
Portal to open up Canadian political history
The Library of Parliament in
Ottawa, Canada
The Parliament of Canada will soon be releasing a portal of all its historical debates. Sébastien Tremblay and Sonia Bebbington reveal how the project came about
A new digital portal in Canada
gives free public access to all the historical debates of the Parliament of Canada from 1867 until the mid-1990s, when the Senate and the House of Commons began publishing born-digital versions of debates directly to the Parliament of Canada website. The portal, which will
officially launch
in the autumn, aims ‘to provide access to a consolidated collection of digital versions of historical debates of the Parliament of Canada, free to the public at point of use, and in both official languages.’ This content fills a significant gap in the online availability of debates, and the main driver of the project is free public access.
The paper volumes were extracted from collections at Library and Archives
12 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013
Canada and the Library of Parliament, and subsequently imaged by Library and Archives Canada. The portal is being developed in collaboration between the Library
of Parliament and Canadiana.
org, a membership alliance dedicated to building Canada’s digital preservation infrastructure and providing wide-ranging access to Canadian documentary heritage.
Canadiana.org has applied optical character recognition (OCR) to all page images and implemented our metadata requirements. It is also hosting the portal on its servers. These developments make these key historical documents entirely searchable from home, in a full-text and key word format that the public are likely to find more familiar than the print debates indexes. The portal offers both browse and search functions. The key
Improving access The main driver that we use to determine digitisation priorities is access; our aim in all digitisation projects is to increase access to key content. Online access can provide additional and valuable functionality such as faceted searching, full-text searching and text mining. We see the portal being not just as an access point for the public, but a service tool for our colleagues. As a full-service library to senators, members of parliament and their staff, the ability to search across nearly 150 years of our parliament’s debates is extremely valuable in the provision of reference and research
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
filters are chamber, parliament, session, year of publication, and language. There is also a full- text search box.
Given the historical scope of the collection, we expect that our primary users will be researchers in and students of topics such as Canadian history, political science, and law. We know, as well, that a number of political journalists are interested in the high ‘searchability’ that the portal provides. In addition, providing full and free access to the public contributes to a more accessible Parliament.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32