Introduction

Canadiana.org proposes the Canada Online Project to digitize a critical mass of Canada’s documentary heritage, preserve it for our future generations and provide online access to these digital collections.

The Canada Online Project requires funding from federal, provincial, public and private sources to put in place the infrastructure and trained workforce to digitize approximately four million titles of Canadian documentary heritage.

Once funding is in place, a collaboration of major memory institutions is ready to undertake this mass-digitization project.

Objectives

Digitization

Mass-digitization centres will be set-up and for the first two years will focus on text-based content, including books, newspapers, periodicals, government documents, theses, etc. Pilot projects will also be undertaken for other media types including film, audio, video, 2D and 3D images to determine the best technologies and practices to deliver mass-digitization economies of scale.

Preservation

A national preservation network of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) will be implemented to permanently preserve digital documentary heritage.

Access

A national digital collection catalogue will be implemented to link all Canadian digital collections to maximize the value of the content by making it easy to find, easy to use and easy to integrate into the work environment, schools, research centres, and the homes of Canadians.

Research

Research projects will be undertaken to:

• Advance digitization, preservation and access technologies and processes;
• Provide new and innovative techniques to interface with the vast amount of content to leverage its full potential;
• Provide equitable access to digital content for people with disabilities; and
• Make Canada the leader in web-based technologies for content access and integrating relevant digital content and social networking tools to enhance knowledge sharing.

Benefits

Global Competitiveness in the Knowledge-Based New Economy

Managing knowledge and information will be central to international competitiveness and financial success. The long term benefit for Canada in the knowledge-based new economy is substantial. The access to Canadian content will benefit education, accelerate research, and create an export capacity for online content and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to other cultures and economies.

Jobs for Canadians

It is anticipated that a substantial number of direct jobs would be created, with the economic spin-offs from the Canada Online project estimated to create thousands of jobs over time.

Empowering the Canadian Creative Economy

The equivalent of four million titles (books, government documents, scholar theses, periodicals and newspapers) will become available online. All Canadians will have an invaluable digital resource.

21st-Century Training

Canada Online, available to schools and universities across the country for free, will permit educators great innovation in their learning environments. Not only would Canada be an information-rich country, but also its citizens would stand amongst the globe’s first information-rich workforce.

Innovative Commercial Products

Canada Online is an opportunity for Canada to take the lead in new innovative technologies for preservation networks and access. Research projects will provide Canadian digital libraries with immediate functional benefits and Canadian companies with commercial product development opportunities that will have global applications.

Critical Mass for a Sustainable Digitization Sector

Canada Online will digitize approximately 10% of the Canadian documentary heritage corpus while putting in place the critical mass of infrastructure and trained workforce to continue a sustainable digitization programme funded by cost recovery, funding and sponsorship methods.

Economies of Scale for Canadian digitization Projects

Mass-digitization projects optimize workflow and the economies of scale reduce the cost per page. Infrastructure, overheads and one-time setup costs are spread over a higher volume of work. For the same investment more work can be accomplished. By organizing collection holders to coordinate by media type and have their content digitized at a mass-digitization centre, their costs are dramatically lowered.

Research

Canada Online will provide vast amounts of information–many times more than any single library or archive in the country–that will be readily retrieved and therefore easy to use. Canadians will be uniquely empowered to understand their country by using the vast quantities of the corpus that Canada Online makes available to them.

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