 |
|
 |
     |
"Peace, Order and Good Government"1Tom Tytor, Research and Information Services
The February 2001 SAVOIR FAIRE seminar was a bilingual presentation by Amy Fisher and Nicolas Savard of the National Library’s Reference and Information Services Division. They described the various processes involved in establishing the Canadian Confederation Web site, a site that enables Canadians to access digitized historical documents, newspaper articles, period photographs and historical essays. The original project dates back to 1995, when the National Library established a Web site as part of a school demonstration project pertaining to the influence of the American Civil War on Confederation. The site was developed in three weeks and consisted of prepared texts, photographs and documents. The time constraint precluded the assembling of a comprehensive collection of images and texts, and the items selected were limited to those that were in the public domain. In order to produce a site that provided a broader, deeper and more balanced view of Confederation -- one that included provincial perspectives and contained a full range of documents -- the project was extended, thus permitting increased time for research and copyright investigation, and for a significant increase in the amount of supplementary Canadian material included. Hyperlinks to relevant federal government departments were created, for example, material relating to laws was linked to Justice Canada, and that which concerned treaties was linked to Indian and Northern Affairs. The Digital Library Task Force, established to coordinate the National Library’s digitization projects, collaborated with Reference and Information Services staff to create content appropriate for a younger audience. The results consist of simple texts and images together with longer essays, which have been supplemented with digitized documents for a more advanced level of research. The initial expansion phase entailed using a wide assortment of resources, both primary and secondary. This led to a survey of the literature to determine the availability of materials in a number of relevant subject areas. The resources used include the following: AMICUS (the National Library’s public access catalogue); printed bibliographies and footnotes; newspapers; theses; biographies; official publications, including debates, statutes and official reports; and archives and libraries of provincial legislative assemblies and various other institutions, such as the McCord Museum in Montreal. Photographs to accompany biographical accounts were obtained from the National Archives of Canada.
Amy Fisher and Nicolas Savard perused the various publications to familiarize themselves with an array of topics and perspectives on Confederation and to determine which historical incidents would be included in the final product. They then wrote a text that attempted to portray events and public figures in an impartial manner. In the course of research, it was discovered that on the Internet there was a paucity of details relating to the political process that led to Confederation and that there were few historical documents or photographs on the existing Canadian history sites. The research process was challenging: there were few indexes to periodicals and illustrations in the periodicals consulted were scarce. Furthermore, the fragility of documents raised the question of whether they would be damaged by the digitization process. Despite these obstacles, a variety of material was added to the site.
Amy Fisher and Nicolas Savard illustrated their talk with slides showing 19th-century city street scenes, political cartoons and title pages of consulted sources. Further enhancing the seminar, was a display of a selection of the sources consulted. The original Confederation project on the National Library’s Web site is one of the most heavily consulted resources on the site. It is clear that with the additional texts, illustrative and documentary material, appropriate to a range of ages, the site will be even more heavily used in the future!
__________ 1 From The British North America Act, 1867, Section 91. |
