Canadian Scottish history

You'd have to be a poor Scot not to find something of interest at Electric Scotland's extensive collection of online resources. It includes an extensive section on Canadian Scottish history at www.electricscotland.com/Canada/index.htm.

Scans of several books include a four volume set on The Scot in British North America published in 1880, a two volume set on The Scotsman in Canada published in the early 20th century, and many shorter pieces on places and people of Scottish interest.

I was particularly interested to see 52 issues of the weekly Scottish Canadian newspaper dating from 13 November 1890 to 22 October 1891. Based in Toronto, each issue contained nostalgic prose and poetry, snippets of Scottish news presented county by county, and lots of advertising. Each page of what is usually a 16 page paper is presented as a JPEG image. There's no OCR or indexing.

Electric Scotland has a lot more. The antiquarian books collection contains 231 completely scanned books, 22 works in progress, 38 items termed "Detailed Accounts, Smaller Books and Partial Books", and 71 books in text format mostly from Project Gutenberg.

Naturally, in an item on Scotland I can't miss the opportunity to make a mention of BIFHSGO's annual conference, 18 - 20 September 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, which has a special focus on Scotland. More here.