LAC Signatures: Fall/Winter 2017

The new issue of Signatures offers an “impressionistic overview” of how digitization figures meaningfully in the day-to-day workings at Library and Archives Canada.

Some of the things  I learned:

The LAC Digital Archive contains approximately 5 petabytes of digital content, equivalent to 1,338 metres (4,390 feet) of DVDs, a fragment of the total digital holdings of documentary heritage requiring preservation treatment.

The team digitizing the CEF service files can now produce more than 7 million digital images per year. When the project is concluded in the latter part of 2018 approximately 30 million images will have been digitized. (To put that in perspective, the British Newspaper Archive digitized and OCRd 6.1 million newspaper pages in the past year.)

LAC digitized over 10,200 photographs from Expo 67, including just over 9,300 colour slides.

During its first months of operation the LAC DigiLab supported the digitization of over 24,000 pages of textual material and more than 1,000 photographs by researchers from outside LAC.

LAC acknowledged it still has much to learn in digitization by stating "Canada is fortunate in that it can draw on these experiences" (of other peer organizations internationally.)

There's much more.

Read the Fall/Winter issue of Signatures at www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/publications/signatures/Pages/Signatures-2017-fall-winter.aspx