"Canada, unlike many other countries (for example Chronicling America in the United States and Trove in Australia), does not have a national newspaper digitization program. With the lack of such a program, public libraries, historical societies, provincial and local archives, as well as university libraries and archives, are left to fill the void, digitizing their local newspapers, often in piece-meal fashion. In doing so, Canadian institutions face many challenges, such as copyright and permissions issues. Individual institutions do their best to manage these issues, but do not necessarily have the expertise that is often required. Lack of funding is also a constant challenge. Canada lags far behind places like the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia for funding newspaper digitization, and most projects in Canada have relied on one-time grants, volunteers, and non-government contributions to move forward."
That's a paragraph from a Heritage Content Priorities Task Group report to the Canadian Research Knowledge Network.
It's from a section of the report, starting on page 8, Environmental Scan of Newspaper Digitization mentioning a number of challenges, including:
A further obstacle lies in simply trying to discover what has been digitized and what has not. There is no national inventory or index and the most comprehensive listing, by province, of both free and subscription sites is on a US-based genealogy website called The Ancestor Hunt. With no national index, it is often challenging for organizations to avoid duplicating digitization efforts.
Newspapers are mentioned in two recommendations of the report:
1. The Canadiana Collections should be enhanced with 1) content that is more reflective of the diversity of Canadians; 2) at risk materials; 3) high interest archival collections; and 4) newspapers. CRKN should consider focusing its efforts in these areas through the creation of collection development strategies developed in collaboration with members.
4. It is recommended that CRKN work collaboratively with Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and Library and Archives Canada and other major organizations (OurDigitalWorld, Internet Archive Canada) on solutions to enable digitization, access, and digital preservation of newspapers.
I wish I could be more encouraged by these two recommendations, but there have been numerous previous studies and recommendations all of which have come to nought -- paralysis by analysis.
More of the same? The report mentions — Library and Archives Canada is currently working on a newspaper strategy with national implications.
5 comments:
Sad indeed!
It is better to have duplication, rather than nothing at all.
I am constantly and desperately looking for places where I might find digitized stories about the men I am writing about who went to the Great War from Gravenhurst and its former surrounding townships now all part of the Town. Gravenhurst Archives has only a very few newspapers from the Great War, on microfilm, and we have one person who is converting the microfilm to .pdf pages so that at least they are in a more useable format. But with companies like the Toronto Star who refuse to make their archives public except to Toronto citizens, it is pretty hard during COVID times to access their collections through public libraries. It is also very frustrating to have to hunt down the almost 600 men piece-meal throughout the country. Even when collections have been digitized, there is no common practice established re searching. So frustrating to be at the tail-end of the technology trail with such a rich history languishing in the pages of newspapers we cannot access.
Canada lags, sad indeed!
Definitely sad! I'm so used to Trove - it would be wonderful to have something similar here at some point.
Post a Comment