11 August 2008

Australia's gift to Canada - maybe?

Nearly a year ago Library and Archives Canada (LAC), through the Prime Minister, gave the people of Australia a national treasure, an historic playbill printed in Sydney in 1796, a document that experts have confirmed to be the oldest surviving document printed in Australia.

What would Canada wish for in return? Maybe the National Archives of Australia (NAA) could give LAC the willpower to institute proactive digitization of record series nominated by clients.

Not only does NAA, like LAC, do proactive digitization of series it identifies, they also invite
researchers to nominate record series for proactive digitization.

All nominations are evaluated against selection criteria to ensure that high-use, high-value or at-risk material is digitized first. If chosen the records are made available to all online at no cost to the requester. Apparently some of the series listed here were nominated by clients.

It would undoubtedly take months of meetings and email exchanges for LAC to put the mechanism in place.

In the meantime why not nominate a record series directly to Ian Wilson, the Librarian and Archivist of Canada. Write to him at:

Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4
CANADA

1 comment:

M. Diane Rogers said...

Excellent idea, John. Besides the Canadian 1861, 1871 and the Canadian 'prairie' 1916 censuses, all of which I'd like to see free on-line 'in Canada' with indexes, (also for 1891), I do have another series in mind that I was madly copying from on my recent research visit.