Annex 1: Selected Federal Digitization Projects

The following examples of federal digitization projects demonstrate how digitized information can be accessed in real time across geographic boundaries, thus enhancing equity and ease of access to information among Canadians and contributing to the promotion of citizenship and national identity.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMCC) holds in trust millions of objects but, like most museums, does not have enough room to display them all. Now, however, with the development of the Digital 3D Imaging System, CMCC’s artifacts can be replicated in 3D and these digital copies examined as if they were real. The AMUSE (Access to Museums) project was undertaken to demonstrate a revolutionary 3D laser scanning technology developed by the National Research Council of Canada and commercialized by Hymarc Ltd. A laser scanning camera digitally captures an object’s precise shape and colour simultaneously. Once objects have been digitized, museums can use the digital images for remote viewing and various research, conservation, publication, reproduction and insurance purposes.

The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), a part of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), provides digital access to scientific, technical and medical data and information from Canadian and international sources, and helps users seeking this class of information navigate through a suite of digital tools, including many operating on the Internet. As a world leader in rapid, high-quality delivery of copies of technical documents, CISTI uses temporary digitization of some 2,500 documents per day from its extensive collection to facilitate this access. Finally, as Canada’s largest technical publisher, it publishes a growing set of full-text digital scientific journals.

In the fall of 1997, the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) published a catalogue of its Canadian collection on CD-ROM. More than 13,000 Canadian works are documented, illustrated and presented in an interactive context. The NGC is also preparing for the December 1988 opening of The Learning Centre, which will offer a rich program of multimedia productions as well as access to an entire collection database, including visuals. Individuals or groups will have access to the Centre’s progressive program on-site or through various international digital networks. On another front, the NGC is playing a leadership role in the development of The Art Museum Image Consortium of Canada. AMICO Canada is a non-profit corporation formed by leading Canadian art galleries and museums to provide educational access to and delivery of cultural heritage information by creating, maintaining and licensing a collective digital library of images and documentation of works in their collections. The Canadian consortium is being formed to ensure that Canadian content will be available electronically. Products derived from the digital library will be offered to different markets under licences and through a number of distribution channels.

The Canadian Forestry Service, Natural Resources Canada, has developed the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, which automatically accesses weather data from the Atmospheric Environment Service national observing network, as well as computer-generated numeric weather forecasts produced by the Climate Analysis Centre. It transforms the data into elements of the Canadian Fire Weather Index and the Fire Behaviour Prediction System. Using Global Information System (GIS) technology, station data are integrated into daily national observed and forecast fire-danger maps. The maps are disseminated via the World Wide Web to fire management agencies and to Canadian and global audiences. By accessing global weather networks, the system has been adapted to produce maps for Florida, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region, and the northern hemisphere.

The National Film Board (NFB), working with organizations like Vidéotron in Montreal and Oz in Edmonton, is field testing digital distance access by educational institutions to selected films from its collection. Its award-winning Internet site, which provides catalogue information on audiovisual holdings, is being further developed to permit educational institutions and home consumers to place orders for videocassettes on-line. The NFB has developed an extensive children’s site—The Prince and I—in English and French specifically for access on the Internet, and has worked with a range of private sector developers to produce sophisticated educational CD-ROMs such as Making History: Louis Riel and Has Anyone Seen My Umbrella?, which are currently being launched into the marketplace. The NFB has also worked with Canadian Heritage Information Network and the national museums to develop other CD-ROMs such as Canada’s Visual History and Flypast.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/SRC) continues to expand its English and French services on the Web, reaching out to Canadians across the country and around the world. In the last year, CBC/SRC opened new Web sites, integrated new technologies and added numerous on-line discussion forums. Internet users can now go to the Newsworld On-line Web site to catch up on the day’s breaking news stories. New content has been added through a number of sites such as Adrienne Clarkson Presents and Demain. CBC/SRC has also become a leader in the uses of Internet multimedia so that you can now find live video and audio on its Web pages. CBC/SRC Audience Relations has also established its own Internet presence. Using email, message boards, and feedback forms, the CBC/SRC is responding quicker than ever to its audience.

Strategis is Canada’s largest business site on the Internet and contains over 70 information collections, 750,000 pages of text and over 3 gigabytes of current data. Industry Canada developed Strategis, with partners in the private sector, other federal departments and other levels of government. Since its launch in March 1996, it has been visited over 1.4 million times. Strategis is now averaging close to 150,000 visits each month and is expected to attract close to 200,000 visits in February 1998, tripling February 1997 levels. Strategis has only begun to tap into its primary market of 900,000 business users or companies, and into a secondary market of researchers, universities, consultants, lawyers and accountants. Canadians can access on-line a host of economic information such as company information, international business opportunities, micro-economic research and statistical analysis, and consumer information.

For 25 years, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) has been breaking new ground by developing a comprehensive digitized inventory of Canadian content. This special operating agency of the Department of Canadian Heritage now provides on-line access via the Internet to comprehensive reference services and digitized cataloguing information on 25 million objects in the national inventories of Canadian museum collections. Its Web site constitutes a value-added gateway to other Canadian and international heritage services, including a guide to Canadian museums and galleries, virtual exhibits, professional forums, listservs and special presentations. Current activities include a research and development project to develop an interface that enables the user to define a point of view, navigation strategy and search universe, while presenting the results in a learnable form.

The Industry Canada SchoolNet Digital Collections (SDC) program has enabled 15 federal departments and agencies, as well as some 150 other contractors, to hire young people to digitize collections and display them on SchoolNet. The program is designed to provide jobs for youth in technology, encourage the creation of new business undertakings and demonstrate the productivity enhancement potential of digitization while building the stock of significant Canadian content on the Information Highway. From the pilot phase to November 1997, over 1,000 young Canadians have been employed, some 200 projects have been completed or are in production, and over 100 collections are displayed on SchoolNet. This is understood to be the largest single collection of Canadian content on the Web.

The National Library of Canada (NLC) has built on its traditional library and networking strengths to implement an array of Internet-accessible services, databases and collections. resAnet provides WWW access to the National Library’s bibliographic records and to a burgeoning collection of networked electronic publications. Through Access AMICUS, Canadian libraries and researchers can search on-line through more than 12 million bibliographic authority records incorporating the holdings of Canadian libraries from across the country. The flexibility and power of Access AMICUS make it an ideal tool for reference work, information verification, cataloguing support and interlibrary loans. The NLC has agreements with a growing number of Canadian private and public sector publishers to obtain copies of their networked electronic publications. This innovative program helps ensure long-term preservation of and access to these significant electronic publications. The NLC has made a number of its holdings accessible on the Information Highway by hiring young people under the SchoolNet Digital Collections program to digitize material and display it on SchoolNet. These displays feature famous Canadian writers such as Gabrielle Roy and Stephen Leacock, the world-renowned Glenn Gould and "North: Landscape of the Imagination", as well as unique reference databases such as the Canadian Music Periodical Index and the Index to Federal Royal Commissions. All of these resources, services and systems, and many more, can be accessed via the NLC Web site.

The National Archives of Canada has also employed young people under the SchoolNet Digital Collections program. Projects have ranged from the digitization of a collection of Indian treaties (done by students in Nelson House, MB) to digitization of 20 percent of the million pages of Attestation Papers (enlistment documents) from the First World War Canadian Expeditionary Force. The digitized documents are being integrated into a database that is accessed through the National Archives Web site as well as the SchoolNet site. Digitization of the Attestation Papers is enabling the National Archives to improve its service to the public, preserve fragile records from the damage of excessive handling, and increase awareness of a key period of Canadian history, as well as providing skilled jobs for dozens of young people in Renfrew, ON, and Gatineau, QC.

Legal Surveys Division (LSD), Natural Resources Canada, is at the forefront in the exploitation of digitization technologies to provide both enhanced effectiveness and efficient client service. The Division is in the process of completing two major digitization projects: the Survey Records Information System (SRIS), a digital database of the complete Canada Lands Survey Records (CLSR) which indexes all registered plans of Canada Lands; and on a significantly larger scale, the scanning and digitization of all plans held by the Division. To date, the scanning project has resulted in the digitization of over 34,000 plans (60 percent of the CLSR holdings) occupying some 5,000 megabytes of data storage. In conjunction with ongoing efforts to provide nation-wide remote access to LSD’s data, these projects will permit surveyors and other stakeholders to deliver timely and cost-effective service to their clients and provide for sustainable economic growth.

NAISMap (National Atlas of Canada), Natural Resources Canada, is an example of an interactive, Web-based, popularized version of scientific and technical information in map form. It uses a selection of digital data sets to graphically portray national themes and related issues, and includes several range maps of endangered species. The most heavily used components of NAISMap are the interactive pages, including the "Geography Quiz" (testing knowledge of Canadian geography) and the interactive map maker. The interactive map maker lets users choose from over 200 spatial data layers to build their own maps; over one million interactive new maps were made last year. The NAISMap site won the Internet Society Award for Best Educational site in 1996 and the Government and Technology Award for innovation and technology in 1995. NAISMap will continue to evolve into a sophisticated tool enabling in-depth visualization and analysis of cross-discipline, national-level data.

The Photo Collection of the Earth Sciences Information Centre (ESIC), Natural Resources Canada, contains over 520,000 images in a variety of formats: glass plate negatives, prints, safety film negatives, slides, scanned negatives and computer files. The Photo Collection supports the official research activities of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and ensures the long-term preservation of the photographic holdings. The GSC’s original mandate was not only to photograph geological formations, but also to make a record of the people and customs of Canada as encountered by geologists during their field work. As a result, a wide variety of topics are represented in the Photo Collection: the work of the GSC, the peoples of Canada, geographic locations across Canada, the advancement of technology in the geosciences and resource development, and Canada’s varied environment. The photographic output of the GSC is now more research-focused. During the summer of 1997, over 350 slides were digitized and captured on a photo-CD, and may be made available as a CD product in the future. The slides consist of winning photos from the annual GSC photo competition. Several of the early images from the Photo Collection have been posted as thumbnail sketches as well as full images on the Earth Sciences Information Centre home page. By making this collection available in digital format, the ESIC is preserving and promoting a valuable and growing Canadian geoscience collection.