Over 60 Million Pages of Digitized Canadian Heritage Soon To Be Available At No Charge

Over 60 Million Pages of Digitized Canadian Documentary Heritage Soon To Be Available At No Charge

Posted by Jean-Yves on Nov 19, 2018

As of January 1, 2019, 60 million pages of Canadian digital documentary heritage will be available at no charge to users. The Canadiana collections are the largest online collections of early textual Canadiana in the world. The removal of the subscription paywall will allow unimpeded access to this unique historical content for researchers, students, faculty, and all users in Canada and around the world.
Making the Canadiana collections available at no cost to users is a result of the recent merger between Canadiana.org, a not-for-profit charity, and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a not-for-profit partnership of 75 Canadian universities, finalized in April 2018.
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New York Times will Digitize its Photo Archive

The New York Times will Digitize its Photo Archive

Dick Eastman · November 12, 2018 · Photography, Preservation · One Comment

This may turn out to be a gold mine for historians and genealogists alike. The New York Times is planning to digitize more than a century’s worth of photographs, and it is going to use Google Cloud to do so.
The plan is to digitize MILLIONS of images — some dating back to the late nineteenth century — to ensure they can be accessed by generations to come. The digitization process will also prove useful for journalists who will be able to delve into the archives far more easily in future.

Until now, historic news articles and photos have been stored on microfilm and in other physical forms. This is not only difficult to catalog and navigate, but also prone to deterioration over time and through use.
Brian Stevens, Chief Technical Officer of Google Cloud, stated:

“Google Cloud technologies like Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Vision API are helping to preserve this priceless history and give journalists a new way to search, access, and analyze millions of historic photos and give them new life. Cloud technology is allowing The Times to protect one of their most unique assets migrating from steel filing cabinets to a cloud-based platform where journalists can bring visual storytelling to a whole new level.”

You can read more in an article by Mark Wycislik-Wilson in the BetaNews web site at: https://betanews.com/2018/11/09/new-york-times-google-cloud/.