[From a press release dated November 2004]

Canadiana.org is a non-profit organization which for over 25 years has worked with Canadian libraries to preserve and provide access to Canada's printed heritage online for the 21st Century.

"Canada in the Making" is a 6-year project focusing on the history of governance in Canada, with the goal of making 1.5 million pages of early orricial publications available to all by spring 2006. With this support from Canadian Heritage, Canadiana.org will be able to add a further 250,000 pages this year. These will include selected Acts, Debates and Sessional papers from the Colonial period to Confederation, and 1867 to 1900. Over the next 18 months major serial titles such as the English Sessional Papers, the Senate and House of Commons Debates and Journals, the Statutes of Canada and 1st reading federal bills will be added to the full-text searchable Early Canadian Online database at www.canadiana.org.

*** WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? ****
For those of us whose ancestors were in Canada as early as the 18th century, Early Canadiana.org provides a tremendous resource of online images of early Canadian texts. This database is fully searchable, the images load quickly and can be easily printed on your own printer, and there are hundreds of thousands of images available on the free portion of the database. For even more images, the subscription rate is $80 per year (Canadian dollars).

Take a few minutes to take a look at this database.

- Lisa B. Lee
Oakland, CA