The shelves are literally groaning under the weight of cartloads of microfilm at Canadiana, an organization working to create a massive digital library of Canadian history. Established in 1978, the organization was involved in creating the same cartloads of microfilm images of documents from Library and Archives Canada. Since the early 2000s, it has kept pace with new technology, continuing its partnership with the library by digitizing documents and the already-created microfilms.

For its Early Canadiana project, consisting mostly of published documents, more than 250,000 pages per year are being digitized. More collections are searchable on the Canadiana Discovery Portal. The Heritage project, which is putting images of the microfilms online, reached 15 million digitized pages in April out of a total of 60 million that it hopes to digitize in the next few years. More than six million of these images are already available and searchable on a free public website.

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/canadiana-organization-putting-canadian-history-online