Collections Canada is an amazing resource database but also just an amazing thing. Contained in that digital archive, thousands upon thousands of lines of code work perfectly to create a time machine to Canada’s historic past out of digitized 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century journals, photographs, biographies, microforms, and even virtual exhibitions. A resource like this allows students to frame sources against their own world; a picture of a young person in the eighteen hundreds, a register listing names of soldiers who fought in the War of 1812, a journal entry of a young girl moving to the country in 1835, or even the doodles she draws, are just a few examples that can be used to connect students’ experiences to the material.
Not only is the site available in English and French but it is built to explore. This may seem like a bit of an obvious statement but many equally valuable sites are mazes of categories, bad cacheing, and have poor user experience.
The site allows the user to navigate alphabetically for specific sources, through categories for broader searches, types, topics, and even portraits. All in all it is a formidable resource. The link to the site is available below:
