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Digging up History with Digitization
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Contact: Lynn Copeland, 604.291.3265, copeland@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, media/pr, 604.291.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
What: The Multicultural Canada Conference: our Diverse Heritage
When: May 31-June 2, 2006
Where: SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 580 W. Hastings St.
Carol Thorbes, media/pr, 604.291.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
What: The Multicultural Canada Conference: our Diverse Heritage
When: May 31-June 2, 2006
Where: SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 580 W. Hastings St.
May 17, 2006
Lynn Copeland hopes that a conference hosted by Simon Fraser University will increase public support for making Canada’s immigrant historical records accessible to anyone near a computer. Like a locked jewel box full of heirlooms, these records often languish on microfilm and other media in the obscurity of museums, libraries and archives, inaccessible to people who live far away.
Copeland, SFU’s dean of library services, is the instigator of the Multicultural Canada Digitization Project and the Multicultural Canada Conference: Our Diverse Heritage. The free public conference is designed to promote the project and develop fundraising strategies for the digitization of hundreds of thousands of immigrant historical records across Canada.
The material includes historical immigrant newspapers, such as the Chinese Times, oral histories, photographs, letters and legal documents. The digitization project is making this material accessible on-line in its original language, using vernacular, English and French search engines. Ultimately, linked websites will allow researchers, students and the descendents of immigrants to easily explore immigrant migration, ancestry and cross-cultural information on-line in several languages.
With state-of-the-art digitization equipment at the Burnaby campus, SFU is leading the massive national initiative. The digitization of the Chinese Times is one of the largest of five major projects connected to the Multicultural Canada Digitization Project at the SFU W.A.C. Bennett library.
Henry Yu, a keynote speaker at the conference, is using recently digitized material to mine Canada’s Chinese head tax registry for a book about the globalization of Chinese migration. Until now the registry has only been accessible on microfilm.
An associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia, Yu is one of almost 30 well-known historians, writers and archivists presenting their work at the conference and discussing how digitization will advance it. For more information and to register, see: ocs.sfu.ca/multiculturalcanada2006/
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Copeland, SFU’s dean of library services, is the instigator of the Multicultural Canada Digitization Project and the Multicultural Canada Conference: Our Diverse Heritage. The free public conference is designed to promote the project and develop fundraising strategies for the digitization of hundreds of thousands of immigrant historical records across Canada.
The material includes historical immigrant newspapers, such as the Chinese Times, oral histories, photographs, letters and legal documents. The digitization project is making this material accessible on-line in its original language, using vernacular, English and French search engines. Ultimately, linked websites will allow researchers, students and the descendents of immigrants to easily explore immigrant migration, ancestry and cross-cultural information on-line in several languages.
With state-of-the-art digitization equipment at the Burnaby campus, SFU is leading the massive national initiative. The digitization of the Chinese Times is one of the largest of five major projects connected to the Multicultural Canada Digitization Project at the SFU W.A.C. Bennett library.
Henry Yu, a keynote speaker at the conference, is using recently digitized material to mine Canada’s Chinese head tax registry for a book about the globalization of Chinese migration. Until now the registry has only been accessible on microfilm.
An associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia, Yu is one of almost 30 well-known historians, writers and archivists presenting their work at the conference and discussing how digitization will advance it. For more information and to register, see: ocs.sfu.ca/multiculturalcanada2006/
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