Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions
| Motto | Digitization. Preservation. Access. |
|---|---|
| Established | 1978 |
| President | Jonathan Bengtson |
| Location |
 Ottawa, Canada
|
| Affiliations | Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, University of Toronto, Toronto Public Library, University of Alberta |
| Website | www.canadiana.ca |
Canadiana.org, formerly the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, is a non-profit and charitable organization dedicated to preserving Canada's heritage and making it accessible online.
The Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) was launched in 1978 by the Canada Council in keeping with the recommendations of the Commission on Canadian Studies (held by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada). The commission's report, To Know Ourselves, noted several major concerns for the development of Canadian research knowledge: the difficulty accessing Canada's published heritage, unevenly scattered across the country, and the deteriorating condition of material for which no preservation efforts had been made.
CIHM launched with the mandate to preserve Canada's older physical collections for future generations. The organization microfilmed materials to preservation standards, storing the masters at Library and Archives Canada and producing copies on microfiche for distribution to Canada's research libraries. By the late 1990s, the CIHM collection was held by 85 libraries and accessed by 100,000 users each year.
Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital repository containing some 4 million pages of historical primary sources catalogued in 10 digital collections. The database was launched in 1999 at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library with material digitized from the CIHM microfiche collection and a search engine developed at the University of Waterloo. The ECO collection initially covered four themes (English Canadian literature, travel and exploration, women's history, history of French Canada, and aboriginal history), which has since been expanded to 10 collections with the digitization of the Jesuit Relations, the Hudson's Bay Company archives, Canada's early Official Publications, early Canadian periodicals, health and medicine journals, and Governors General's papers.
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