Multicultural Canada

With funding from Canadian Heritage, the seven partners in the Multicultural Canada Project have been able to digitize significant works associated with our multicultural immigrant communities and present them through a single integrated portal on the World Wide Web. The current project will result in the digitization of materials associated with the Chinese, South Asian, Vietnamese, Doukhobor, German, Ukrainian, German and Hungarian communities. Some materials such as the Chinese Times newspaper, provide significant coverage of their communities. Newspapers, photos, letters, and books are included in the online collection. In many cases English and French abstracts and even fulltext are available and searching may be done in English, French and the vernacular. The project also includes learning materials, making the material further accessible to their communities, all Canadians, and the world.

Led by the Simon Fraser University Library, the project includes library and cultural partners in Canada. The importance of such a project was highlighted at a conference presented in spring 2006 in Vancouver, where community members, libraries, archives and scholars came together to discuss different aspects of the record of multicultural community experience.

It is to be hoped that further contributions to the Multicultural Canada portal will continue, and plans are afoot to submit a followup proposal to focus on newspapers.