- Story-Telling: Immersive Vault at Adisoke
A large-scale interactive wall, the Immersive Vault “transforms LAC’s collections into living experiences where objects, images, voices and memories come together to reveal the many stories that shape Canada’s documentary heritage.” - LAC records too difficult to digitize!
If true, this article from Juno News, citing a Tuesday, 25 August 2026 article from Blacklock’s Reporter, shows LAC is content to hoard. “Seventy-eight percent of records, 860 million pages, are still inaccessible.” Why? “boxes must be physically retrieved from storage,” and the problem of removing “clips, staples and other fasteners.”
Leslie Weir, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, recently returned from a trip to the annual IFLA conference in Busan, Korea. She is IFLA President. It’s sad that, with all that talent assembled in one place, she couldn’t learn from other organizations successfully managing digitization for access. - What’s in Collection Search?
As of 5 September, there are 7,930,971 items in the Archives section of Collection Search, 8,227,689 in the Genealogy section, 4,424,294 in Library and 352,681 in Images.
This post today struck close to home for me. For years, i successfully used the old LAC website to search the upper canada land petitions. From there i could take the information and go to their site where you could access over 300 reels of microfilm to find the exact record you wanted. This has all now been disabled. In utter frustration yesterday, i phoned the LAC to speak to someone in the genealogy dept. the first person i spoke to had such broken english that i could hardly understand her. The second person was polite and tried very hard to be helpful. But confessed that he really knew nothing about how to search for these records. He suggested i try clearing my cookies, or using internetarchive. Another option on the LC website to access these reels was last updated on march 9 of this year. It does not function either. So essentially, they have removed all access while they work on new access. Tell me this is being run by professionals. Please.
It does baffle me … obviously any digitisation project involves retrieving boxes…I did it myself YEARS ago as a summer student, working on a project to prepare for the initial digitisation (yes, I’m THAT old)…there must be something else to this, because that sounds like a really weak excuse. So frustrating.