This past summer the City of Vancouver recognized staff at the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for digitizing rare, historical materials and making them more accessible to the public.
VPL’s Virtual Vault received this year’s City Service Award in the innovation category at a ceremony in June. The items, once only available through an in-person visit to a special collections room at the library, are now available 24/7 to users everywhere.
Kay Cahill, director of information technology and collections at the library, said patrons are increasingly requesting electronic materials, at the same time that the library is struggling with the cost of maintaining the expense of ebook licenses. Exploring other ways to offer digital content that were more sustainable, VPL turned to the Internet Archive Canada. Internet Archive Canada is a not-for-profit dedicated to preserving and providing access to Canada’s cultural heritage through digitization and web archiving. Since 2006, it has partnered with over 200 Canadian GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) to digitize collections, archive the web, and preserve donated physical materials.
VPL partnered with the Internet Archive Canada on the project and embraced the library practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) to let users borrow one copy at a time of a digitized title in place of a physical one it owns.
While the award was specifically for city staff, the project could not have been possible without the support of the Internet Archive Canada, which provided the platform, technology, and expertise, Cahill said. The Archive contributed a Scribe—digitization equipment that the library set up in a central location in its building to maximize exposure of the process.
“The operator is working away digitizing content in one of our public spaces. They get so many questions from our patrons about, ‘What’s the machine? What are you doing?’” Cahill said. “Our decision to actually do the digitization out in the open has been a really great way of raising awareness.”
More than 3,000 titles have been digitized so far, including unique and fragile materials related to the history of the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver and British Columbia. The titles include:
- A Specimen of Printing Types, by Fry and Steele, Letter-founders to the Prince of Wales, Type-Street (one of the oldest books in the collection, from 1794);
- The Trout and Other Game Fishes of British Columbia (a natural history book with color illustrations);
- Early history of the British Columbia electric power system (a government document); and
- The Lions’ Gate and Other Verses (the first literary work published by a woman in British Columbia).
“Working with the Vancouver Public Library on this project, we’re proud to help digitize and make available the region’s precious local materials,” said Andrea Mills, executive director of Internet Archive Canada. “Partnering with other Canadian libraries allows for the safeguarding of unique stories and histories, and making them available for everyone to enjoy now and into the future.”
The initial collection was released on archive.org in late 2024, and further titles will be added through 2025 as digitization continues.
The library was very deliberate in approaching the project to keep within Canadian copyright laws, Cahill said, while expanding public access to the materials. At the beginning of the project in 2022, the library board approved a policy to ensure appropriate controls to maintain copyright compliance and protect rights holders’ interests. (See VPL Digitization of Print Books Policy with the guiding statements for the project: https://www.vpl.ca/policy/digitization-and-lending-print-books.)
While some materials were already in the public domain, for those still under copyright, the library made a good faith effort to contact authors to obtain their permission, Cahill said. About half were reached, and all but one granted permission for their works to be digitized.
In many cases, the books were no longer in print or the publishers had gone out of business. The library put up notice of the digitization on its website in an effort to find any remaining authors, Cahill said.
“It was very important that we not impact the ability of authors to earn a living from their work, so if there was a copy available to buy, we would buy a copy instead,” Cahill said.
The newly available materials online have generated excitement among the public, Cahill said, and journalists from local media outlets have used the digital collection when researching stories. Other librarians interested in replicating the project have reached out to VPL to ask about the process.
“This is really valuable work. We feel that the principles we established, and controls we wrote into the policy, represent a conservative approach, and that’s the right way to do this,” Cahill said. “We want a thriving ecosystem for libraries, for authors and for publishers.”
For more on the project, see our post from December: https://internetarchivecanada.org/2024/12/18/bringing-vancouvers-past-to-the-present-digitizing-rare-collections-with-vancouver-public-library-and-internet-archive-canada/
Photos from the city event: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofvancouver/54571437955/in/album-72177720326685383