Built on CRKN/RCDR’s Canadiana et Héritage collections, the DCoF project mobilizes one of the largest openly accessible online resources of digitized Canadian documentary heritage. This trove of Canadian data is made up of 69 million pages of Canadian publications and archival records, including over 90,000 books, 23,000 maps, and 5,000 periodicals, historical journals, and newspapers from across the county. The collections span from the 1500s to the present day, with data in 45 languages (including 14 Indigenous languages).
DCoF unlocks the research potential of these millions of printed and handwritten pages of by transforming them into machine‑actionable datasets that will be accessible to both researchers and computational systems, enabling new forms of analysis, discovery, and long-term preservation. The project data covers a vast range of subject areas, including natural resources, climate science, public health, finance, histories of marginalized communities, immigration, and government policy. DCoF will mobilize this Canadian data to improve access, support interoperability, and reduce data silos. The project will enable discovery and collaboration by linking related data across domains and developing new digital tools and interdisciplinary research. In addition to facilitating the development of new evidence-backed knowledge in the subject areas listed above, the resulting publicly available infrastructure will give all Canadians the superpowers of the Humanities: the power to reveal the historical forces that shape their lives.
Ensuring equitable, nationwide access to Canada’s historical record is foundational to how Canadians understand their shared past, diverse cultures, and evolving society. Preserving and expanding access to trusted historical documents enables inclusive research, supports cultural continuity, and ensures that voices and experiences from across regions and communities, past and present, can be discovered, represented, and meaningfully reused.
Project Team
Lead Institution: University of Ottawa
Project Leader: Dr. Constance Crompton, Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities
Not pictured: Dan Brown, University of Waterloo, on leave.
Read the team biographies here
The DCoF Challenge
Funded by CFI, the 88 libraries that make up the CRKN membership, provinces, and collaborating universities, the project will start in January 2027. The project data is currently available as mostly OCRed PDFs in Canadiana and Héritage portals. The collections used to be paywalled, but when Canadiana merged with CRKN in 2018, the CRKN/RCDR member libraries agreed to continue to pay for the Canadiana platform, but to make it open to all Canadians.
More than collections, Canadiana and Héritage are national Canadian library-owned and backed digital platforms and research infrastructure that enable the preservation, discovery, and research at scale. The DCoF project will address the current infrastructural challenges that separate Canadians from their history, including:
- The documentary legacy of our colonial, racist, and sexist past and present from which vital contextual information is missing or inaccessible
- Outdated and unhelpful interfaces
- Limited/no machine or API access
- Siloed data with limited interoperability with other Canadian historical data resources
Read more about the project: Unlocking our hidden stories: Boosting Canadiana’s historical records
