Early Canadian Online is interesting to look at while remaining uncluttered. The backgrounds are sparsely decorated, a good compromise between boring solid colours and an overly busy background. The designers avoided distracting moving or flashing icons. Instead, they put their resources into magazine-quality static graphics. Control buttons are logically and intuitively organized. However, this site works very poorly with certain web-browsers, especially Java-based ones. No website can be all things to all software, and this website works well (but not perfectly) with the most common browsers.

Someone arriving at the site is presented with a number of search options. One can search for a document by specifying an author or a title. Alternatively, one can ask the search program to look for a particular phrase or word in the texts of the collected documents. If one chooses a full-text search, a list of all the documents in which this phrase occurs will be generated. Clicking on any title in this list brings you to the exact page of the document where the search term occurs. An image of the original document appears, which can be maximized, shrunk, or downloaded in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. This website allows anyone connected to the web to look at a selection of documents in the archives of the institutions that created this website without leaving home or leaving fingerprints on the originals.

Permitting people to see the scanned image of the original document as opposed to a plain text transcription of that document certainly has some advantages. Looking at the original image of a document increases one’s sense of immediacy. However, some of the images available on this site are of late-nineteenth century printed transcriptions of earlier documents, so that one is not looking at the original document anyway. The image of a page with a hundred words on it takes up far more memory than one hundred words of text in nearly any format. This increases the time it takes to view or download a given amount of text. I think that for most users of this site, what is most important is not the appearance of the page but its contents. Plain text transcriptions of documents rather than images of documents would have saved an enormous amount of memory (and money). This would have allowed for more content to be provided.

The most questionable aspect of this site relates to the selection of documents. Early Canadian Online was the product of a joint venture including the University of Toronto, the National Library, and Laval University. A website of this nature can not hope to be exhaustive, but there are documents available at other archives that perhaps ought to have been included in a site that aims to be inclusive and of national rather than merely central Canadian importance. Admittedly, funding is scarce and memory space can be expensive, but this just makes one question the decision to use scanned images even more.

Proponents of women’s history and native history will be pleased to see that many documents related to these topics have been included in this site. Unfortunately, this has been at the expense of documents relating to political history. For instance, nothing written by John Graves Simcoe is available, while a fragmentary document by his wife was selected. The substantial writings of both Simcoes ought to be on the Internet. Strangely, despite the site’s avowed focus on women’s history, native history, and narratives of exploration, the diary of Elizabeth Simcoe was not included even though it relates closely to all of these themes. Choosing a less expensive way of showing documents would have allowed for greater balance and completeness.

The basic concept of making historical documents available on the Internet is extremely sound. Bolder individuals than the reviewer have stated that it is the wave of the future. However, problems bedevil this particular site. Despite generous state and corporate financial support, Early Canadiana Online is deeply flawed. While there is the possibility that this site will evolve over time, the range of Canadian historical documents available on the Internet will likely not increase until other institutions are willing to devote resources to web-publishing the contents of their archives.