DIGITISING PARLIAMENTARY JOURNALS

DIGITISING THE PARLIAMENTARY JOURNALS OF THE OLDEST LEGISLATURE IN CANADA

The Nova Scotia Legislature has undertaken an extensive project over many years to digitise its historic journals from 1758 to increase accessibility to its citizens. Today, the collection is now available online in Canada, the United States and the UK.

The Nova Scotia House of Assembly is the oldest Legislature in Canada, having first sat in 1758. Today, the House of Assembly continues to meet at Province House in Halifax, a National Historic Site and Canada’s oldest, continuously occupied Legislative building which first opened on 11 February 1819.

Following an extensive project by the Legislature’s staff, members of the public in Nova Scotia as well as researchers and citizens across Canada will now have electronic access to all of the Nova Scotia Legislative Library’s historical journals dating from 1758.

The journals include the minutes of the House of Assembly, beginning with the first meeting in 1758, and other information and reports. Initially hand-written, the journals illuminate government responses to important events while detailing the evolution of Nova Scotia as a Province and the everyday lives of its people.

The Legislative Librarian, David McDonald explained: “A lot of people did not realise that until 1962, the journals included government departmental reports. If you are interested in how the Nova Scotia government spent money in the past, these publications have everything from the details of the building of the 1759 Sambro Lighthouse, which can be argued to be the Province’s first public expense, and the construction of Province House to how Nova Scotia’s rail and road transportation network was built. They also have very interesting statistics on the health of Nova Scotians.”

One of the key objectives for the Legislative team was to increase access to its historic collections and to make the collection more accessible. “We receive a lot of questions every year from researchers looking for these reports – now we just have to provide them the link” David McDonald continued.

“The end product is really the result of years of work that actually started in the 1950s with the microfilming of the Journals from 1758 to 1766 and 1867 to 1939. Had this work not been completed then, we would have had considerable difficulty digitising these volumes as some are extremely fragile.”

In 2016, the Nova Scotia Legislative Library digitised the journals from 1867 to 1900. Canadiana.org, now part of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, had already posted online those from 1767 to 1866.

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, library staff were able to utilise their time to digitise the remaining journals – from 1758 to 1766 and 1901 to 2003.

One of the challenges was to scan the microfilm journals using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. Some of the older, handwritten materials did not OCR very accurately, however, the Legislature didn’t have the resources to review all documents for accuracy.

Second copies of some of the journals were used for scanning as it was easier to scan if the copy has been guillotined (i.e. the binding removed) and pages can be fed through a delicate scanner (recommended by the Nova Scotia Archives).

Previously, researchers and members of the public had to visit the library in person to review the material or request that it be sent to them. The electronic publications are expected to be used by researchers across both Nova Scotia and Canada.

Academic Feedback:

Shirley Tillotson, retired Professor at the department of history at Dalhousie University, and Inglis Professor, University of King's College: “The journals are a great source for political history. They are a guide to the issues of their day. But for some periods, they also contain a wealth of curious detail, full of human interest, that came up as the House of Assembly investigated conflicts and adjudicated claims. Making a full range of the journals digitally available will be a great help to Nova Scotia researchers and to international historians, too.”

R. Blake Brown, Professor and Chair, department of history at Saint Mary's University: “The archive of the historic journals of the House of Assembly is a rich resource for scholars and members of the public interested in the legal, political and social history of Nova Scotia. The digitisation of the earliest handwritten journals is especially valuable, as previously these documents were only available to researchers who had the time and resources to visit the Nova Scotia Archives.”

Michèle Raymond, former MLA, historical researcher and author: “The Legislative library has undertaken the massive work of presenting online the daily minutes of the early Nova Scotia House of Assembly and making them widely accessible for the first time in more than 250 years. Researchers can now follow government responses to events including the deportation of the Acadians, the revolution of the 13 colonies to the south, the settlement of the Loyal Refugees and partition of New Brunswick and Cape Breton from Nova Scotia. The newly digitised early journals are critical records showing us how we got here, as a Province and as a nation.”

If your Legislative library has any questions about the process of digitising your collection, please email the Nova Scotia Legislative Librarian via David.McDonald@novascotia.ca.

To access the journals of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly visit https:// nslegislature.ca/legislative-business/journals. For jurisdictions outside of Canada, the USA and UK please contact the Legislature direct.