The University of Alberta’s library is migrating its popular online historical collection, Peel’s Prairie Provinces, to Internet Archive.
Peel’s Prairie Provinces is a resource that has helped scholars, students, and researchers of all types to explore the history and culture of the western Canadian prairies.
The site’s Henderson’s Directories from across the prairie provinces are among the most popular for family historians.
The University of Alberta is no longer maintaining the online collection, and it will be retired from the university’s website over the next several months.
Hosting Peel’s Prairie Provinces on the Internet Archive platform allows the university to take advantage of a number of new accessibility features and high-resolution downloads.
For example, Internet Archive offers expanded options for browsing, viewing, and downloading documents in the collection.
According to the university, “It is now easier to search and filter through information like year, author, and title. The Internet Archive’s interface also makes it easier to flip through books and zoom in on detailed maps and photos.”
For the time being, researchers can access both the original site and the new one on Internet Archive.
As of last summer, Peel’s Prairie Provinces contained about 7,500 digitized books, almost 30,000 issues of historical newspaper issues (4.8 million articles), more than 20,000 postcards, about 900 maps, and almost 8,000 books and other print materials such as magazines, journals, programs, catalogues, reports, and financial statements.
How to use
The University of Alberta has created an easy-to-understand and very useful, How to use this collection, guiding users where to find information, how to browse, and how to search on Internet Archive, including full-text search for newspapers and directories, along with full-text search within one item.
