What Sorts of Electronic Texts are Currently in the Library's Collection?

The National Library strives to comprehensively collect and archive indefinitely all original networked electronic publications of Canadian origin, published both domestically and abroad.

However, the NLC does not necessarily collect every version/edition of all networked electronic publications. Whenever possible, the Library collects, displays, provides access, and stores networked electronic publications in the formats in which the publications were originally published. For pragmatic reasons, the NLC allocates priority to collecting standard format publications, and also ensures that formats collected include those accessible to the perceptually disabled.

The current Electronic Collection contains works of literature, nonfiction and memoirs, government publications, periodicals, zines, and a wide variety of other forms.

How To Submit An Electronic Publication to the National Library

The following formats may be sent through regular mail:

• diskette
• various CD formats (CD-ROM, CD-RW, etc.)

Send all such submissions to the following address:

Publishers also may transmit their electronic publications to the Library over the Internet, using the following methods:

• e-mail
• FTP

(contact the NLC at the address given above for specific information on these deposit methods)

HTML publications must be easily transferable and operational on the NLC's server. To meet these criteria, all files and sub-directories must be organized under a single directory. Relative URLs (e.g. ../images/flowers.gif, images/flowers.gif, flowers.gif) must be used for hypertext links accessing the publication directly, while absolute URLs (e.g. http://www.collectionscanada.ca) must be used for hypertext links accessing information outside the publication. For more information on the subject of relative URLs, see this page at Wired magazine's Webmonkey site, an excellent source of tutorials and articles on developing content for the Web.

The Electronic Collection resides on a server running a Unix operating system. Unix is a case-sensitive language, which means that it recognizes uppercase and lowercase letters as distinctly different entities. Therefore, the files 'flower.gif', 'Flower.gif' and 'FLOWER.GIF' are all seen as different from each other, because of the difference in case. When preparing files for deposit at the NLC, you must always use the same case for file and directory names as you used in the HTML code itself. Also, file and directory names should not have any 'space' characters in their names. For example, use 'afile.txt' instead of 'a file.txt'.

For more information on deposit, with the NLC, see Information for Publishers.

How To Access An Electronic Publication on the National Library Web Site

• browsing by title
• browsing by subject, using the first three Dewey Decimal numbers
• full text search of ASCII, HTML, .txt. .doc, and .wpd files
• AMICUS Web, which searches the National Library's catalogue by title, author, subject, ISBN, ISSN, publisher, subject, AMICUS number and much more.