Alberta Historical Law Collection
My first post was about a resource I like out of BC, one that I never see reference to. Moving east, this is one I rely on from Alberta. I never see reference to it either but I think it’s a valuable resource.
When asked to find an old (and I mean “old”) version of an Alberta Act, I stumbled upon the Alberta Historical Law Collection and I was VERY impressed! It has been developed as part of the Alberta Historical Digitization Project (check out its other interesting offerings) and is produced by the University of Calgary Press with the support of the Alberta Law Foundation.
It includes all of Alberta’s Statutes up to 1990, Legislative Assembly Bills, Debates and Journals, the Alberta Gazette and the Ordinances of the Northwest Territories prior to the birth of Alberta.
You can Browse the collection or Search by keyword. Help screens are available for information about the documents and about how to search these pages.
I wish every province had a resource like this! Do tell if there are others out there.
Way back (as these things go in Slaw), and, so, before your time, your fellow Westerner, Brenda Johnson, extolled the virtues of this fine collection, too: http://www.slaw.ca/2005/09/14/historical-legislation-at-your-fingertips/. It’s good, though, to keep reminding the east how much catching up there is for it to do.
Well fiddle-dee-dee! How do you like that! What a good reminder to do a little search of the Slaw archives first to be sure I’m not duplicating! Thanks for the heads up, Simon.
Funny moment … as soon as I saw this, I though it was me who had posted it previously. I had, but was obviously confused as to where … one of the troubles with multi-location blogging. :-)
I’m also a big fan of the Alberta database. In answer to Heather’s question, I can say something about the situation in BC. There have been a number of institutional digitalization initiatives such as UBC and BCCLS did with the early BC Repots
http://stikine.library.ubc.ca/bcreports/index.html
I believe the BC legislature is also working on digitalizing early BC legislative documents. However, other than the efforts of LLMC Digital
http://wwww.llmcdigital.com which is a membership database, there is no coordinated approach like Alberta did. Preliminary discussion have begun in
BC with the two universities and the courthouse library society.
I would be amiss to point out that BC legal history did not come east from Ontario but is distinct in its own right and involves the two former colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. As one of the rare native Vancouver Islanders, at one time we even had out own flag, which you can view at
http://www.atlasgeo.net/fotw/flags/ca-bc-vi.html
Or for a real insight to the nuttiness that is BC try the gloriously waiving flag of Saltspring Island, home to hippies, goats and millionaires:
http://www.multimediapalace.com/fl/flags-ca/ca-bc-htm/ca-bc-salt-sring-island.htm