Canadian Documents Collections

Public Documents Collections

To complement the Publishers Collection, we are offering collections of material drawn from the public domain, in that the documents included are those issued in PDF form by nonprofit and public-sector organizations and freely available to the public through the internet. While the publishers commonly post their publications on their websites and make them available for free downloading, the monitoring, acquisition and processing of such a disparate body of material is beyond the resources of even the most specialized library. The Canadian Electronic Library gathers the documents from the sources, arranges permissions if necessary and provides libraries with the regularly updated collection on the ebrary platform.

Content Guidelines

Public Documents Collections inclusion policies are guided by quality criteria which favour titles of lasting reference value.

Documents in both official languages are included. Emphasis is on publications post-dating 2003.

Included are: research papers, reports, studies, policy papers & briefs, discussion papers, numbered series, working papers and speeches (selectively.)

Excluded are: press releases, flyers, ephemera and promotional publications, manuals, handbooks, guides, instructional materials, textbooks, teaching aids, backgrounders, fact sheets, newsletters, journals and journal articles, bibliographies, regulatory decisions.

Perpetual Access Provision

Because these are public documents freely available on the Internet, GLC offers all subscribers perpetual access ownership of all titles supplied. We provide a complete archive of all documents in PDF form for download by subscribing institutions; these files are named by accession number, allowing the institution to create a local store of documents linked to the MARC records provided.

Replacement Policies

From time to time documents included in our services are rescinded by publishers or issued as new editions. In these cases our editorial policy is to retain the original document and add any new the new one. Where a publisher issues a corrected version and requests that the original be replaced, we will do this, but we will replace the original document with the new, thus avoiding removal of MARC records.