Canadian Electronic Library
The vision of the digital library is generating considerable excitement in the library world, for good reason. It offers a promise of access to a rich body of authoritative (copyright) material that goes beyond the "unmediated" nature of the worldwide web. This access will be universal and perpetual, available equally to all library users in a jurisdiction or institution, regardless of location. Any item in the collection will be available to all users simultaneously, and sophisticated search tools will allow for quick location of items of interest. It will allow users to move easily between material on all media (text, audio, video) and will integrate local collections of material with published sources.
To help realize this vision, Gibson Library Connections launched the Canadian Electronic Library in June 2005.
As of January 2009, the Canadian Electronic Library has released over 20,000 Canadian monographs to libraries (of which nearly 10,000 are current in-copyright titles from 50 major Canadian publishers, making the service Canada's largest collection of e-books for libraries. The service is in use in every university in Canada.
The Canadian Electronic Library consists of three subscription-based services:
Most of the titles in the Canadian Publishers Collection may be ordered title by title under Perpetual Access licenses.
And new collections are being developed. See, for example, The Best of BC Books and the Irwin Law Collection.
All CEL services are delivered on the ebrary technology platform, which is built around the requirements of the digital library, and is designed to preserve the integrity of the original published unit while providing all the benefits of digital access.
Under permission or license from publishers, GLC aggregates the titles chosen for inclusion in the service. GLC carries out the assembly, cataloguing and organization of the collection on the ebrary platform, and delivers the resulting collection to its library customers, with full MARC records for every title, in a framework that requires minimal technical commitment from the library.
Once the collection is installed in the library system, the library user may access it through the library's online catalogue. A click on a record takes the user to the ebrary reader, a browser plug-in which gives the user access to all titles in all GLC collections held by the institution.
Current promotional literature (PDF)
More information on MARC records
Complete title lists pricing and ordering information
This is the MARC support and storage location for the Canadian Electronic Library.
CELArc is open to the public for search of all books and documents in the Canadian Electronic Library. It also provides several MARC support functions for institutions subscribing to the service. Using CELArc, subscribers may export and download selected MARC records customized for their institutional OPACs. And they may report errors and request corrections from SLC, the MARC supplier for CEL.
