The site actually contains two different collections: one for newspapers and another for books. The two sections operate in a slightly different manner.

Once completed, the Alberta Newspapers collection will contain all Alberta newspapers, whether daily, weekly or monthly, including all special and supplementary editions from 1880 to 1950. Most of the collection is being digitized from microfilm. As such, the collection is organized by the microfilm roll. For the researcher, this means you will have the same access to the materials as you would if you walked into a library and used a microfilm reader to view the newspapers. The collection is organized by year and by location so that you can look for any roll of microfilm that contains material from 1908, for example, or any roll of microfilm that contains material pertaining to Lethbridge. You cannot search for individual words within the newspaper collection, only by date or location of the publisher.

The Local and Alberta Histories collection consists primarily of paper books and books on microfiche. Both general province-wide histories and histories of specific regions and communities are available. In all cases, the text of the volumes has been processed through optical character recognition for searching. This means that if you want to find all mentions of "Calgary," for instance, you can do this. Most of the collection is based on A Bibliography of the Prairie Provinces to 1953 with Biographical Index, compiled by Bruce Braden Peel and Alberta, 1954-79: A Provincial Bibliography, compiled by Gloria M. Strathern, with the addition of a number of histories produced after these bibliographies were created.

The two primary search keys that the collection is organized around are the name of the author(s) and the title of the book. Although the place of the subject of the book would also be an ideal locator, it is not always clear where the "place" actually is (or where it refers to). However, both Peel and Strathern provide indicators as to the "place" of the local history. Gloria Strahern's bibliography is available on the site, and Peel's bibliography should be readily available in your local library.

Every book has an electronic table of contents that you can use to jump to specific chapters and sections of the book. The title of every book you display, either through a search or through browsing the collection, contains a hyperlink to the table of contents for that book. In addition, the index page also allows you to jump to a specific page of the book. Keep in mind that the page of the book refers to the "digital" page, so the numbers may be off from the physical document. Finally, the index page also allows you to do a keyword search of just that particular book.

I took a look at several of the books and newspapers available and found the quality of the images to be excellent. I could easily read them on my computer screen, although I had to use the Web browser’s scroll bars to move around each page. I did find that the newspaper searches are a bit slow at displaying pages, since these are huge images. However, anyone with Alberta ancestry will be willing to wait for these images. After all, it is still a lot faster than driving to Alberta to look at the newspapers or microfilms in person!

The Alberta Heritage Digitization Project is an excellent online resource for genealogists as well as for historians. Access it today.

My thanks to Sandra Devlin for letting me know about this online resource.