Why aren't all rare books available online?

Title page and frontispiece in Tales of an Empty Cabin by Wa-sha-quon-asin / Grey Owl (Archie Belaney’s false Indigenous identity). Item #35.

Although it sometimes seems as if everything is available online, the truth is that a relatively small proportion of rare books and archival materials have been digitized: the general estimate is less than 2%. Many of those that have been digitized are accessible only through subscription-based databases.

The team at Bruce Peel Special Collections worked to identify those titles that were freely available through other libraries and then we worked with U of A Library colleagues to digitize as many additional titles in this exhibition as we could. We could not digitize all of them for various reasons: books published relatively recently may still be under copyright protection while some historic rare books may not be in a state that would allow them to be digitized without causing damage.