The University of Toronto Libraries are a network of 30 collections with over 15 million holdings, forming the largest academic library in Canada, and ranking third among research libraries in North America. With an average of 12,000 visits per day, and a rapidly expanding online information system, the collections meet the research, teaching and learning needs of scholars in an exceptionally broad range of disciplines. Serving researchers in Canada's largest university, across the country, and around the world, UTL is an internationally recognized cultural resource.

The University of Toronto has used Archive-it to create a comprehensive collection on Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups. The collection archives the websites of all of the national Canadian political parties, and a number of special interest groups across the political spectrum. The University of Toronto has been archiving these sites several times a year since 2005. You can find the University’s portal to their Archive-it collections here.

-Lori

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News, Canada's national public broadcaster, reported Monday, January 22, 2007 that

A woman from the Rural Municipality of Daly in western Manitoba faces a long wait — 13½ years, to be exact — for government records she requested about the province's livestock industry.

Read the full story online: Woman faces 13-year wait for hog industry info.

Officials from Manitoba Province were not available for comment on Monday.

I know we usually focus on US documents, but it's good to look at what's happening in other countries once in a while.

BoingBoing, one of my favorite blogs, frequently posts information of interest to libraries, and today was a banner day.

The first post of interest was a story about the UK's new *free* statutes database. The UK Department for Constitutional Affairs, after 13 years in the works, has launched the Statute Law Database project. Before this, access to consolidated versions of the law of the UK wasn’t possible without paying lots of money to a private publisher. While the writer mentioned that the situation in the US was similar with access dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis, a kind commenter pointed out that West and Lexis indeed dominate case law access, but US code could be freely accessible via GPOAccess, Thomas and Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

A little closer to home, The US counter-intelligence office of the U.S. Department of Defense recently related that Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada. Evidently, this is one way that foreign agents use to illicitly acquire military technology.