It’s an expensive effort, but Library and Archives Canada is planning to save time and money in the future by making some of its most sought-after files readily accessible to all Canadians.

According to documents obtained through an Access to Information request, 10 million dollars has been committed towards digitizing personnel files of Canadians who served in the First World War.

Fabien Lengellé,  the Director General of Services at Library and Archives, said the current budget is closer to 6 million, but the cost will hopefully be worth it when the project is done in 2015.

Lengellé said Library and Archives will spend the next four years scanning and uploading around 650,000 service files from soldiers, officers, nurses, and other military personel. Lengellé estimaes there are between 18 and 20 million pages to digitize and every single one requires extreme caution to handle.

“The operation is a delicate one. The paper is over a hundred years old and it’s pretty frail.”

The following document obtained through an Access to Information Request contains information on the funding for this and other commemorative projects. Click the “Notes” tab to find out more about this project.

Some service files are already online. Click here to view the service file for Canada’s 14th Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.

The project is one of many projects supported by the federal government to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Canada’s participation in the First World War, but the digitization effort will have long-term benefits.

Lengellé said the files spend a lot of time being trucked back and forth between the preservation centre in Gatineau and the public reading rooms located in Library and Archives Canada’s headquarters in Ottawa.

The preservation centre was built 30 years after Library and Archives’ main building, which wasn’t advanced enough to properly preserve all the old files.

This transportation costs going from Gatineau to Ottawa a lot and runs the risk of permanently damaging these rare historical artifacts.

“To keep manipulating them puts the entire collection in jeopardy,” Lengellé said.

While this digitization project will certainly save money trucking so many files back and forth, the whole endeavour is still costly. Although Lengellé said the money is all coming from Library and Archives’ own budget.

“The bulk of it is going to go to the actual digitization effort,” Lengellé said. “That’s manual labour, that’s very costly.”

The number of people working on the files will change over time, but Library and Archives will be hiring extra staff to help complete the project.

Library and Archives moves around 3,000 files per year for various clients.

In an email, Carleton research professor Tim Cook said the digital archives will be helpful for him and many others.

“Having the 600,000 available will be a new and incredible resource for historians, genealogists, and historically minded Canadians.”

Lengellé said the files are sometimes requested by historical researchers, but a lot of the time it’s relatives of the soldiers wanting to know about their own heritage.

“650,000 people represents 8 per cent of the Canadian population at the time. So anybody who’s got Canadian roots over 100 years old has a relative in those files.”

Library and Archives used to digitize on demand for Canadians living too far from Ottawa to come view the files. Although it saved travel costs for the person who requested the file, Lengellé said digitizing on demand “would cost Canadians 40 cents a page.”

This new digital archive of service files be available to all Canadians completely free of charge.

Although having all the service files in digital format will save some money for both the Library and Archives and Canadians, Lengellé said the project won’t change too much of the department’s regular activities.

“It will make a difference, I’m not downplaying it, but I don’t it would be a major difference on our physical operation in Ottawa.”

After the files are completely uploaded, Library and Archives will start looking at which documents they should digitize next.

“Once we’re done this one, we’ll look at what’s good for clients, what makes sense, and we’ll move on.”