E-Collection

What is the E-Collection?

The Depository Services Program (DSP) began building a collection of Government of Canada electronic publications in 1995. The E-collection includes over 85,000 freely accessible titles. Currently, about 500-600 titles are added to our catalogue every month. These publications are produced by departments and agencies across the Government of Canada.

Until 2000, the collection was relatively small and comprised of a number of different file formats. After that date, Adobe® PDF became the preferred file format for acquisition because of the ease of downloading, re-hosting and printing by end-users, compared with other standard Web file formats.

How to access the E-Collection

You can search or browse our catalogue to find publications that are included in the E-collection. A link to the electronic publication is provided on the Search Result and Publication Information Web pages.

Electronic serial titles also may be accessed via Browse Serial Publications. In addition, all electronic publications are listed in either Weekly Checklists or Supplementary Checklists which include active links to listed titles.

About electronic file formats

In the Government of Canada, Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet 2.0 (CLF 2.0) came into effect on January 1, 2007. One important requirement of these standards is that the primary file format for all Web content must be XHTML. This conforms with globally accepted standards for accessibility to Web content by persons using assistive devices. However, because Publishing and Depository Services is only an aggregator of content in PDF format that was originally created by other government organisations, it maintains an electronic publications collection largely in PDF format. The various government organisations that originally created and hosted the publications in the collection have the responsibility to provide the publications in the formats required by CLF 2.0.