This has been mentioned in another thread, but for posterities sake, I thought it deserved its own thread so people could easily find it by doing a SEARCH.
Most Canadian collectors know that about 20 years ago, "
Canada Post" donated all of their archival material to "Archives Canada". For quite sometime, "Archives Canada" ran a website called the "Canadian Postal Archives". Unfortunately, most of the site has been 'down' since October of last year. I thought it was a temporary problem, but in talking to the Library and Archives of Canada just a few days ago, I have been led to understand that the site will no longer be active and will eventually disappear completely.
For those of you not familiar with the site, here is some basics....
The main part of the site was an extensive data base of every Canadian and Provincial stamp from 1851 up until 2010. For each stamp, there was a main page that listed details about each stamp such as the printer, perforation, designer, quantity printed, etc. In later stamps from the 1960's on, they also had archived the original announcement that
Canada Post had made about the new issue - pretty much everything you would find today in
Canada Post's "DETAILS Magazine".
From the General Detail page, you could also click on "Documents Related to this Stamp". You would find it just under the picture of the stamp. In this section, you would find more pictures that included blocks, plate blocks, sheets, proofs, trials, and many other things. A massive store of philatelic information.
Here is a link to the ORIGINAL website as it is now.
https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca...80608_e.htmlBy clicking on CANADIAN STAMPS, it will take you to the menu where you can choose the stamp you want to investigate.
Once you click on that stamp though, you will find it is a dead link.
I will continue with my narrative. I was a little irate with the person I was speaking with, as I always assumed that once information is in the hands of the Library and Archives of Canada, that it would be safe and always available. In the end, she suggested that I search for the archive on the WAYBACK MACHINE, a website that claims its mission is to preserve and archive websites. You may see it another way. In this case though, I do believe that it is authorised. At the top of the page it reads,
You are viewing an archived web page, collected at the request of Library and Archives Canada | Bibliothèque et Archives Canada using Archive-It. This page was captured on 3:34:38 Sep 23, 2017, and is part of the Library and Archives Canada (9155) collection.You will find the entire archive on the WAYBACK MACHINE here.....
http://wayback.archive-it.org/9155/...S&Sect1=STMPIt is a little awkward to navigate. Each page only lists 200 stamps in chronological order. So if you are looking for a stamp from 2009 - you are going to have to flip through a lot of pages.
In order to flip to the next page of 200 stamps, there is a button with some letters and three small arrows pointing to the LEFT. Click on this, and it will bring up the next 200 stamps. This button can be found at the top left and bottom left of each page. You can also flip back by using the button with the three little arrows pointing to the left.
There are 4555 entries so there are a total of 23 pages.
There are 2920 individual stamp entries, which covers every stamp from the Penny Beaver up to the November, 2011 Christmas Issue.
That leaves another 1635 entries on the last 7 pages. There you can find entries covering proposed stamp issues, War Saving Stamps, Postal Stationary, and other things. As this is essentially a data base for an archives collection, you will find that everything does not have a picture.
There is still a lot to explore on the archive and I encourage people to post interesting material they find there, here.
Here are a few pictures I picked up while bopping through the later part of the site today.
Posted 04/14/2018 01:00 am
