About the Old Hansards Web Project
About the Old Hansards Web Project
British Columbia Hansard Services has had electronic versions of transcripts and indexes available to the public on the Internet since the mid 1990s. In the past, access to these products has been limited to those documents produced since the 35th parliament. Public access to Hansard documents published prior to 1991 has been restricted to the bound volumes held by a limited number of university and regional libraries.
In January 2002, an initiative was undertaken to convert Hansard transcripts from the 29th to 34th parliaments into an electronic format for publication on the Internet. The project required electronically scanning over 78,000 pages cut from bound Hansard transcripts and converting these images into over 2,200 text documents using optical character recognition software. This web-conversion process resulted in documents that are about 98% accurate. To provide our clients with a product that is 100% accurate, the page numbers in the transcripts have been hyperlinked to the image files for each page. This gives the user the ability to search and copy from a text file with the added advantage of being able to view an exact facsimile of the original published page.
A number of reference documents have also been created to accompany each of the legislative session for the 29th to 34th parliaments. These documents include an Executive Council list, lists of members and ridings and lists of rulings by Speakers and Chairs, bills and estimates indexed to page references. These products will assist users in locating the most popular items of business from these sessions.
The debates have been processed into HTML documents for the web. Each sitting of the House is published in an individual document and all sittings are organized by session and parliament. The documents can be search using the Hansard Search feature at the following web address: http://www.legis.gov.bc.ca/hansard/search/index.htm. This search feature allows users to limit the scope of their searches to specific parliament or sessions or to globally search the whole Hansard transcript database. The individual files may also be searched using the "Find" feature of your web browser. Due to occasional optical character recognition errors remaining in the documents, searches cannot be guaranteed to produce all results.
The image files are scanned reproductions of the original pages from the bound volumes that have been converted into GIF files for the web. They are exact facsimiles of the published texts. To view an image click on the page number in the HTML text file. Clicking on this hyperlink will automatically open a new web browser on your desktop displaying the page image. These images are best viewed in 1024 by 768 resolution. Some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer may open these images in a minimized form. You can disable this feature by deselecting the option "Enable Automatic Image Resizing" from the Multimedia section under the menu item Tools/Internet Options/Advanced settings.
Reference materials have been added to the Hansard Index website to assist users in finding some of the main items of business for each session. Page reference in these resources have not been hyperlinked to the debates. However, a table of Hansard sittings associated with page numbers and a link to the HTML document for each session has been created under the title "Hansard Sittings by Page Number." A link to this document is provided near the top of the Progress of Bills, Progress of Estimates and Rulings by Speaker or Chair web pages. To examine the debate on a specific item of business — such as second reading debate on a particular bill — make a note of the page ranges that appear in the Progress of Bills under that bill title and go to the Hansard Sittings by Page Number for that session by clicking on the link at the top of the Progress of Bills page. Locate your pages using the first column in the table and open the document for that sitting by clicking on the HTML hyperlink in the third column.
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