Welcome to the Virtual Archives

Virtual Archives (VA) is an electronic archives publication. The historical documents presented here were transcribed and translated. This accessibility helps promote historical and documentary analyses.

Handwritten archives are often presented as museum pieces. The elegance of letters written by hand is captivating. However, sometimes handwriting prevents the content of a manuscript from being accessed. It is with the intention of making the content of handwritten documents accessible that Virtual Archives was created.

This electronic publishing initiative is also helping to create a database, which is still being developed and enriched. When annotated archives and virtual exhibits of historical documents are added, VA electronic publishing will be renewed and in constant progression. Special access to sources not only makes the texts easier to access and understand, it also centralizes the archival documents.

For this electronic publishing project, some documents from the Archdiocese of Quebec’s archives collection have been scanned for preservation purposes. It will allow for the future development of electronic transcription software (École Polytechnique de Montréal) and the development of translation software from Latin and Classical French to contemporary French and English (PORTAGE project by the Interactive Language Technologies Group at the National Research Council’s Institute for Information Technology).

The project is a work in progress thanks to the expert participation of the researchers.