McCord Museum Keys for History Project 
Receives Canadian Heritage Grant

Montreal, Wednesday, November 13, 2002 — In September the McCord Museum and its partners were pleased to learn of the success of their application for funding under the Canadian Content Online Program (CCOP) of the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Hon. Sheila Copps, Minister of Canadian Heritage awarded a total of $727,662.00 to Keys for History, a Web-based research and design project. Thanks to this generous grant as many as 36,000 documents and artifacts related to significant themes in Canadian history will be digitized, and a number of these will also be contextualized in some 20 thematic Web tours. These tours will amount to miniature virtual exhibitions, in keeping with the McCord's tradition of innovative Web programming. Keys for History will debut on April 1, 2003.

Keys for History will make accessible a wealth of Canadian material culture currently held in the collections of the McCord, the New Brunswick Museum and the Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton. Photographs, archival documents and historic objects will be preserved in digital form and interpreted — in a fun and dynamic fashion — in both official languages. Schoolchildren and the general public will be familiarized with many fascinating events in Canadian history from the 19th century to today, from the Klondike gold rush to the Acadian renaissance. Historical themes to be addressed include epidemics and disasters, the daily lives and lifestyles of rich and poor, and medicine and the "miracle cures" of the 19th century.

The McCord Museum is spearheading the initial phase of the Keys for History project, with the help of several public and private partners, including the New Brunswick Museum, the Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton, Sygraf Inc., SonoDesign, and McGill University, as well as teachers' organizations and school boards throughout Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

Keys for History will be carried out in conjunction with ClioClic, a project initiated in 1999 by the McCord and several partner universities, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Drawing upon current secondary school curricula, ClioClic is a pedagogical tool for using online museum-based resources, designed to encourage the use of material culture in the teaching of Canadian history. The most recent ClioClic prototype can be viewed on the McCord Museum Web site: www.mccord-museum.qc.ca. In the menu, click on EduWeb.  

We acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Culture Online Program 

Source and information:  Nike Langevin
(514) 398-7100, ext. 251

Photographs available upon request.