The $25-million total CFI investment will provide researchers and students in the humanities and social sciences - who comprise more than half of Canada's academic researchers and students -- with desktop access to a huge variety of searchable national and international academic research material.

"Together these projects will significantly enhance the capacity of scholars on this campus and across Canada to advance knowledge and remain at the forefront in rapidly changing areas of humanities and social science research," said U of S library dean Vicki Williamson.

At present, humanities and social science academic journals exist mostly in print form. A $5.8-million CFI investment -- Synergies -- will move humanities and social sciences research into the digital world, creating a national network for the production, storage, and access to digitized knowledge generated in Canada. This will include peer-reviewed journal articles, datasets, theses, conference proceedings, and scholarly books.

"Scholarly journals that are digitized can cut costs, carry much more information and be more easily searched," said Peter Stoicheff, U of S associate dean of humanities and fine arts in the U of S College of Arts and Science.

The U of S is a member of the Synergies' Prairie node which is led by the University of Calgary and includes the University of Winnipeg and Athabasca University.

With $26,000 from the CFI and matching funding to be sought from other sources, the U of S will be able to digitize its own scholarly journals through investments in equipment and student researchers at the new Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre in the College of Arts and Science on campus.

"This project will open up U of S humanities and social science research to a potentially much larger audience, enhancing our profile on national and international stages in the process," Stoicheff added.

The second project, led by the University of Ottawa, will provide researchers at the U of S and 66 other Canadian universities with electronic access to social sciences and humanities scholarship from around the world.

More than $19 million in CFI funding will be invested in the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a consortium of Canadian universities. Combined with additional pooled contributions from member universities and provincial funding agencies, this investment will provide online research content through licensing agreements with Canadian and international publishers. The U of S library will be making a contribution over the course of the five-year project.

Examples of potential new resources include a digital library of more than two million pages of Canada's printed heritage -- from the time of the first European settlers up to the early 20th century - and a digital collection of more than 155,000 volumes of works published in the U.K. between 1701 and 1800.

The CRKN will build on the Canadian National Site Licensing Project, an earlier CFI-funded initiative that provided comparable resources for researchers working in the fields of science, technology, and medicine.

"That project had a profound impact on the way U of S faculty and students conducted their research, on the quality of that research, and on the development of library infrastructure," said Williamson.

"This new initiative, focused on the humanities and social sciences, will contribute to development of better quality research overall and new leading-edge and multi-disciplinary research at the U of S."

The Canada Foundation for Innovation is an independent corporation created by the federal government to fund research infrastructure. For more information, visit: www.innovation.ca

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For more information, contact:

Vicki Williamson
Library Dean
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-5942

Peter Stoicheff
Associate Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts
College of Arts and Science
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-5516