Growing up in Halifax, I have been really interested in the Titanic story since I was a child. The Halifax connection is well documented here.    I remember visiting the Titanic graveyard in Halifax as a child and it was the most decrepit place, dirty with illegible falling down headstones.  I understand that it's been spruced up quite a lot since Cameron's Titanic film came out and revived interest.   The Martime Museum of the Atlantic has been collecting Titanic artifacts and documents for many years as well.   Newfoundland also played a big role in the rescue and recovery efforts - read more here.

One of the best ways to experience history is through the newspapers of the day.  All Canadian newspapers covered the tragedy and subsequent rescue and recovery efforts - you can view these articles online via our subscription to the Globe and Mail Archive.  We also have online archives of the London Times, New York Times, Washington Post.

We also have a number of British newspapers from that period, which document the ship's building and launch, maiden voyage, sinking, and the aftermath, too: lawsuits and maritime safety regulations and burials.  A number of very famous, very wealthy people were on board and the Titanic story dominated the news for a long time.

This subject guide (not one of mine) has great links to more information on all aspects of the Titanic Disaster.

Link: http://1940census.archives.gov/

Not yet indexed by name, but still useable with a little advance legwork.

Link: http://library.uvic.ca/dig/VictoriaFirePlans.html

From the site:

The Fire Insurance Plans (FIPs) from 1885 to 1916 are undoubtedly the best maps of Victoria for the period.   Created by Charles E. Goad and Company to assist insurance underwriters in determining fire insurance risk these coloured  maps show the developing neighbourhoods of the city at a scale of 50 feet to the inch  -- so detailed  a single sheet often only fits four entire blocks. There was not much about the city and its buildings that missed the eye of the underwriters and the information is all here for historians, geographers, genealogists, and the just plain curious.

Using symbols and colours, the maps indicate the use,  construction material, the shape, height and number of floors, and for industrial buildings, building functions, fuel, and fire protection.  Race was one of the key divisions of the era and the FIPS   indicated building used by Chinese, Japanese, Indians and for what purposes.   As street cars and railways serviced the city, they were mapped and when the automobile challenged them, new garages, and parking areas were also recorded.  As  firefighting infrastructure developed the maps show the city water mains and fire hydrants.

In this digital collection drawn from the BC Archives collection are all of the 1891 plans, the full set of 1903 plans (with revisions to 1909 indicated),  and the surviving plans from 1911 plans (revised to 1913).  The number of plans required expanded to cover the city grew from 31 in 1891 to over 170 in 1913.

Frances M. Woodward,  “Fire Insurance Plans and British Columbia Urban History: A Union List,” BC Studies, 42 (Summer 1979) 13-26 contains more information on the BC FIPs and a list including extant maps for other cities besides Victoria.

The University of Victoria Libraries wishes to thank the BC Archives for making these maps available and supporting their digitization.

Link: http://teachinghistory.org/digital-classroom/ask-a-digital-historian/23885

This article, from Teachinghistory.org, the US "National History Education Clearinghouse", gives several great sources for finding usable, citable online images to use in the history classroom.

Link: http://historyonics.blogspot.ca/2011/10/academic-history-writing-and-its.html

http://historyonics.blogspot.ca/2011/10/academic-history-writing-and-its.html

This article discusses the consequences of the 'death' of the book that is occuring with mass digitization projects and the rise in sales of new ebooks, and argues that historians need to address "the critical impact of digitization on our intellectural praxis."  What do we lose?  He says, "Provenance, edition, transcription, editorial practise, readership, authorship, reception -- the things we query issues in relation to books, are left unexplored in relation to the online text we actually read."

No one at the Is The Book Dead? debate, held for IdeasWeek2012, raised these arguments around ebooks impact on scholarship, but I will think of this article every time I am frustrated trying to find a publication date on a mass digitized ebook.