The Dictionary of Canadian Biography used to be a big new book every ten years or so with a heap of short biographies in each one.
Not anymore. The DCB is becoming an empire. Now that the biographies are published online, will there ever be decade-by-decade hardcopy books like there used to be? It would be hard to do because the boundless space of the intertubes is allowing the DBC to include more people and to produce longer articles on them too. The last printed volumes of the DCB covered notable Canadians who died in a particular decade. Now the biographies in development for the decades remaining to be covered are probably too extensive to go into a single book.
These days, the DCB publishes a new biography online every week. The 1920s seem to be complete, the 1930s are providing a lot of the new ones, and the odd one from the 1940s can be seen. (Special cases can bend the rules: Pierre Trudeau is among the eminent dead already included in the DCB.) I'm currently drafting a DCBiography about someone who died in 1973, and I have no great expectations of living to see that one in digital "print."
Meanwhile, today the DBC announces a new expansion of its website.
Today we are proud to announce the launch of our updated website, which has a refreshed look and important new features.
We have added more than 300 summaries about topics and events relevant to Canadian history. When reading a biography, refer to “Related Topics” in the left-hand sidebar; click to read the topic summary and discover links to other resources for more information. Readers can also browse by topic: click on Browse (at the top of the site under the Search bar) and then Browse by Topic. As well as improving discoverability of our biographies on the Web, these related topics offer an overview of the many historical themes addressed in our entries. For example, the summary “Enslaved Black people in the Maritimes” provides context for more than 40 related biographies, including a group that we started publishing in Black History Month, among them Name Unrecorded and Lydia Jackson.
You will also begin to see biographical summaries at the head of new entries and, in the case of long biographies, subheadings; consult, for example, Ward Chipman. The addition of summaries and subheadings will be ongoing in the coming weeks.
As well, the site’s display is now responsive, adapting to all screen sizes, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.
I think this is good. I can see the additional material and the links back and forth add context for readers. It must also makes the DCB seem more classroom-friendly and teacher-friendly.
But I will confess to some mixed feelings about the unsigned interpretive essays that have been gradually added to the website and that are now becoming even more integrated with the biographies. It's more fun, sometimes, just to follow links from one biography to another, gradually putting together a sense of their shared time and place from their combined experience.
Which reminds me. Has anyone ever tried to put together a course in Canadian history or some field or period of it, using only the DCB as the course text? Could one? Would anyone? You could get quite a long way -- and the course materials would be right at hand.
(Update, July 11: I have a little case of covid at the moment, and covid-brain may have scrambled some of what I tried to write above yesterday. I've done some rewriting for coherence. Also: I should have noted the some of the new elements of the DBC will be added gradually and are not entirely in place at the moment.
