Over the past six months, we’ve added 353 items to the Government of Alberta Publications Collection, and new material is being added every day. New uploads touch on topics such as post-secondary education, northern economic development, consumer price indexes, automobile emissions, and housing incentive programs — providing researchers with valuable primary-source documentation of Alberta’s social, economic, environmental, and governmental priorities, mostly from the 1970s and 80s.
Background: This collection is a partnership with the Alberta Legislature Library. Everything in our collection is then also added to the larger Canadian Government Publications Portal, a collaborative, cross-institutional effort to make Canadian government documents freely searchable online.
Collection scope and content: The collection’s strength lies in administrative and regulatory documentation, the kind of primary-source grey literature that’s often hard to track down elsewhere. Some examples of major themes include:
- Energy and natural resources: proceedings, orders, and reports from the Energy Resources Conservation Board and its successors, plus extensive material on natural gas, petroleum, and coal regulation — including long multi-volume inquiry records (e.g., the 1944–46 Natural Gas Utilities Act enquiry into Turner Valley, spanning 93 volumes)
- Education testing records: provincial examinations, diploma exams, and matriculation board materials from Alberta Education and its Student Evaluation Branch. This includes a run of standardized testing artifacts, concentrated mainly in the 1980s–2000s.
- Statistics and public finance: Bureau of Statistics and Treasury Department periodicals and annual series.
Who might benefit from this collection? Researchers in Alberta/Canadian provincial political history, energy and natural resource policy history (especially natural gas/petroleum regulation), education policy and the history of standardized testing, public administration, and social policy history relying on primary government documents and grey literature — particularly those with a research window in the 1970s–2000s.
Not sure if there would be relevant information? Encourage researchers to search the collection’s full text (“text contents” option shown below) by keyword and explore what is available, using the filters on the left.
