The two print editions of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (EMC) have been the authoritative general reference work on Canadian music for the past twenty years and more. But for the past ten years, the EMC board of directors wrestled with the dual problem of how to find funding for EMC and take it into the realm of new digital information technology.

An interim solution was to make the contents of the second edition of EMC available on the National Library of Canada web site [renamed Library and Archives of Canada in 2004]. Funding from the Canada Council allowed a limited amount of the material to be updated in recent years. But the majority of the content in the National Library of Canada version of EMC was at best over a decade old – antediluvian in terms of Internet information content. The solution to both problems, which was adopted by the EMC board of directors at a meeting on 24 March 2003 in Toronto, was to donate EMC to the Historica Foundation.

Historica was created in 1999 in response to a perceived need to improve the quality of history instruction in Canadian schools, and more generally to make Canadians better aware of their past. The co-founders were Charles R. Bronfman (chairman of the CRB Foundation, which initiated the Heritage Minutes series for television) and L.R. (Red) Wilson (chairman of Bell Canada Enterprises). Initiatives supported by Historica since 1999 have included books, videos, radio and television programming, field trips to historic sites, and heritage fairs. The foundation maintains an informative web site at www.histori.ca.

Historica acquired The Canadian Encyclopedia in November 2000, and launched an online version in October 2001. Historica also provided financial assistance for the digitization of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which went online in October 2003 (visit www.biographi.ca. The timeline from acquisition to the Internet was even more streamlined in the case of EMC, which was launched as part of the Historica web site on 15 October 2003. Updating of the EMC articles will now be an ongoing process under the supervision of the editor-in-chief James H. Marsh.