Let me start by wishing everyone a safe, happy, and healthy new year.  The new year starts with fresh hope for the kind of ambitious access programs that are desperately needed.  The BBC again sets the standard with the release of nearly 80 news clips from leading stories over the past 50 years.  Those clips are made available to UK residents under their Creative Archive License, which allows users to download, view and use the clips for their own projects.  This is the sort of model that the CBC should be embracing, but has yet to do so.  Perhaps 2006 will be the year.

Meanwhile, the new year will apparently be the year for a major digitization project for Canada' s universities.  Project Alouette, which brings together 17 universities, plans to digitize millions of Canadian public domain works. While I think we need legal reform to allow for digitization of all Canadian works, this is certainly a great step forward and it deserves public and government support.