The history project has accumulated files
related to the IDRC conference over the years. You can use the search box
below to search for a particular subject. The pages can be viewed by year or you can browse through the directory list. Please note that this is a work in progress.
The files in this collection were assembled from the contributions of several
people, who each had a different piece of the history of the development of NIR,
the CNIRS and the IDRC. We thank all the contributors for helping us make this
collection as complete as possible. If anyone seeing this collection finds that
other documents, that we have not included, are available to them, we would
appreciate any further contributions that can be made. Please contact Howard Mark at to submit new material.
Most of the files presented here, especially the older ones, were not available
in electronic form, but only in hard copy. They therefore had to be converted to
electronic form; this required scanning the paper document, using an OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) program to create a WORD document, editing the
WORD file, and finally, converting the file to .PDF format. The purpose for this was to make the collection searchable.
Some of the documents were available only in handwritten manuscript form. For
these, the text was transcribed manually and the transcription was appended to the
document and labeled as such.
In general, the OCR program had a tendency to do strange and wonderful things to
the text, both in the formatting and in the interpretation of the text. This
required manually reading and correcting errors in the document. The corrections
were unfortunately, but inevitably, not made with 100% accuracy. An attempt was
made to reproduce the format and visual appearance of the original document as
much as possible; this was also not done to 100% accuracy. For this we apologize
- we did our best. Anyone finding an error is requested to notify Howard at the
above e-mail address, so that corrections can be made.
A stickier problem that arose was the question of what to do about errors in the
original document. Sometimes there were obvious misspellings, missing words,
inconsistencies, etc. Historical accuracy would dictate that errors in the
original should be left as-is. However, sometimes the error was so obvious and
blatant that the temptation to make the correction could not be overcome.
Sometimes the two countervailing forces tipped the scales to a different
decision even in relatively similar situations. For this we apologize to the
more historically-minded. Anyone who is concerned about this in any particular
case may also contact Howard at, and request the
original page scans. These, of course, are not searchable.
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