The commission's report, To Know Ourselves, noted several major concerns for the development of Canadian research knowledge: the difficulty accessing Canada's published heritage, unevenly scattered across the country, and the deteriorating condition of material for which no preservation efforts had been made.

[1] Canadiana.org initial launch included a 'Discovery Portal' which was a search platform built by harvesting the cataloguing information (metadata) from Canada's major digital libraries.

[2] The portal converted each type of metadata into a common format, allowing users to search 60 million pages of digital heritage material held by 33 Canadian research libraries, archives, and museums.

In 2003, a Toronto-based hockey historian exploited ECO's search capabilities to trace the sport's origins back two decades earlier (and thousands of kilometers further west) than previously believed.

Addressed to British geologist Roderick Murchison from Fort Franklin on the south shore of the Great Bear Lake, Rupert's Land (present-day North-West Territories), the letter read: We endeavour to keep ourselves in good humour, health and spirits by an agreeable variety of useful occupation and amusement.