newspapers; and government publications. Some of the source material includes the digitization of the Jesuit Relations, the Hudson's Bay Company archives, Canada's early Official Publications, early Canadian periodicals, health and medicine journals, and Governors General's papers. Role in the history of hockey 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. The ECO collection featured a letter from Sir John Franklin's 1825 Arctic expedition containing the first known written reference to a game of hockey played on ice. 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: Several Canadian cities, including Montreal (whose Montreal Gazette published the first set of hockey rules in 1875), Halifax, and Windsor, claim the distinction of the "birthplace of hockey," while similar stick-and-ball games were common (and no doubt occasionally played on ice) to both Europe and North America in the early 19th century. Following the discovery of Franklin's passage on ECO, the town of Deline (site of the original Fort Franklin) officially added its claim. See also Europeana Mexicana Flandrica.be References External links Canadiana Online Digital history projects Canadian digital libraries Historiography of Canada Mass digitization Open-access archives Organizations based in Ottawa Organizations established in 1978 Web archiving initiatives 1978 establishments in Canada