Privy Council Documents: Introduction
In 1907 the then-separate countries of Canada and Newfoundland agreed that the dispute over the location of their common boundary in the Labrador Peninsula should be sent to arbitration. The highest court of appeal in the British Empire was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which agreed to hear the case. The hearing took place in October-November 1926. Each side submitted arguments and counter-arguments, and thousands of documents. The decision was announced in Newfoundland and Labrador's favour on 1 March, 1927.
The result of the case had important ramifications for both Canada and Newfoundland, and the 12 volumes of documents submitted to the court form a valuable historical resource used by students of Labrador history. These documents are archived at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS) at Memorial University, St. John's, NL.
In 2003 the members of the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site (NLHWS), and well over a dozen Memorial University undergraduate students, began placing all 12 volumes on its web site in as close a layout to the original printed version as possible. The project was huge totalling over 3300 web files.
In the summer of 2012 the site began upgrading from html 4 to html 5 using a faceted design approach, and making the site responsive to mobile devices and tablets. To include the Labrador Boundary Dispute documents in this upgrade would have been prohibitively costly. Instead we decided to convert all 12 volumes into one PDF file. Its size, however, is huge, totaling more than 44 megabytes.
In the original web documents up to five printed pages were included in one web page, yet with some documents over 60 pages in length, visitors would need to be able to move from one web page to the next within any single document. To facilitate navigation within the PDF version, we placed at the bottom of each of these web pages a bar containing hot-linked numbers. Each number corresponds to a web page of the document.
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We retained these links in the PDF file and they still perform the same function.
Visitors can use the Find or Search feature in their browser to search a subject in the PDF file.
Cautionary note: We began scanning the Labrador Boundary Dispute documents in 2003. At that time scanning equipment and OCR software had higher error rates than contemporary technology (2026). Despite our best efforts, some scanning and OCR mistakes leaked onto the web pages. These errors were carried over to the PDF file as "typos", that is, misspellings, punctuation errors and miscellaneously placed alphabetic, numerical, or other characters. At the moment, we lack the financial resources to systematically edit the PDF document for these inaccuracies. For citation and other purposes where accuracy is required, users of the PDF document are advised to consult the original archived documents at the CNS.
