Connexions Information Sharing Services

The project was founded in 1975 as a national information clearinghouse for grassroots activists involved with urban and rural poverty issues. The project was originally called the Canadian Information Sharing Service. In an initial consultation, Jim Morin, who worked with the Canadian News Synthesis publication, proposed a voluntary collective organization for the project and became the first coordinating editor, who focused upon publishing analytical abstracts of the diagnosis and strategies being developed by grassroots activists, in order to circulate their work on a national level to promote networking, learning and collaboration. The name was changed to Connexions in 1978 to more clearly identify the project's action-oriented goal of connecting grassroots activists with each other and with information, ideas, and issues. The scope of the project expanded to include Native rights, third world development, women's empowerment, peace, human rights, and other issues. The project disseminated information through the newsletter-format Connexions Digest, which received documents and materials from participants across the country, and distilled them into a subject-indexed summary format.

Print-based for the first two decades of its existence, Connexions published more than 4,000 abstracts summarising the content of documents, articles, reports, and books, as well as profiles of organizations and projects, becoming in the process a resource and networking tool for Canadian activists and researchers concerned with social justice issues.

In the 1980s and 1990s it published The Connexions Annual, a widely distributed sourcebook of social and environmental alternatives. The Connexions Annual's combined articles surveying current issues confronting movements for social change with lists of resources and directory listings and profiles of grassroots groups working for change. The last print edition of The Connexions Annual appeared in 1994.

In the mid-1990s, Connexions moved online, and added new resources to its online library while pursuing an ongoing program of digitizing its print-based resources. Connexions Online hosts an online library of more than 7,000 documents related to human rights, civil liberties, social justice, economic alternatives, democratization, women's issues, gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights, First Nations and Native Peoples issues, alternative lifestyles, and environmental issues.

In addition to using Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal subject classifications, Connexions also uses a controlled vocabulary database of more than 20,000 subject headings developed by Connexions in association with Sources, the Canadian directory of experts and spokespersons. Connexions has worked with Sources since 1993, when Sources publisher Barrie Zwicker, a media critic and peace activist, asked Connexions Co-ordinator Ulli Diemer to lead a joint project to develop an online directory of Canadian associations.