7/31/2019 Walker Ron. 2011. Canadian Content Online - An
Assessment 2011
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Walker, Ron. 2011. Canadian Content Online: an Assessment 2011,
Stratford Institute
Prepared by Ernest Hoffman
The author is the executive director of Canadiana.org
(henceforth referred to as Canadiana), one of the
most important and empowered TDRs in Canada. This report
provides an overview of the state of
Canadian online archives, as well as the processes that led to
the formation of the TDR model and its
relationship with LAC and Canadiana.
The ramping up of Canadianas development, budget and mandate
came in the wake of the 2005-2006
drafting of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS),
which was led by LAC in collaboration with
200 stakeholder organizations from a variety of sectors:
publishing and media producers, creators,
rights bodies, academics, provincial and federal officials and
memory institutions *+ The key tenets of
the strategy are mass digitization and increased digital
preservation capacity, and included providing
powerful search and discovery tools to make these digital
archives accessible to the public (Pg. 63).
Following the articulation and adoption of CDIS, Canadiana was
given a leading role in working toachieve the CDIS objectives. It
is the hub of the ongoing collaboration between 35 of Canadas
major
memory institutions, including LAC, CARL, BANQ, and large public
libraries. This collaboration has led
to the expansion of Canadiana.orgs role to facilitate planning
and coordination as well as provide a focal
point for initiatives such as Canada Online (a proposed national
digitization programme), a network of
Trusted Digital Repositories, and a Canadian Metadata Repository
and Discovery Portal (Pg. 64).
The author analyzes ongoing CDIS initiatives in terms of
Digitization, Preservation and Access, with the
latter two relevant to born-digital content. Following an
overview of digitization efforts to date, the
report notes that *t+here are a number of preservation projects
underway, notably, LAC, BAnQ,
University of Alberta and University of Toronto and
Canadiana.org are collaborating on a PreservationNetwork of Trusted
Digital Repositories to provide mutual redundancy,
interoperability, standards and
criticallyperpetual preservation (Pg. 65). Under access, the
report states that *o+nline collections of
digitized and born-digital content are held by many memory
institutions across Canada *+ we need to
make it possible to find it using modern search tools that can
search all the collections at once (Pg. 65).
Canadiana is working towards this goal through the Canadian
Metadata Repository and Discovery Portal
launched in January 2011.
The report also summarizes digitization and preservation
initiatives around the world, noting that
Norway and the Netherlands are comprehensively digitizing their
newspaper archives, and states that it
is essential to provide a preservation and access infrastructure
for all digital media, new and old, as it
enters the Canadian corpus.
This description reinforces the impression from other sources,
including LAC documents, that LAC is now
in a more passive role (receiving government archives and legal
deposit, etc), and Canadiana is leading
the active collaboration and acquisition, including in the
formation of the TDR network itself. It appears
likely that whatever major Canadian ongoing or planned
initiatives there are for archiving born-digital
news, they are or will be situated within the TDR network led by
Canadiana.
