National Library News July/August 1999 Vol. 31, nos. 7-8

Digitizing a Royal Commission Like No Other: Massey-Lévesque:
National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences

Louis St. Laurent National Archives of Canada

The year was 1949. The Governor-General’s Awards for Literature were only a few years old. The computer age had barely begun. There were no artificial satellites orbiting the earth, let alone any for telecommunications or broadcasting. There were no Canadian television stations. The Stratford Festival was still four years from staging its first production. Canadian books, films, magazines, authors, actors, playwrights and poets were striving for greater recognition. Universities were dealing with a huge growth in student population.

At a critical juncture in Canadian cultural history, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his Cabinet decided the time was ripe for a royal commission to address a wide range of issues pertaining to Canadian arts, letters and science. To lead this commission, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, the government turned to Vincent Massey, who was chancellor of the University of Toronto and would soon after become Canada’s first native-born Governor General. Joining him as Commissioners were the Most Rev. Georges-Henri Lévesque, founder and dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Université Laval; Arthur Surveyor, a civil engineer and businessman from Montreal, Quebec; Norman A. M. MacKenzie, president of the University of British Columbia; and Hilda Neatby, who was associate professor of history and acting head, Department of History, University of Saskatchewan.

The Commission’s Report, published in 1951, covered a wide variety of subjects which the Commission had under review, making recommendations on broadcasting and television, the National Film Board and other federal institutions, the establishment of the National Library of Canada, aid to universities, national scholarships, scientific research, information dissemination abroad, and the creation of a council for the arts, letters, humanities and social sciences. One hundred and fourteen public hearings were held across Canada, before which some 1200 witnesses appeared. There were 462 formal submissions received, along with hundreds of letters. ¹ In addition, studies were commissioned from prominent Canadians such as Robertson Davies, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Charles F. Comfort, Charles Bilodeau, Gérard Morisset, Pierre Daviault and Hilda Neatby, 28 of which were published as a special companion volume to the Report. ²

The effect of this royal commission has been profound. John Godfrey and Rob McLean, in their new book, The Canada We Want, remark that the "most important event in the development of Canadian culture, prior to the emergence of the Internet, was the report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences." ³ Claude Bissell noted in his 1986 biography of Massey that "by 1957, all the major recommendations of the [Massey-Lévesque] report had been implemented. Only the recommendation on ‘honours’ (contained in a special report never released) had been ignored, but in 1967 it was adopted in substance by the Pearson government. No other Canadian Commission, before or since, has had such an immediate and transforming effect." ⁴ Paul Litt, while taking issue with aspects of this statement, notes that "it is undeniable that the Massey Commission did have a significant influence in each of the four major areas of its work" and that "the real significance of the Massey Commission lies less in the fate of its major initiatives than in the general impact it had upon the attitudes of the public and the policies of the government." ⁵ The Commission was instrumental in the establishment of the National Library in 1953, its recommendations having been strongly influenced by many submissions such as those of the Canadian Library Association (CLA), the Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française, and many other groups.

Given the significance of the Commission’s work and its impact on the support, development and growth of culture in Canada, the National Library decided in January 1998 to digitize the report and a selection of the supporting materials and make them available on the Web as one of its digital projects, ⁶ thereby providing enhanced access to these key documents of value to Canadian studies researchers and students. In addition, the project offered an opportunity to mark two key 50th anniversaries: the founding of the Commission itself in 1949; and the creation of the Canadian Bibliographical Centre, which provided the core of the National Library, in 1950.

The project included two aspects: first, digitization of the entire English and French versions of the Report of the Royal Commission and of selected formal submissions (briefs); second, an applied research component, which examined the application of the early version of the Canadian Government Information Locator Service (GILS) metadata standard. A study of the accuracy of the conversion to digital format was also undertaken. The manuscripts of the studies which had been commissioned and the vast majority of the letters received were excluded. The intention to digitize at least some of the published studies had to be set aside due to constraints of time and resources.

To digitize the report, two small teams were established: one in Victoria, B.C., responsible for digitizing the English version, and one in Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez, Quebec, for the French language version. To help ensure consistency, an HTML template was provided to the teams. Since the teams were over 3000 kilometres apart and there were no in-person meetings, work was coordinated via the Internet and by telephone, fax and courier. This presented some challenges! But overall, it worked quite well. The conversion and encoding of the tables in the report proved the most difficult task, but that was chiefly in terms of achieving consistency between the English and French versions of the report. National Library staff augmented each team’s approaches to coding the tables to help ensure consistent presentation throughout the report.

Faithfulness to the original text was paramount. To this end, the digital version was proofread twice, first by the teams themselves and then a second time by editors at the National Library of Canada who had the advantage of bringing completely fresh eyes to the texts. All of the typographical errors which occurred in the original published report were marked with [sic] and were retained in the electronic version. Brief editorial notations were made if it appeared that the error in the original text would lead to confusion in regards to meaning.

The original index of the report was retained and links were established between the entries and the relevant pages in the text. First, hypertext anchors were established for pages in the body of the report. A batch program generated the hypertext links (from each index entry to the appropriate page in the report). Approximately two percent of the entries were not amenable to this approach and had to be coded manually. Even when one includes the time spent analyzing the index entries, designing the program, coding, debugging, running the batch conversion, and manually creating the remaining links, this approach cut the digitization time for the index in half.

The briefs have been transcribed, with the emphasis on ensuring accuracy of content rather than on representation of page layout. Digitization provided an unexpected opportunity to fill in some gaps in the National Library’s collections of briefs (submissions). For example, some of the appendices included with the Canadian Library Association’s submission were missing from the National Library’s holdings. Most of the missing material was identified through other sources and added. The result is a networked electronic version which is now more complete than the printed one. Among the briefs digitized are those of L’Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française, the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, L’Association canadienne des éducateurs de langue française, the Canadian Council for Reconstruction through UNESCO, the Calgary Allied Arts Centre, the Jardin botanique de Montréal, and the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union.

A version of the Canadian Government Information Locator Service (GILS) standard was used for tagging embedded metadata (information about authors, subjects, dates, abstracts, titles, etc.) in HTML files. The objective of this was to assess the implications of creating embedded metadata, the resources required, and issues of enhancing intellectual access. Embedding metadata in HTML files promises to help facilitate discovery of resources on the Internet. Unlike databases, this "embedded" approach makes the metadata visible to commercial search engines which then can index it for retrieval. For now, few commercial Internet search engines support indexing of embedded metadata, but it is expected that this will change as more Web sites start to embed metadata in their HTML files.

For testing purposes, application of the GILS standard was varied. The variances included adding abstracts, detailed lists of authors, or contributing organizations to various HTML files. The process of digitization affords excellent opportunities for creation of metadata, especially if the person digitizing (converting, coding, proofreading) a given document also creates the metadata. Although all of the embedded metadata was created "manually", it was clear that a more automated approach to generation of embedded metadata would increase efficiency and augment the accuracy and consistency of the records. ⁷

The average cost for conversion, coding and initial proofreading was just slightly more than $0.02 per word, or $10.31 per page (based on 460 words per page), with $3.20 per page being the cost of the second round of proofreading. Rates for the digitization teams were in accordance with those of the SchoolNet Digital Collections program. It took approximately one person-hour for each page to be converted, proofread, marked up, debugged and reviewed. The challenge of converting so many tables was a major factor in the overall costs. Converting tables to HTML files is very error-prone and time consuming. Both the English and French reports had over 80 pages of appendices, the majority of which were tables and required extra effort.

The pages of each chapter were kept together in one HTML file to the extent possible, but lengthy chapters were split into two or more HTML files to reduce downloading time. Keeping the pages of a chapter together makes it more convenient for users to print a chapter and read it off-line and it also helps to support a sense of context. The notes to the chapters were kept together as one HTML file, in keeping with the arrangement of the original report. Once downloaded and cached by a user’s browser, they load very quickly whenever a footnote is checked. A disadvantage of this approach appears when measuring usage: all things being equal, this approach tends to give lower statistics on Web page downloads than sites that oblige users to download pages one at a time.

Some enhancements to the site are planned and will be done as resources permit:

· Changes to GILS: since the initial implementation of Canadian GILS, the Canadian federal government has modified and approved the standard. As a consequence, all of the embedded GILS records are to be upgraded. This task is proceeding as resources permit.

· Biographies: earlier this year, a biographical note on Vincent Massey, written by Don Carter, a senior reference librarian in Research and Information Services, was added to the site. We intend to add biographical notes for the other Commissioners later this year.

· Studies and briefs: a priority is to augment the briefs which were digitized with others also selected for digitization but which could not be done within the time and resources available.

· Paragraph anchors: hypertext paragraph anchors are being included in studies which have been converted but not yet marked up. This will permit someone to create a link from an external document (such as from a footnote in a thesis or dissertation) to a specific paragraph. We hope that this type of inexpensive enhancement will prove useful.

Projects of this nature reflect the combined strengths of many contributors from outside the National Library. We gratefully acknowledge Industry Canada’s "Canada’s Digital Collections Programme" <http://collections.ic.gc.ca/> ⁸ for their funding for the project, which is one of several National Library projects they have sponsored and added to the SchoolNet Digital Collections site. In addition, we are grateful for the support of Bell Canada through the Stentor Alliance. Thanks also go to Dr. Paul Litt for kindly suggesting a number of briefs for digitization. Anita M. Vandenbeld and the members of the Executive Committee of the Organization for the History of Canada were very helpful in providing several contacts in the scholarly community. And, of course, our sincere appreciation is also extended to the Privy Council Office for permission to digitize the report, studies and briefs submitted to the Commission.

We would like to hear from you. So, if you have any comments on this project, on other National Library digitization projects, or if you would like further information, please contact

Doug Hodges
Database Policy and Planning Officer
Information Resource Management
National Library of Canada
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa Canada K1A 0N4
Telephone: (613) 947-5888
Fax: (613) 996-3573
E-mail: doug.hodges@nlc-bnc.ca

______
Notes

1 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1949-1951. -- Report. -- Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951. [xxiii], 517 p. On the Web at: <www.nlc-bnc.ca/massey/rpt/etable.htm>.

6 For a list of NLC digital projects (with emphasis on digitization and virtual exhibits) see: <www.nlc-bnc.ca/digiproj/edigiact.htm>.

7 Since completion of the test, the Canadian government GILS standard has changed. As a result, the syntax of the project’s embedded metadata is being brought up-to-date with the new version of the standard. For more information about the Canadian GILS standard, see <http://gils.srv.gc.ca/>.

8 Recently the SchoolNet Digital Collections program was renamed "Canada’s Digital Collections Programme". The URL is <http://collections.ic.gc.ca/>.