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CIDL Activities 2004
Digital Canada: Toward a Common Information Infrastructure for Canada
This document was first presented at the CIDL Open Meeting on June 3, 2004.
Brian Bell, Director, E-Services Development, Halton Information Network (HALINET)
Chair, CIDL Steering Committee (2004-2006)
Revised, David McKnight, Digital Collections Librarian, McGill University
Member, CIDL Steering Committee (2004-2006)
Introduction
This document is a look at the "big picture" of a common information infrastructure for Canada. It outlines the components required for a national digitization strategy that the Canadian library community and its partners across the country can apply toward the shaping of a cooperative national vision of digital collections for and about Canada and Canadians. This paper explores ways that libraries and their partners can contribute indexing and digital content to a collectively designed national system that maximizes coordinated efforts toward content building (indexing, scanning, etc.) and raises awareness of the importance of digital preservation. A national infrastructure such as this can minimize several concerns such as the requirements for expensive systems, duplication of effort, software development experience and/or expensive individual software licenses. It will ensure that our unique digital content will survive over time. This paper outlines such a national digitization strategy.
1. Goals
CIDL is entering a challenging phase. The 2004-2006 Steering Committee was elected and the Committee has set as a priority the launch of a new cycle of work and advocacy. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has embarked on a fundamental change that will transform its role and mission. At the same time, LAC has welcomed input from its constituency. It is timely for CIDL to formulate a national digitization strategy for Canada in which every organization from a public library or local archive to the academic, provincial and national levels, including LAC, play a balanced and unique role. Such a digitization strategy should achieve:
| a) |
a national infrastructure that brings an inclusive Canadian understanding of long-term digital content preservation standards and best practices; |
| b) |
the joint venture development of large-scale Canadian national digitization projects that feature a cooperative and distributed approach to the work and the funding (e.g. Our Roots, ECO, Images Canada), and that remain scalable and expandable in scope; |
| c) |
coherence in the financial development of Canadian digital content through influence on funding policies and programs with the goal of building a strong and sustainable digitization capacity for Canadian libraries and cultural organizations to enable partners to forge ahead with cost effective digitization and metadata creation; |
| d) |
a concerted approach amongst libraries, archives, museums and other stakeholders in Canadian digital content to address and come to agreement on copyright issues as we work toward broadening public access to materials that are important to the understanding of Canada; |
| e) |
an approach that actively solicits educators and historians to work with digitization projects to develop interpretive resources that are linked to the digital content being built. |
| f) |
storing, searching and retrieval of digital content that represent a wide variety of information types (e.g. photographs, periodicals, newspapers monographs, pamphlets, ephemera, government documents, learning resources) across all formats (e.g. image files, data sets, full-text, multimedia, born digital, and digitized materials) and from all sources (libraries, archives, museums, government web sites); |
| g) |
an infrastructure that blends the best of locally designed digitization projects with regional and national level retrieval systems and tools; |
| h) |
a design that provides shared, simple to use applications and tools for any partner that opts to use them as an alternative to building local systems from scratch; |
| i) |
access to Canadian digital collections through a single gateway/portal and a series of lower level, related theme or format related portals; |
| j) |
advocacy for the importance of digital preservation and a standards based approach to ensure long-term access to digital content; |
| k) |
an infrastructure that is compatible with international metadata standards, preservation initiatives, and resource discovery tools; and which strives to emulate the best of what other countries have achieved in these areas while retaining a distinctly Canadian focus. |
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2. Outcomes:
A national digitization infrastructure about Canada and Canadians will enable us to:
| a) |
anticipate the provision of tools that any library or partner in the country can use to assist in the describing and indexing of their collections of local or research value onto the Canadian Web - much like an organized "national quilt" to which everyone brings their standardized squares. They are provided the tools of needle and thread, and are empowered to contribute the cloth of their own local content; |
| b) |
build on the model of successful national projects to create a metasearch engine that is built upon a series of overlapping specialized union search tools, to provide the user with links to discrete databases of apparently unlike types of data that are joined by a common theme, or document types, to seamlessly send the user to the local content source; |
| c) |
reach out to colleagues in the archival and museum communities to ensure that the standards and 'hooks' built into the meta-level search tools will enable these communities to contribute metadata to a national union catalogue of Canadian digital content; and thus enlarge the broad base of user communities, and enhance their ability to locate and retrieve seamlessly a wide variety of local content from the source. |
3. Benefits
The valuable benefits of a national digitization strategy at this time are:
| a) |
Input to LAC at this crucial stage of its transformation; |
| b) |
Service to CIDL members to prove its value and attract more members; |
| c) |
Service to Canadian libraries, archives, museums and other information based services to help them add content to the Digital Canada collection; |
| d) |
Service to Canadians with information needs of any kind; |
| e) |
Service to grant-giving institutions that have the assurance of an overall strategy and set of standards by which to measure individual requests for project assistance. |
4. Examples
Examples of 'components' for a national digitization strategy already exist and will help in the creation of a national framework.
| a) |
Cooperative projects developed by teams at the Electronic Text Centre (UNB) and at HALINET demonstrate the ability to create tools that can be shared over the web via forms in secured staff interfaces. The Our Future Our Past Alberta Heritage Digitization Project shows how meta-level search tools provide uniform access to local content in provincial collections. |
| b) |
The successful collaboration and expertise-sharing infrastructure of the Our Roots/Nos racines digitization project relies on its adopted technical guidelines and standards for common metadata and editorial content amongst the partners; |
| c) |
The technological choices in terms of the metadata schema used for the Université Laval Bibliothèque electronic theses project, "Collection des mémoires et thèses électroniques de la Bibliothèque", were made based on international standards such as Dublin Core (NISO Z39.85 and ISO 15836), and the use of the Open Archives Initiative data harvester protocol. |
| d) |
Alberta Heritage uses a common search front-end to bring access, under a unified search engine, to 100s of thousands of local newspaper pages. Through a similar search, a user can reach hundreds of local history monographs to see images of the original text pages. |
| e) |
HALINET MetaSearch page demonstrates the ability to target multiple searches from a single page. The information is drawn from dozens of databases in a variety of otherwise incompatible database structures tuned specifically to the content nature, or through appropriate standards such as Z39.50. |
| f) |
Artefacts Canada is a collection containing millions of collections records and close to 444,000 images from museums across the country that is used by national and international heritage professional to conduct research. Presently, from this collection, only the exhibit images are publicly accessible in the Virtual Museum of Canada's Image Gallery. |
| g) |
Archives Canada is a gateway to archival resources found in over 800 repositories across Canada. Access is provided by provenance and keyword to fonds/collections levels descriptions from all the Provinces and Territories of Canada. As with the Virtual Museum Image Gallery, only 'exhibits of digitized photographs and maps' are publicly accessible. |
| h) |
Images Canada is based on a national level meta search engine which provides virtual unity across a national set of locally created collections albeit a single type of record. Records are voluntarily contributed by some archives, museums and libraries. A more comprehensive example is in Australia where there is a history of cooperation and centralized leadership. |
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5. Design Principles
These successful digitization projects provide examples of strategic design principles such as:
| a) |
meta-level design to describe and unify disparate formats and metadata records from images, newspapers, maps, local histories and contributions to the national digital corpus being made by partners in archives, museums and others; |
| b) |
standards based design to enable a powerful set of search engines to search -- either individual systems and national 'harvested' index aggregate systems (such as Images Canada) that provide a 'union' index yet point the users back to the local applications where the full data is stored - or both, with the end result of giving the end user the appearance and function of a unified but scopeable, 'one place to look'; |
| c) |
infrastructure of shared, web based indexing utilities or modules to enable even the smallest organization to begin digitizing and creating metadata, as extensive or as brief as local budgets and time permit. The storage of digital content and the associated metadata for these other collections can be fully "centralized" on one of many regional servers located across Canada at a very reasonable and sustainable cost; |
| d) |
flexible and scalable user interface to enable the ability of each local digital content creator to customize the individual 'view' of their search interface and display to suit local branding and identification strategies, while promoting the use of the national level union search services; |
| e) |
creation of "digital expertise centres" fostered through the participation of CIDL members' and partners' sites located strategically across Canada to: |
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- continue development on the various modules,
- manage the roll out and maintenance of regionally based projects,
- facilitate the shared use of extremely expensive, jointly purchased, high end scanning equipment and other relevant tools and software;
- provide guidelines and best practices for digital preservation
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6. Collective Needs
The key to a successful national digitization strategy is to create a deep infrastructure behind the scenes. We need to reach a consensus on:
| a) |
overarching meta services we intend to build; |
| b) |
'back end' components and harvesting systems that need to be adapted or designed; |
| c) |
identification of standards-based 'hooks', so that we can design both the individual applications and the collective tools to inter-link to give the end user a variety of 'one place to look' portals suited to specific search needs and target audiences (such as K-12 students); |
| d) |
systematic work with educators on useful instructional aids and links from Learning Object Repositories across Canada. |
| e) |
Building alliances with other memory institutions at the national, regional and local levels. |
7. Areas for research and discussion:
| a) |
Development of a long-term strategy; |
| b) |
Involvement of archive, museum, genealogy partners in addition to CLA, CARL, ACA, CCA, CMA and provincial associations; |
| c) |
Standards to drive the harvest and scope mechanisms to support, among others, geographical and audience levels; |
| d) |
W3C compliance; |
| e) |
Encourage comprehensive digitization of collections rather than sampling or online exhibits; |
| f) |
Ensure interoperability with work that is already going on at high levels; |
| g) |
Organization(s) - both existing and those that need to be established - to carry on the development, implementation and sustainability of the centralized infrastructure; |
| h) |
Scope of the applications for this round (eg., images, manuscripts, maps, local histories, local newspapers, ephemera); |
| i) |
Cost effectiveness to hold index records and document files on centralized regional servers located strategically across the country; |
| j) |
Design web-based templates to facilitate easy metadata entry via the World Wide Web to create standardized index records on central servers throughout Canada; |
| k) |
Achieve flexibility if index records can be optionally stored on one server and linked to digitized image content stored elsewhere as appropriate; |
| l) |
Support federated searching through the adoption of common metadata structure, i.e. Dublin Core, EAD, METS, RDF, OAI or Z39.50-based approach over the WWW; |
| m) |
Design a standard metadata structure for both data harvesting and to populate a national 'union catalogue' service for newspaper and genealogical indexing (similar to the successful Images Canada model); |
| n) |
Facilitate data entry over the WWW using forms based templates into standardized record structures (XML, TEI so that images or other media files are transferred (probably by FTP) to the central servers where the index records might be stored (although indexes could be on one server and digitized content elsewhere as appropriate); |
| o) |
Stimulate discussion on the ways of accommodating and reconciling descriptive standards (data content standards) between archives, museums and libraries. |
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8. Articulate CIDL's Role and Responsibilities
CIDL channels energies into fostering shared approach although stand alone projects and tools will continue to be reasonably appropriate;
| a) |
CIDL supports training for use of shared tools; |
| b) |
CIDL lobbies funding agencies for a bigger vision; |
| c) |
helps to interpret and promote grant opportunities, and endorses applications that fit the "big-picture"; |
| d) |
CIDL role as active advisor and lobbyist to LAC and national organizations on the long-term vision. |
9. Conclusions: Forward Movement
| a) |
Conduct a national meeting of library, archive and museum administrators, public service and technical "types", and collection owners to brainstorm user needs and collection definitions. The agenda would be to scope out what kind of revolutionary, unified approach we can develop at national level. We need to broaden the scope to describe ways in which library held collections will be integrated with collections from other public (and even for-profit) institutions (including museums, archives, galleries) to form a 'virtual' unified resource. |
| b) |
Conduct research across Canada to: a) determine what already exists in terms of applications that might do the job; b) determine work/resources needed to integrate what exists and to develop rest from scratch. Define phasing and what can be done realistically within 2004/05 to get started. Also, set out longer-term evolution path, then develop budget recommendation for grant opportunities. |
| c) |
Conduct a second national forum to review the results and formulate a national information digitization policy and a funding strategy to support the long-term growth and sustainability of Digital Canada. |
Credits: The ideas summarized here come from a variety of sources that include papers by and/or conversations with the current CIDL Steering Committee, Claude Bonnelly, Walter Lewis, Doug Poff, Chris Petter, Mark Jordan, Susan Haigh, Jackie Bell, Karen Turko, Leigh Swain, Alan Burk, Steve Sloan, Brenda Campbell, Sandra Burrows, Magdalene Albert and Michelle Landriault. I take the blame for misrepresenting anyone else's ideas or positions! Author, June 2004.
Digitization Project References:
Artefacts Canada:
www.chin.gc.ca/English/Artefacts_Canada/
Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL):
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cidl/index-e.html
Early Canadiana Online (ECO):
www.canadiana.org/eco/english/index.html
Electronic Text Centre, University of New Brunswick Libraries:
www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/
HALINET:
www.hhpl.on.ca/
Images Canada:
www.imagescanada.ca/index-e.html
Library and Archives Canada:
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html
Our Future Our Past Alberta Heritage Digitization Project:
http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/ic/cdc/futurepast/default.htm
Our Roots:
www.ourroots.ca/e/home.asp
Université Laval, Bibliothèque, Collection des mémoires et thèses électroniques:
www.theses.ulaval.ca/
Virtual Museum of Canada Image Gallery:
www.virtualmuseum.ca/English/Gallery/index.html
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