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Issue 4: Identification of Standards and Best Practices  
Text-Based Languages Used
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Navigational or Search Tools Used
The existing organizations and established processes used to develop standards are now generally recognized as too slow to be effective. New processes and organizations, mostly within the Internet community and through industry consortia, are providing the framework for developing new networking and digitization standards. Certain digitization-related standards, however, will continue to be developed exclusively within the traditional standards organizations (e.g., database Structured Query Language-SQL). In an era of declining budgets, there is increasing pressure across government to clearly demonstrate added value and cost savings when implementing new services and technologies. The challenge for all government institutions is to ensure that technical infrastructures serve the varying mandate requirements of each federal institution, while reliably providing quality service to its users both within and outside government. Furthermore, the infrastructure must be affordable and sustainable over its life cycle and must be able to evolve or scale to meet new user requirements or technological advances. All standards have strengths and weaknesses. Every standard has a use and user. But no single standard or set of standards can satisfy the requirements of all users, in all places, at all times. The use of appropriate standards and best current practices can assist federal institutions in balancing the need for technical flexibility to meet organizational objectives with the need to maintain a level of compatibility that enables the user to share or exchange resources. Properly utilized, digitization standards and best current practices can assist organizations in their efforts to successfully cope with emerging new technologies. It follows from these considerations that standards and best current practices should be used, whenever possible, to further organizational goals and to encourage interoperability across federal institutions and between the government and the public. However, standards and best current practices alone are not sufficient to ensure interoperability. Government will also need to share technical information, understand user needs and communicate and cooperate across federal institutions.
For long-term electronic storage, best current practices suggest that key digital resources should be maintained and migrated to new technological systems as they become available. The best way to ensure the preservation and accessibility of electronic resources over time is for the information to remain with the federal institution that creates or manages it as long as it is actively required. When the originating department no longer uses the information, it is then transferred to either the National Archives or the National Library, depending on the type of information. Federal institutions must be responsible for managing and providing access to the information that they have created. Standards and common practices make the processes that support these responsibilities more uniform and in turn facilitate access to government information resources. The government-wide role is to promote the use of standards-based solutions. The government does not, contrary to popular belief, develop core standards. For example, the federal government did not develop any email standards, but it did define certain data elements needed for community-wide use (e.g., naming conventions for departmental names). It is clear that the private sector will be largely responsible for the development and deployment of the infrastructure for the Information Highway. It follows that the private sector will be the leader in ensuring that the infrastructure is interoperable. Nonetheless, the federal government should continue to look for opportunities to enhance and expand the use of standards in digital infrastructure through partnerships with the private and public sector. When private sector mechanisms for developing digitization standards do not meet the needs of particular user communities, the government should continue to work with industry to define and develop those standards (e.g., Canadian Aboriginal syllabics encoding). To promote economies and efficiencies in the global information infrastructure, information technology standards must be based on a strong international consensus and market acceptance. Such global standards increase application interoperability, support the development of cost-effective technical solutions, promote quality of service, and support cultural diversity. The challenge of developing global standards is to provide these benefits in a timely and efficient manner, and to build upon existing efforts to develop national and regional information infrastructures. Government should provide guidance on the applicability and use of de jure and de facto standards in the provision of government services. Government departments, agencies and Crown corporations need to work with their communities of users to develop a standard and to establish common ways of using standards (i.e., profiles) and best practices. The following recommendations are primarily directed to Treasury Board’s Chief Information Officer, to encourage Treasury Board’s continued leadership role in these areas and to further collaboration across federal departments, agencies and Crown corporations in the areas of digitization standards and best practices.
Navigation and Retrieval 4.2 A mechanism should be established to advise government on emerging standards and technologies in the areas of navigation and retrieval of networked information, including but not limited to metadata initiatives, locator naming systems, link maintenance and retrieval technologies and services. In particular, the mechanism would identify best practices for metadata use, evaluate retrieval technologies as they evolve, and assist in the development of a scalable architecture for the effective retrieval of electronic information, both for government and general public use. Document Standards 4.3 The government should continue and expand its efforts to seek solutions or best practices to address the problem of the diversity of document formats across government agencies. This effort is necessary to ensure the interoperability and long-term preservation of government documents. It should be directed towards providing guidance, standards and best practices for document and records creation in federal institutions. The present diversity of document file formats being used in government continues to have a significant detrimental impact upon the operations of all government departments. The document formats currently being used-- for example, the multiple variations of MS Word or WordPerfect, RTF, HTML, XML/SGML, PostScript, PDF and desktop publishing formats -- are frequently incompatible and non-interoperable. This diversity of formats also has a detrimental effect on long-term preservation of the documents. Maintaining the archival integrity and accessibility of multiple file formats will be an extremely difficult and costly undertaking for the National Archives and National Library, or agencies charged with providing long-term preservation of electronic information resources. It is likely that a substantial amount of government information has already been lost due to obsolescence of technology and non-readable file formats. Use of Standards-Based Information Technologies 4.4 Federal institutions should acquire and use standards-based digitization technologies wherever possible, and ensure that these acquisitions meet specific and well-defined user requirements, which should include interoperability with other government systems. In addition to other factors, success in the use of information technologies should be measured by how well departments satisfy these requirements. Licensing of Proprietary Technologies on Reasonable Terms 4.5 To assist in providing widespread government interoperability in strategic areas (i.e., desktop applications such as word processing, electronic mail, Web browsers, spreadsheet or presentation applications) and in Internet servers (i.e., WWW servers, mail systems, push publishing technology, information management software) proprietary technologies for federal institutions should be licensed on reasonable terms. Procurement practices for digitization technologies should seek to follow standard commercial acquisition practices for the use of COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) technologies. Many issues that government is currently addressing would be significantly mitigated if all government agencies used a common desktop environment. For example, the adoption of common applications in key areas such as word processing, spreadsheet and presentation formats would address many interoperability, migration, training and preservation issues that continue to plague federal institutions. Preservation 4.6 To ensure preservation of and access to digital information over time, the National Archives of Canada, the National Library of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage should jointly conduct research into preservation practices for digital information. In addition, the established mechanism, as per Recommendation 4.1, will support this research through the monitoring and assessment of current work being undertaken nationally and internationally. This research would contribute to the government’s knowledge base of new technologies, evaluations, standards and best current practices. This recommendation is complementary to Recommendation 2.6 under Selection of Materials for Digitization. The preservation of digital collections is a difficult problem. Currently, there are no accepted digital preservation formats or standards, only strategies. One strategy currently being considered in the archival community is to use the digital object to produce computer output microfilm (COM) that meets preservation standards for quality and permanence. Evaluating such strategies will require looking at issues of quality, expense and process, to determine their feasibility and applicability to the specific digital resources being considered for preservation.
7 Annex 4, "Selected Standards in the Digitization Process", is illustrative of the plethora of standards. |
