Canadian Digital Information Strategy

The Digital Strategy

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Challenge 3 - Maximizing access and use

Long-term outcome: Canadians have optimal access to Canadian digital information important to their learning, businesses and work, leisure activities, and cultural identity; and Canadian content is showcased to the world.

Sustaining access to digital information over time is the goal of digital preservation, but it is the use of information by people that is the overarching rationale for preservation efforts-just as it is why the information is created in the first place. This Strategy seeks to foster the widespread availability and diverse use of Canadian digital information resources. We need to be sure that we are exploiting the opportunities provided by Canada's high levels of connectivity and Internet use to society's greatest advantage.

In this era of powerful search engines, wireless Internet connectivity, online communities, and handheld devices, access to a vast wealth of information is easier than ever before. Some might argue that the user is well and sufficiently served. But it is increasingly evident that users don't just want to find information, they want to use and reuse it, interact with it and with other users about it, manipulate it, comment on it, repackage it to meet their unique needs, and rework it to create new content. This is the ethos of Web 2.0²⁹ -the second generation of the web characterized by services, collaboration and sharing.

This Strategy aims to foster information use and reuse to serve a wide range of purposes and contexts and a wide range of users, access methods, and devices. It seeks ways for Canada to resolve the tension between, on the one hand, maximizing access to information so that it can be used and reused freely for education, scholarship, entertainment, or creative purpose within our society; and on the other hand, supporting the right of creators to exert control over the use of, and to derive remuneration from, their works.

Goals

• To foster optimal³⁰ access to Canada's digital information assets to everyone, everywhere, and via all devices.
• To promote access and use of Canadian information within a global information environment.

3. Maximizing access and use - Objectives

A range of legislation and policy mechanisms exist to ensure that Canadian citizens have as level a playing field as possible for economic and social opportunity. These include the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, universal public education, universal health care, the public broadcast system and the public library system. These mechanisms must also extend to the digital environment. Factors such as income, language, age, geographic location, and physical ability should have as little impact as possible on citizens' ability to participate in and benefit from the shift to a digital information environment.

Access to broadband services is becoming increasingly important as content becomes more complex and sophisticated. Canada is a world leader in this area.³² According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), just over 23% of Canadian households have broadband access to the Internet.³³ This translates into a Canadian broadband penetration of about 76% of active Internet users (compared to the US rate of 69.4%, as of March 2006).³⁴

Yet significant numbers of households and organizations still do not have access to broadband, either because they are unable to afford it, or because there is no access in their community. Not all classrooms and libraries have access to broadband, although a target connectivity threshold seems to have been reached and the federal government is pulling back from programs such as SchoolNet, LibraryNet and the Community Access Program. We need to continue efforts to improve and maintain broadband or wireless penetration for all Canadians, including affordable plans so that wireless devices such as cellphones and Blackberries can be used for unlimited access and downloading of Internet content.

Large capacity research networks are also needed in order to support e-science/e-research methods such as high performance computing. The continued development of Canada's advanced Internet network for research purposes through CANARIE (www.canarie.ca/) is critical.

The term 'digital divide', initially framed as a connectivity and affordability issue, now also encompasses information literacy. Information literacy is defined as "the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand".³⁵ Technical and information literacy skills are relatively low in some segments of society, including low-income Canadians, new Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians, and older Canadians. For example, a small but growing number of seniors embrace the Internet (5.8% of 55-64 age group; and 1.9% of 65+ as of 2004³⁶). For these segments of society, rapid advances in information and communications technologies can be intimidating. We need targeted training programs that address demographic groups' differing usability requirements.

Canadians with print disabilities-those who are unable to read standard print due to a visual, perceptual or physical disability-require information in alternative formats such as braille, audio, or electronic text and need access to assistive technologies. Less than 5% of published works are available in a format that is accessible to those with print disabilities. It is critical that publishers provide digital information in a format that is usable on assistive technology and/or which facilitates its transformation into alternative formats.³⁷ The promotion of universal design and ensuring the interoperability of assistive technologies with mainstream technologies are also important.

For the traditional research materials such as online databases and journals, there are ways to increase 'free-to-me' access-the appearance to the user that there is no cost to their use of the information resource. Substantial public sector investment from institutions, provincial governments, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (www.innovation.ca/) has been made to license content to consortia of academic or public libraries. Opportunities to expand this approach are by no means exhausted. Each time the scope of a licence is expanded (e.g. from institutional to provincial), there is broadened public benefit, reduced per-use costs to be borne, and, at the same time, increased producer revenues. New Zealand and Iceland have expanded their National Site Licences to include all citizens, rather than just the academic community.³⁸

The digital environment offers new opportunities to improve equitable information access. This can be accomplished through the expansion of access programs available through public institutions such as libraries, schools, and other community centres, or by supporting Canadian publishers in their efforts to make content accessible at source or through alternative format producers. The Strategy seeks ways to maximize all Canadians' access to digital content.

Actions

Users are brought together with the content they seek through powerful global search engines, specialized retrieval and aggregation services, and links from other websites.

Currently, aggregated access to existing Canadian digital content is not optimal. Digital content providers have typically created neat silos of their own content but have not maximized the Web exposure of this content. Also, the availability of digital content varies significantly depending on the type of content or producer (i.e. commercial, government, etc.); the type of access model employed (subscription-based, pay per view/download, free access, etc.); and the content management system in use.⁴⁰

Digitized content is a good case in point. Most cultural heritage digitization projects are web-accessible, but their Web profile is low. While it is possible to make database content visible to search engines, much database content remains accessible only to a user who arrives at the home website, finds the database, and inputs a search query. Private sector digitized collections may be behind firewalls and accessible only to the company itself, but this is potential for much broader use. At present, no comprehensive meta-search is available, even from the major search engines.

In Canada, in the cultural, education and research sectors, there are a number of specialized aggregation services and portals for different types of information resources, such as: AMICUS (Canadian library holdings), Archives Canada (archival collection holdings), Artefacts Canada (museum holdings), Images Canada, Theses Canada, Culture.ca, Virtual Museum of Canada, and the CARL Institutional Repositories Harvester, the IDRC Open Repository (IDRC-funded research results), TaPOR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), Geogratis Portal (geospatial data), SAFORAH (forest observation research), the Ice Service Data Archive (ice data), Érudit (scholarly research), and so on.

These national portals and access tools are valuable, but do not provide comprehensive coverage of the digital information available in Canada. Gaps exist in scope, coverage, functionality, or public profile. They are on a range of platforms and use divergent metadata standards and controlled vocabularies; some are focused linguistically in either English or French; and they are not federated. Canada needs to assess the position and scope of Canadian aggregation services in the global network environment to determine whether more or different Canadian information aggregation services will benefit users' ability to find and use Canada's digital information assets. We also need to nurture classification and information retrieval systems that facilitate multilingual access, as single language focus of content, metadata, or the user interface inhibits access to digital content for those who seek a more complete set of search results.

The emerging vision of Web 3.0⁴¹ suggests that in the future there will be increased use and benefit derived from exploiting and federating metadata describing information resources. Many anticipate that unstructured information such as the full-text indexing of contemporary search engines will give way to, or be augmented by, greater use of structured information, allowing more intelligent computing by search services. This suggests that memory institutions should continue their long-standing commitment to encourage and provide metadata services for Canada's key information resources.

The theory of the Long Tail⁴² asserts that even very obscure, old or specialized material will get used if it is made available on the Internet. Improving the mechanisms through which content (whether commercial or free) is discovered by its market, and optimizing content for exposure through those mechanisms, will lead to higher rates of use of the content and, potentially, to new revenues for rights holders. At the National Summit, it was underscored that the further development of national aggregation services would be an important step in improving access to Canadian content.

Actions

Governments produce a wide range of information, much of it in digital format. This information constitutes an important national asset. A 2006 OECD report on public sector information (PSI) details the important economic and social benefits that arise from providing the broadest possible access to this information. These include: direct commercial benefit to the private sector based on public sector information reuse; indirect economic potential by improving decision-making and production; preserving public information in collective memory and for future generations; and improving and supporting cultural and educational experience.⁴³ Along with these benefits, governments have a social obligation to provide access to the information they create. Although additional costs are associated with making information available to the public that must be borne by governments, the benefits have been shown to far outweigh the costs. It follows that governments should look for ways to make their information publicly accessible, available free of charge, and with limited or no restriction on use.

In Canada, the various levels of government are major producers of digital information, including both cultural and scientific content such as geospatial and environmental data. There are a number of laws and policies that govern information produced by governments. Federally, the Access to Information Act (http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/A-1/index.html?noCookie), which intends to ensure a right of access to government information by the public, applies to all federal government departments and most government agencies with the exception of the commercial Crown corporations, Parliament and the Courts.

The federal government has a Policy on the Management of Government Information (www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pubs_pol/ciopubs/tb_gih/pim-pgi_e.asp). The policy states that government information is "a valuable asset that the Government of Canada must manage as a public trust on behalf of Canadians." It seeks to "manage information to facilitate equality of access and promote public trust, optimize information sharing and re-use, and reduce duplication, in accordance with legal and policy obligations." Equivalent legislation and policies exist in the provinces and territories.

One of the major mechanisms currently in place to provide access to federal government documents is the Depository Services Program (DSP http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/index-e.html). The DSP provides access to an electronic library of Canadian federal government publications to a network of more than 800 libraries in Canada and to another 150 institutions around the world.

Crown copyright has been the traditional mechanism used to guard against inappropriate or erroneous use of government information. In Canada it has also been used as a means to license commercial reuse of government information. The United States places its information in the public domain and has introduced a Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million to enact policy to ensure that articles generated through research funded by that agency are made available online within six months of publication. The United Kingdom has streamlined and clarified permitted uses and costs for online information through its "Click-Use" licences, while the European Union has recently adopted a position to allow unrestricted commercial and non-commercial re-use of its information, with certain conditions in some cases. Public funding also underwrites much of the academic research in Canada. Indeed, the Canadian government invests over a billion dollars each year⁴⁴ in support of research through the three academic funding agencies. Yet the results of government-funded research are not always freely available to the Canadian public or Canadian researchers. Research outputs come in many forms: data, journal articles, monographs, and other types of content, all of which should be as accessible as possible. Today, researchers create and use data sets of unprecedented size and complexity. In 2006, the National Consultation of Access to Scientific and Research Data (NCASRD) called for urgent action on improving access to research data, stating that "Much of the data on which our knowledge is being built today is hard to access by other Canadian research communities, and is often not ideally structured to be as useful or as open as possible, even within the discipline for which it is being constructed." Having documented the types of practices needed, the report states, "Increased access will accelerate these changes, creating a new world of research and a whole new world. When these databases are combined within and between disciplines and countries, fundamental leaps in knowledge can occur that transform our understanding of life, the world and the universe."⁴⁵

Public reporting of the outcomes of research, usually accomplished through published journal articles, is an important part of the research process. Like academic granting councils worldwide, Canadian funding agencies are considering how best to improve access to the research results they fund. In a 2005 article, Dr. Arthur Carty, Canada's National Science Advisor calls for a culture of sharing. "An open-access philosophy is critical to the system's success: if research findings and knowledge are to be built upon and used by other scientists, then this knowledge must be widely available on the web, not just stored in published journals that are often expensive and not universally available."⁴⁶

Stakeholders at the CDIS consultations felt that Canada could improve the accessibility of both government-produced and government-sponsored digital information and data at both federal and provincial levels. This includes a more open interpretation of Crown copyright and the implementation of policy and program measures that ensure that the results of publicly-funded research are made publicly available.

Strategies are required to advance the goal of maximizing access and use of government information in Canada, while acknowledging that public sector information is not all the same. For example, a valid distinction can be drawn between the open access appropriate for government publications and the on-demand access required by law to internal government records, where restrictions on the latter may be founded upon privacy or security concerns. There are also significant costs associated with making government information available to the public-costs related to production, translation to meet Official Languages requirements, accessibility standards, and maintaining information's authoritativeness and currency over time. Yet, for Canadian citizens and society to obtain maximal benefit from the information governments generate, those governments must provide as open access as possible to publicly-owned and publicly-funded information at no cost.

Actions

The direction and application of copyright law in the digital age is a matter of debate worldwide. Canada is no different: the discussion around existing Canadian statutes and jurisprudence has led to a consensus that some aspects of the law need to be reformed, but there is no consensus on the proposed changes. The debate tends to be polarized, with creators and copyright owners arguing that the law must ensure that rights holders retain the right to determine access and use in the digital realm, while user groups advocate for a more flexible copyright regime that will permit new methods of use without express authorization.

The Canadian Digital Information Strategy is not focused on resolving the tensions between open access and commercial interests on the Internet, nor on copyright reform. Rather, CDIS seeks ways to advance the goal of fostering widespread access and diverse information use within a philosophical framework of respect for intellectual property rights, as enshrined in copyright legislation.

At the National Summit, a number of stakeholders expressed concerns about the impact of measures that limit legitimate uses of digital material, such as those uses exercised based on fair dealing⁴⁷ . For example, technological protection measures can limit the number of times a work can be copied, even if the purchaser is making legitimate copies, or can make it technically impossible for those using assistive technology to read the material; or licences can dictate restrictive terms and conditions on access and use. These types of measures are particularly worrisome for libraries because they inhibit the activities required for long-term preservation, such as making multiple copies and migrating formats.

Some content providers are moving away from technological measures. For example, in response to consumer demand, Apple iTunes recently announced it will offer DRM-free (without digital rights management⁴⁸) music that will be interoperable with its competitors' audio devices. Perhaps one of the keys to ensure vibrant and sustainable content industries in Canada, while fostering greater access and use of content, will be found with new economic models rather than by exercising greater control (See Section 1.2).

In Canada, copyright does not need to be asserted with a copyright statement; the Copyright Act's provisions provide acceptable purposes of use and only the rights holder can give permission for a use that is proscribed by the law. The digital environment presents new opportunities relating to the terms of use. A variety of mechanisms - such as licences, web permission forms, and pre-approved uses, with and without notice - have emerged that assist rights holders to indicate to users permitted uses beyond those provided in the legislation. These mechanisms reflect a diversity of interests amongst content provider communities. There are already numerous direct producer-consumer and producer-information manager licencing arrangements, and many websites provide terms and conditions statements about the use for their content. While many licences aim to restrict use and limit redistribution, Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.ca/) licences allow producers who want to expand use of their content to express that they permit users to copy, make adaptations, or share works, with or without attribution. Such models and templates are a positive step in encouraging rights holders to consider their options and to document legitimate licencing terms in plain language.

For many digital content users, the vagaries of Copyright law, when combined with inconsistencies in available rights information and uninformed assertions and interpretations of rights, lead to uncertainty and confusion. Is downloading music illegal except for sites where I pay for it? If I download from a site based in Russia, whose laws apply? Can I use an online World War II image in my own mash-up? Where does the public domain start and end? Clearly, there is room for user education.

The Strategy aims to clarify the issues surrounding rights for both users and creators; and to encourage the development and adoption of tools that enable the greatest possible use of content within a balanced legal framework.

Actions

Online users are often characterized as expecting to find everything they seek easily, immediately, and preferably free-of-charge on the Internet. They are increasingly participative, interacting with Internet content to refine, repurpose or reshape it.

Several sources of data exist on Internet connectivity and patterns of use, and various forms of evidence have helped us understand that the Internet is now a first and often only source for information seekers.⁴⁹ Internet user behaviour has been studied globally, but less well documented are user needs in specific contexts and sectors.

For a national digitization effort, we need data on user needs and preferences for different kinds of retrospective information in order to set priorities for digital conversion and to evaluate success. Identifiable user groups - students, academic researchers, general public, genealogists, and so on - can have highly divergent requirements.

Where preservation is concerned, we need to better understand public perceptions of digital information value, and what kind of public access is appropriate for web information that has been archived.

We need data to assess the impact of digital information on individuals, on organizations, and in society. Collaborative effort may be needed to define methods to assess the use and value of digital information in Canadian society, and then to carry out such assessments.

E-learning represents an important application of digital content but it suffers from many of the same problems (such as lack of interoperability, lack of quality control, and digital rights issues) that this Strategy looks to address. E-learning stakeholders recognize the need to work together and are taking the first steps to build a strategy for e-learning in Canada. It would be to the advantage of content producers/managers and the education community to work together on shared and interoperable tools, standards and best practices in order to develop a critical mass of Canadian digital content in English and French for K-12 education. Such a collaborative endeavour could start with user needs research on the education market.

The objective is to ensure that those engaged in digital information production, management, and provision of access take full account of the information needs and access behaviours of their user communities. These needs clearly differ between the casual web-browsing citizen and a highly specialized researcher participating in a globally distributed scientific research project.

Actions

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29. See www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2

30. By 'optimal' access we mean, for commercial digital content, that it is available but intellectual property rules and fees may apply in its dissemination and use, and for public domain content that it is available freely.

31. 'Democratic' access means information is broadly available to everyone; 'ubiquitous' access means that information is available everywhere and via all devices; and 'equitable' access means that it is available in a form that makes it usable to everyone.

32. In its December 2006 Report, the OECD stated "Canada continues to lead the G7 group of industrialized countries in broadband penetration."

33. OECD Broadband Statistics to December 2006. See www.oecd.org/document/7/0,2340,en_2649_37441_38446855_1_1_1_
37441,00.html

34. See www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0604/

35. See the National Forum on Information Literacy in the US at www.infolit.org/

36. See www.pwgsc.gc.ca/onlineconsultation/text/statistics-e.html#Demographics

37. Canadian Library Association. Opening the Book: A Strategy for a National Network for Equitable Library Service for Canadians with Print Disabilities. 2005.

38. See EPIC- Electronic Purchasing in Collaboration at: http://epic.org.nz/nl/faq.html#allNZ and The Icelandic National Consortium at: www.hvar.is/sida.php?id=5

39. By 'seamless' we mean that the user can link through to the desired content readily without encountering obstacles or undue barriers to that process.

40. McDonald, John and Kathleen Shearer, Toward a Canadian Digital Information Strategy: Mapping the Current Situation in Canada. January 2006, p. 40. Library and Archives Canada.
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/012033/f2/012033-700-e.pdf [PDF 274 KB]

41. See www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_30_when_web_sites_become_web_
services.php or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3

42. See www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

43. OECD Working Party on the Information Economy. Digital Broadband Sector Content: Public Sector Information and Content (2006) www.ifap.ru/library/book066.pdf

44. The combined funding budgets of the NSERC, CIHR and SSHRC for 2007 represent over 1 billion dollars.

45. Strong, David F. and Peter B. Leach National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data, Final Report. January 31, 2005. pg. 1. Available at: http://ncasrd-cnadrs.scitech.gc.ca/NCASRDReport_e.pdf

46. Carty, Arthur. "A global information system needs a culture of sharing." November 2005. Available at: www.universityaffairs.ca/issues/2005/november/opinion_01.html

47. The Canadian Intellectual Property Right Office defines fair dealing as the "use or reproduction of a work for private study, research, criticism, review or news reporting". See http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/cp/faq_cp-e.html#18

48. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic defines Digital Rights Management as "technologies designed to automatically manage rights in relation to information". See: www.cippic.ca/en/faqs-resources/digital-rights-management/#faq_what-is-drm

49. Statistics Canada, Canadian Internet Use (2005) www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/060815/d060815b.htm;
Media Awareness Network, Young Canadians in a Wired World www.media-awareness.ca/english/research/YCWW/index.cfm

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