Canadian Digital Information Strategy

Responses to October 2007 Draft Strategy

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Submissions received, including the name of the person or organization making the submission, have been posted in the official language in which they were submitted. Content of the submissions has been posted as received; however, minor reformatting may have occurred during HTML conversion. Personal address information has been removed.

David Hunter,
Strategic Policy Manager
Simon Bains,
Digital Library Manager
National Library of Scotland

Email
November 23, 2007

Downloadable Formats
PDF version [PDF 27 KB]

1. The National Library of Scotland (NLS) is pleased to contribute some brief comments on this document.
2. We welcome the comprehensiveness, clarity and accessibility of the strategy, which we think could form a very useful model for other national strategies. We commend the leadership of LAC in developing the overall strategy and more detailed proposals. The bibliography is in itself a very valuable resource.
3. We particularly welcome:
   • acknowledgement of the need to scale up digitisation;
   • the way information behaviours are changing, blurring roles and indicating that provision of access is no longer in itself sufficient;
   • the challenges of organisational change;
   • the section on TDRs: NLS has been conspicuous as one of few organisations committing to build a TDR. The most recent trend seems to have been to shy away from committing to the 'trust' part of it.
4. The Actions in the document are clear and helpful. However, it is not clear who is responsible for implementing them. This may be deliberate, given that as explained on page 4, a number of different stakeholders are involved; however, it may help influence policy more directly if responsibility for each action was spelt out - see for example those on page 21 - albeit in general terms, by suggesting a lead sector (eg 'government', 'publishers' etc.)
5. The strategy naturally focuses on the national level (as befits a strategy for Canada). However, as digital information increasingly has a global character, the relationship between national, (and regional or continental) initiatives and world-wide initiatives (often commercially-generated) becomes more important. We would welcome the addition of any material which indicated how LAC sees this relationship developing, or indeed being managed pro-actively to join together national digital information most effectively. (A practical example here is the potential to join together historic material about Scottish emigration to and settlement in Canada; this material - both digital and physical - exists in both countries). For example, a further action 2.2.8 could be added on page 28 on the lines of: "Support inter-operability between Canadian TDRs and those in other countries, to ensure that information, best practice and collaboration can be co-ordinated as effectively as possible".
6. NLS will be revising its current Digital Library Strategy in 2008. In the meantime, LAC would be welcome to add the current version to the list of strategies and resources in the UK section of Appendix 2 if this was considered useful. (See: http://www.nls.uk/professional/policy/docs/nls_digital_library_strategy.pdf)

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