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Canadian Overview
My aim today is to consider some of the themes that we have been hearing in the last few days in the light of a Canadian context.
Selection for Digital Imaging
In some senses we may have an easier time of this in Canada than is the case elsewhere partly because of the work of the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) Under the aegis of CIHM, selection for preservation has already been attempted and any digitization efforts could certainly build on this initiative.
CIHM was established in 1978 to locate early printed Canadian materials (books, annuals and periodicals), to preserve their content on microfilm, and to make the resulting collections available to libraries and archives in Canada and abroad. "Spanning three and a half centuries of Canadian development, the Early Canadian microform collection contains more than sixty-five thousand titles from North American native peoples' studies to religion and philosophy, from genealogy and local history to French Canadian language and literature. The Institute has located and preserved in microformat over 80,000 Canadian books, pamphlets and periodicals documenting Canada's printed record before 1920. " While the preservation of digital files is an overriding concern in Canada, there is a good chance that any digital files of printed Canadiana would have preservation microfiche already made of the original paper edition if the item in question fell within the purview of CIHM. This would not apply to collections which fall outside the above, however. There are many rich and varied collections in the country on other subjects. An interesting example in the context of a digitization project following on from CIHM's work is the Early Canadiana Online/Notre memoire en ligne Project. " The Project's objectives are to: digitize 5,000 works from CIHM's major microfiche collection and to make them accessible on the Internet; develop a model for comparing the costs of storing and accessing works in both traditional media and digital format; and, evaluate the use and acceptability of various digital versions in comparison to the printed and microform versions of texts. The Project will also test the long-term economic viability of a cooperative digitization operation modelled on CIHM. sponsored by the Mellon Foundation to better understand the costs and benefits of digital technologies and their potential impact on libraries and scholarly communication."
The existence of these two initiatives gives us a starting point in selection for a digital initiative of printed Canadiana at any rate. Another fledgling initiative comes from the Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (mentioned below) which is putting forward a decentralized project of scanning local history materials to develop a multimedia national Digital Canadian Histories collection. Where more work is required is in assessing other kinds of collections in the country and attempting to prioritize or make a checklist of these materials for potential digital projects.
The Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec has digitized 360,000 pages of Quebecoise monographs and 20,000 documents, prints and posters and put these on the Web in PDF format.
The University of Toronto Library has for several years been involved in a digital project in partnership with a Japanese Company, Maruzen International. This project is called UT Back in Print, and it supplies paper copies of books which are out of print to customers in Japan. Orders for paper copies of the books are placed with U of T Library by Maruzen, the University Press clears the copyright and the books are then scanned. At this point we have scanned about 6,000 books, mainly English language materials, and while the decision to scan is customer driven, many of the items fall within the period of paper embrittlement and within broad subject areas. The Library retains the electronic file to add to the growing digital library at the institution. This service is also available to other customers upon request.
The University of Toronto Library is also involved in several other digital projects. There is a Brittle Book Programme to scan items which are deemed to be in danger of deterioration, and which used to be microfilmed. Other digital projects include an investigation of map scanning, an electronic theses project in conjunction with the NLC and other Canadian libraries and scanned documents for a website for the G8 meetings, which has now become the official website of the summits.
Preparation of materials for digitization
In Canada we do not usually do destructive reprography i.e. books are not disbound or discarded after scanning or microfilming. This makes it rather more difficult and expensive when choosing and preparing materials for scanning but I do not see this policy being changed in the near future. For example, it was a considerable challenge to work with the scanning equipment we are using in the University of Toronto Back in Print Project to scan unbound books. This necessitated many months of experiment on the part of the Library staff and the vendor.
Digital Image Capture
As part of the ECO Project I had occasion to put out an RFP for scanning the CIHM microfiche. After a fairly extensive testing procedure, I concluded that there was at that time no vendor in Canada who could scan to the standard required for the Project and the contract was awarded to Preservation Resources, Bethlehem, PA. The criteria used to evaluate proposals included resolution, metadata and communication. In all of these respects Preservation Resources was clearly far superior. I would say that we definitely have to work to bring Canadian vendors up to standard. This is a process that we have gone through before, for example, with microfilming. During a cooperative microfilming project from 1991-1994, again funded by the Mellon Foundation, we worked with vendors to encourage them to meet ANSI standards in microfilming and were successful with several. The same process now needs to be undertaken with scanning vendors. In this respect conferences like the one taking place now, which draw together experts from various countries to agree on best practices on such matters as digital image capture and the other subjects under discussion in the last few days, will be very useful in dealing with vendors. RLG has been very helpful in this regard in the past, notably in drawing up technical manuals which can be used in dealing with vendors, and also within our institutions in justifying policies and procedures.
For the Back in Print Project at the University of Toronto Library we embarked on an inhouse scanning programme using Xerox XDOD equipment. The books are scanned at 600 dpi, 8 bits of greyscale. The TIFF files produced are proprietary and we are therefore experiencing the same problems other users of this equipment have in making these files available. We are hoping to add an overhead scanner which can also handle colour in the near future, so as to be able to scan more fragile books, but in general in this project we are grappling with the same problems of access and copyright as everyone else involved in this field.
Metadata
A fair amount of work has already been done in Canada in the area of metadata. The RLG Working Group on Preservation and Reformatting Information had two Canadian members. The report has been posted on the Web in Canada and many Canadian libraries have been considering it and commenting on the substance. In addition, under the aegis of a programme called Schoolnet a metadata survey has been distributed. Schoolnet is a multimedia portrait of Canada produced by young people under contract to Industry Canada's Schoolnet Digital Collections. It displays over 100 collections from the holdings of Canadian archives, libraries, museums, associations, businesses, labour unions and other organizations. In the ECO project metadata is being taken from the MARC record. The National Library of Canada has been keeping abreast of international developments and emerging standards and there seem to be two points of interest, Dublin Core and GILS. The latter has been used in a pilot for a government wide metadata approach for the federal government in the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences 1949-1951. This is a large full text project of 15 briefs. As well as the Dublin core and GILS approach, the NLC has been creating other MARC compliant metadata for use in other projects using their own data models. A challenge that we do have in Canada is the whole issue of bilingual metadata. This often involves a lot of work, often manual, in recreating key words on the input side, and also on the retrieval side we have to think of such issues as retrieving accented and non accented characters. When we use a French word with or without the accent, we have to ask if we are retrieving everything or only some of the data, for instance. Thus it is fair to say that there is an awareness of metadata concerns in the country and I feel this topic will be dealt with in the same manner in which we follow international cataloguing standards.
Conferences such as this one certainly help in achieving consensus and moving efforts forward internationally. Perhaps this is an another area where RLG can play a major role.
Digital Preservation
Of course in this regard more can always be done and Canada's track record in the digital archiving arena is no better than that of any other country. Much data produced in the early days of electronic files is already lost, and there is no clear consensus as to just what has been produced within the country or indeed within an institution. An initiative has been launched recently, the Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries, which may in part remedy some of these problems. The Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries was established to:
One of the key areas of activity is
Roles and responsibilities for long-term archiving
The idea put forward in Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information that a national digital archive might be decentralized might work very well in a geographically vast country like Canada with two official languages. One example of a decentralised digital archive might be at the University of Toronto Library, for instance, where we would be responsible for the archiving of not only the digital files we have created but also the 7600 electronic serial titles we have mounted in our digital library. Other centres such as this could be established throughout the country. This is an idea that the Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries is bound to consider, but the existence of the CIDL does not mean that our work is done. Much remains to be accomplished in this respect, and perhaps this area causes most concern because of issues of difficulty, leadership and expense.
In summary, in Canada we are working in every area covered by the conference and keeping abreast of and are involved in international efforts. In considering selection for digitization, a register of digitized files would be most helpful. Otherwise some coordinating efforts may come out of the CIDL effort. In preparation of materials for scanning, the culture in Canada would not tolerate other than a non destructive approach. In the area of digital image capture, historically organizations such as RLG have produced manuals and run training courses and conferences on such topics. As for metadata issues, I am confident that there will be full participation in international efforts and translation into Canadian norms. Digital preservation is perhaps the most problematic topic and needs much work and planning. Conferences such as this help greatly in drawing awareness to international efforts so that we do not waste time and resources in "reinventing the wheel" as cautioned by our keynote speaker. It is particularly important to not do this on an international level and not just in a North American context.
Reference Links
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cihm/ecol/
http://www.biblinat.gouv.qc.ca
http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/backinprint.htm
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/etd/
http://www.schoolnet.ca/home/e/connect/
Preserving Digital Information. Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information. Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1996. Available online from the Research Libraries Group: http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/news/frontpage/index.html
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