Evidence of meeting #12 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was media.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call this meeting to order if I could, please.
We're a little bit late again trying to get going. Our meeting will be over at 1:05, because we made a little change. So it will run from 11:05 to 1:05.
11:10 a.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Point of order, Mr. Chair.
It's become a pattern with the Industry committee. We're always five or ten minutes late. I don't think they're showing us the respect our work and our witnesses deserve. I'd like you to raise it with them that when their meetings end at eleven, they should end at eleven, and we should be able to start.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
This committee might consider passing a motion to be considered by the House that the morning committee run from 8:45 to 10:45 so we could have the full two hours for our committee.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Okay. Mr. Del Mastro will take that forward, correct? Or do you want me to? Can you take it forward?
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
I'd be happy to move a motion you could present to the House.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
Quite simply, given that our committee has scheduled two hours for witnesses and for questions, I would move that the House consider moving the morning committee back 15 minutes, from 9 o'clock to 8:45, to give time for committee changeover. That will allow our committee to start on time.
I'm happy for somebody to put words to it. It just came before us.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
I've been advised by the clerk that a motion is going forward to the whips right now to try to alleviate this.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Let's see if we can make that work.
Okay. If you want, we'll accept that motion from Mr. Del Mastro.
Mr. Angus, do you want to second that motion?
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
All in favour of me, as chair, through the clerk, sending the motion that Mr. Del Mastro just made, seconded by Charlie Angus, that the 9 o'clock meeting start at 8:45 and run to 10:45 so we can get our two hours in.
(Motion agreed to) [See Minutes of Proceedings]
Okay, we'll work on that.
Ms. Dhalla.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
Royal Galipeau Conservative Ottawa—Orléans, ON
Mr. Chairman, I have a French copy of Mr. Caron's presentation, and I would like to have one in English as well. I'm told the clerk has all the copies.
11:10 a.m.
Liberal
11:10 a.m.
Liberal
Ruby Dhalla Liberal Brampton—Springdale, ON
Can I, with the will of the committee, bring an issue to everyone's attention? In reading The Globe and Mail today, I noted that a telecom conference is being held with a lot of the telecommunications leadership. They are highlighting some of the digital and new media strategies. It's being held June 6 and 7, I believe. The honourable minister along with a number of other distinguished people in the industry are going to be attending. The committee may want to consider that all or part of our committee be in attendance at some portion of that conference. It's being held in Toronto, so it's also convenient for many of the members to attend. I think it would be beneficial, in light of the study we have before us at the committee.
11:10 a.m.
Liberal
Ruby Dhalla Liberal Brampton—Springdale, ON
June 6 and 7.
I cut it out from The Globe and Mail, but unfortunately I brought the wrong page.
I think it would be beneficial for us.
11:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
We can look into it.
There's another conference going on next Monday and Tuesday in Stratford. It's a 3.0 digital media conference. We don't have time to get all of us there. Maybe we could do that next year.
Okay, we can look into that, Ms. Dhalla.
Welcome to meeting number 12 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this is the study on the emerging and digital media: opportunities and challenges. For our first hour, or close to one hour, we will hear from Library and Archives Canada and the Writers Guild of Canada.
If you can, keep your presentations to ten minutes. It's very important so that we can get our questions in. I will hold my finger up when there's one minute to go.
We'll start with Mr. Caron, please, from Library and Archives Canada.
11:10 a.m.
Daniel J. Caron Librarian and Archivist, Library and Archives Canada
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for inviting me to share my thoughts on the emerging digital media environment.
The mandate of Library and Archives Canada is to capture and preserve the documentary heritage of Canadians, including that of the Government of Canada. Through the collection of documentary heritage we provide an accurate account of the evolution of Canadian society. Documentary heritage is at the core of literacy in Canada, and even at the core of our democracy. By ensuring that the most relevant and significant material is acquired and preserved, we ensure that this material is there to be searched and accessed by Canadians over time.
Fulfilling our mandate in the new digital environment presents unique challenges and opportunities. As you know, the new information and communication technologies are continually evolving. They have fundamentally changed the way Canadians create information, safeguard it, and retrieve it. In the new digital environment, Canadians expect to find information everywhere and anytime. This is true in organizations and institutions throughout our society.
Information in all forms—films, documents, portraits, photos—is today more than ever ephemeral, instantaneous, and highly dynamic. And we are witnessing a new phenomenon: in the digital media age, too much information is recorded. This creates a major challenge unique to the archival function, which is how to be selective about what should be preserved and what need not be.
As the CNRS researcher Tzvetan Todorov wrote in 1995, collective memory is at risk today not because records are disappearing, but rather because there is too much available. This problem of abundance directly affects the capacity of societies to identify, preserve and ensure access to their documentary heritage. One consequence is that most countries are revisiting their policies and legislative frameworks to deal with the challenge of preservation in a digital age.
In Canada, LAC—as a key part of the Canadian Heritage portfolio—has a critical role to play in influencing and informing these discussions. Today, we are in a transition from a documentary environment of paper, canvass, vinyl and film to a new digital environment, where sensory information now takes the form of bits and bytes—untouchable and invisible. This has caused a tectonic shift at the very foundation of our business.
The traditional archival materials that once came to us in a box filled with books, pictures and papers, all organized in the way the donor was thinking, will now be coming to us on a memory stick. This memory stick will contain books read by the donor in one folder, the texts he or she has written in another folder, and photos in yet another one. Moreover, all of these items will be readable only with the software utilized by the author twenty years ago and—to make things worse—the appropriate version of that software. And we will not necessarily know the nature of the content until we have accessed it. These are the challenges of the archival business in the 21st century.
Building and preserving Canada's documentary heritage in this new environment requires new approaches, new ways of working and, above all, new forms of partnership and collaboration.
To meet this challenge, memory institutions like LAC must change the way they do business. Increasingly, they will need to work together to identify relevant documentary heritage and to complement each other's work in the areas of acquisition, preservation, and access.
At the same time, the new digital environment offers wonderful opportunities, provided we can master new technologies in support of acquisition, preservation, and access. This is what we are doing today, and what we will increasingly be doing in the future, with new digital approaches to fulfilling our mandate and to better connect Canadians across the country with their documentary heritage. The digital environment can become a conduit to ensure that all Canadians, no matter where they live or what their socio-economic status is, will have access to their documentary heritage.
To deliver on the promise of the new digital media environment, we will have to address the issue of identifying and preserving the content created in the new social media networks like Facebook and MySpace. We must open up and link our digital and digitized documentary heritage to Canadian cultural industries, genealogists, historians, lawyers and Canadians in general. In this way, we will enable direct cross-country access to a largely untapped public resource. These assets can be leveraged for literacy development and democratic needs, and repurposed for a wide variety of uses, some of which are as yet unknown. For example, LAC is sharing its digital content with memory institutions and Canadian cultural industries to enable new digital media applications, thus contributing to innovation and new business opportunities.
In another case, we have enabled Inuit youth to connect with their Elders by inviting them to identify and tag photographs of their ancestors online. Often, these are the only visual records the Inuit community has of these individuals. Many of the photographs featured in this initiative, called "Project Naming", were digitized by LAC from paper-based Government of Canada collections.
Today, however, most records are born digital, including most government records. In this new environment, LAC has helped build a new policy suite to assist federal departments capture and manage relevant digital content so that it can be made accessible over time. The directive on record keeping is in direct response to the needs of digital work environments in the federal government.
The key lesson of the record-keeping initiative that serves as a best practice for how we collect and preserve digitally created content is the principle of linking the production of Canadian digital content to its preservation and access. As the Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain notes, “In the digital environment, everything is saved yet little is preserved.”
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we cannot wait a few decades before we tackle the challenge of digital preservation. To do so is to risk creating serious gaps in the continuing memory of this country.
As Canada moves forward in meeting the challenges of preserving its digital documentary heritage, we will need to develop a pan-Canadian network of Trusted Digital Repositories—electronic vaults where digital content can be hosted and distributed in both the short and medium term. This content will be carefully selected to determine what should be preserved and made available in the long term. LAC is currently developing the appropriate policies, standards, work processes and technologies to enable it to become a Trusted Digital Repository and thereby to ensure long-term access to this country's digital heritage. In this way, we are truly becoming a 21st century library and archives.
Our mandate to preserve Canada's documentary heritage for current and future generations places LAC in the unique position of being able to contribute our experience and expertise to the emerging national digital content strategies. Our own modernization efforts are focused on meeting these challenges to leave a meaningful legacy for Canadians in future.
As we reflect on the opportunities and challenges of the emerging digital media environment, we should bear in mind that in our free and democratic society, it is the content itself that sustains our institutions and drives our economic, social and cultural development. At the core of any Canadian digital strategy is the obligation to acquire, preserve and make accessible content that is authentic, relevant, reliable and accessible, both today and for future generations. Thank you.
11:20 a.m.
Conservative
11:20 a.m.
Conservative