Very well indeed, actually.
As you said, the first challenge is digitization. In many ways, it's the easiest, but it's very expensive. It's easiest in terms of technologies involved. Those are sophisticated today. We know what we're doing and we know how to do it, but really it's just the cost of doing it.
The interesting thing about it, however, is that it's also a job creator, because we need to set up our sites and we need to utilize those sites in terms of doing that mass digitization--and the mass is huge.
In Quebec, just as an example, some of that digitization capacity is being developed by our first nations, so it's becoming job creation in the Quebec context. So there are some really interesting spin-off benefits, but it is a huge challenge for us.
Of course, just digitizing something doesn't make it accessible. It doesn't lead to its discovery. In and of itself, that's another item.
I don't want to leave you simply with the idea that the retrospective digitization is all of the problem. My colleagues here have talked very persuasively and very articulately with regard to the digital or electronic versions of those magazines, and I applaud them for that.
I hope they're considering the preservation of those files, not for five years, not for ten years, but our challenge within the research library community is to think of that preservation for 500 years. That is our challenge. I think we are the only ones in the country thinking in those terms. That's where trusted digital repositories come into the fray.
Google has been an interesting component of our lives. Access to all of the Google files is not yet a part of our service array in Canada. It probably will be, but there are still legal things to overcome.
But it worries me as a Canadian, perhaps not in my current role, that much Canadian content—thank heavens not as much as they think—has been digitized by Google, and we're now going to have to go in and somehow buy it back, retrieve it from another foreign repository. That gives me a certain amount of angst, I have to admit.
We would like to see more government assistance, particularly in making in-roads into those huge digitization projects that I mentioned. There's a lot of content out there. We think that content can be re-purposed in many ways by the cultural sector, the private sector, education, all sorts of things. Whether it's $1 million or $10 million or $500,000, as we nibble into it, it's an important--