P.O.  Box  23155,  St.  John's  NL,  A1B  4J9 Telephone:  709-­‐726-­‐2867      Fax:709-­‐722-­‐9035  E-­‐mail:  anla@nf.aibn.com 1. What  is  the  nature  and  make-­‐up  of  your  organiza8on? Established in 1983, the Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives (ANLA) represents archives, archivists and individuals committed to the preservation of archival records in the province. Our mandate is to promote professional standards in procedures and practices through workshops, on-site advisory services and the development of educational materials. Our 80-plus member institutions include universities, heritage centres and historical societies, First Nations communities, religious communities and congregations, military and legal bodies, medical and benevolent organizations, francophone and oral history repositories, professional and volunteer associations. ANLA member institutions are distributed all over the province – from Nain, on the north coast of Labrador to Grand Bank, on the southern tip of the Burin Peninsula. 2. Does your organization provide services: (a) directly to Users? Or, (b) to members who make-up the organization? B 3. In terms of Question 2, describe the services provided directly to Users, and if they are consortial in nature please describe the mechanisms in place to define, refine and measure the impact of the services, particularly as they relate to Canadians. ANLA’s services are provided to member institutions who, as a result of our training programs and advisory services, are better able to provide stewardship for and access to their archival holdings. In addition to member services, ANLA provides access to information about archival holdings throughout the province via ARC-ANLA, our provincial archival description database. ANLA measures the impact of its training and advisory services through workshop statistics, memberships sustained, periodic surveys, database statistics and website hits. 4. Would Canadians know of, or understand, the contribution you make to library/archival service in Canada? Most Canadians might not, but community archives and museums across both the province and the country are aware of the services that archives associations provide. Researchers often consult us to determine the best source for archival information on specific topics. 5. What inhibits you from providing services that ultimately would improve library/archive services to Canadians? Our biggest problem at this time is funding. With the loss of the National Archival Development Program (NADP) ANLA has lost fully half of its funding. This reduces the amount of training we can provide and hinders our advisory services by drastically reducing the amount of travel and other outreach we can do for consulting services. We are no longer able to provide conservation advice and services and we struggle to deal with increasing demands from and on our member institutions for digital services. 6. What do you see as the challenges for libraries and archives in the forthcoming years? There is a great expectation that everything should be digitized and searchable. Patrons do not generally have a clear idea of the amount of work and money involved in providing item-level digital access. Government touts this as the route to take, but they do not seem to realize the expense (labour, technology, maintenance). SERVICES 1. Libraries are currently hybrid operations, constantly pulled toward traditional services by many core users and pulled, equally, by a concern for relevancy from other users and potential users. What issues are libraries facing as they try to make the transition to new service models? • Funding and staffing for new technology services • Dealing with clients with a wide range of knowledge, expectation and skill sets 2. How do libraries and archives measure outcomes of their service and community impacts? Website/database hits and searches, circulation stats, programming attendance, researcher registration 3. Are libraries the appropriate institutions to catalog, store, and provide access to research data? If not, which institutions should provide these services? Where else but a library or archives? It isn’t just the warehousing of research data but the skilled provision of reference advice, researcher training, preservation and organization of data and media, made accessible in a central institution with some objective distance from the creators of the record. COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND AWARENESS 1. Describe the services provided directly to users within your context, or whether they are consortial in nature; please describe the mechanisms in place to define, refine and measure the impact of the services. (Users = community archives and museums, other community groups who are charged with maintaining community records) ANLA delivers face-to-face training in best practices for maintaining archival collections and provides advisory services via site visits, e-mail, Skype and telephone. 2. In the digital era, what support for patrons do/should libraries provide? They should provide • access to the technology (in some cases the only available access) • reference services • technical assistance • specialized access to controlled collections (fragile or restricted items, undigitized material) 3. What in your opinion are the specific roles of libraries and/or archives and/or museums and other heritage institutions in community building and memory building? Speaking to the role of archives: Their role is to preserve, organize and provide access to the records of communities and governments. The records they hold provide the context for decisions, developments and choices made by governments, organizations and individuals. Access to records can provide accountability on a range of issues, including cultural, environmental, legal and even financial topics. As records accumulate and are processed, the memory “tools” available to Canadians permit a broader understanding of how our country and our cultures developed. NEW DIRECTIONS Digitization 1. What are the main challenges of born-digital material for your institution? The main challenges for the institutions we advise are • Cost of infrastructure (computers, software, server access) for management/ maintenance of digital material • Availability of skill sets and tech support for management/maintenance of digital material • Continuity of staffing 2. What role should libraries and archives take in the digitization, the dissemination and the long-term preservation of Canadian heritage (print publications and archives)? Organize (don’t forget that part!), preserve, disseminate (that is, provide access to) and, as a part of the dissemination process, to digitize where appropriate – these are the tasks that archivists and librarians have always performed. Governments and other responsible agencies should be supporting them as they struggle to manage the old tasks and methods while expanding their services to meet the expectations of the digital age. And everyone should remember that digitization is good servant but a bad master – digitization is not always the answer, or the only answer, or the whole answer. Education 1. What changes, in your judgment, are necessary in the professional education and training of librarians/archivists in the 21st century? It is vital that archivists are trained with technological competencies, not necessarily so that they can undertake the technical work, but at least so that they can have the conversation with those that do. An archivist five years from now, or maybe even sooner, will not get far without understanding the intent and processes of an open archival information system (OAIS) and acronyms slip so quickly into technical topics, they need to be familiar with stuff like DIPs, SIPs and AIPs as concepts, in order to be able to create and manage them. 2. What conversations do you think need to take place with library, archival, and information studies programs about professional competency requirements, and have they begun? In the archival world most of these conversations have already begun. For our association the big issue is how to get basic technical competencies into the smallest institutions. We struggle with how much to teach and how far to go. Additional comments: Impact on the archival community in Newfoundland and Labrador of the elimination of the federal National Archival Development Program (NADP) The Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives has over 80 members across an area from Nain on the north coast of Labrador to Grand Bank at the bottom of the Burin Peninsula on Newfoundland’s south coast. Some of our member organizations are large professional institutions, but the majority are very small. They tell the stories of communities, schools, service organizations, military groups, First Nations, churches and many special interest groups who work to preserve aspects of the culture of this province and this country. The National Archival Development Program was enormously helpful to these community groups. They participated in training sessions in archival practice so that they could be knowledgeable about their holdings and eligible to apply for funding. The application process encouraged them to think about their projects and holdings in systematic and efficient ways. NADP helped to support the services of an archives advisor who offered advice and assistance for archival issues on a year-round basis. NADP was often the only available source for monies to deal with pressing preservation issues, whether for the conservation of individual plans, maps, documents, photographs and other archival material or for the amelioration of more general issues such as mould outbreaks, humidity problems and other common preservation issues. Some impacts of the elimination of NADP on archival institutions: • Members no longer have access to project funding from NADP. Over the twenty-five year history of NADP and its previous incarnations the program has supported archival description, access, outreach and preservation projects in well over 100 archival institutions in this province. All federal funding was matched dollar for dollar by cash and in-kind/ volunteer contributions. Projects funded included arrangement and description of records; preservation activities such as environmental monitoring, the purchase of archival storage materials, the reformatting of at-risk media, the creation of outreach tools and a wide range of other archival projects. In addition, the elimination of this funding source will place increased pressure on funds available from Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincially – funded Cultural Economic Development Program. • Members no longer have access to detailed and tailored preservation advice via ANLA. This service, when it was available, was of particular use to small institutions, as its recommendations and suggestions were tailored to fit the budgets, facilities and skill sets of the smaller sites. The PDO is able to provide only the most basic level of advice. • Members have seen a reduction in the number of training opportunities, as well as a reduction in the amount of travel support to attend remaining training sessions. Advancedlevel workshops will be offered on a very limited basis. • Fewer opportunities are available for students to explore the archival profession, both because of the end of positions made available by NADP project funding and because of reduced opportunities for training and mentoring via the PDO. • Members will have reduced access to advice and assistance once the PDO position is allocated reduced hours in April 2014. Members have benefitted from access to this advice, and to the continuity of service and knowledge of the archival community that comes from a full-time, year-round staff person. This position has now been in existence for 18 years on a full-time basis, with only one change of staff. What impact does the elimination of NADP funding – and the absence of any replacement program – have on Canadians in general? • Because of the elimination of project funding, Canadians may well experience delays in accessing valuable resource materials. Archival records must be evaluated, organized and processed before they can be accessed to tell our stories. • Significant archival resources will be put at risk, especially those held in smaller institutions, because of the elimination of funding for preservation activities. Handling of older and more fragile materials and media – for research or for digitization -- will become more problematic without the preservation support and advice paid for by NADP funds. • NADP often funded digitization projects in small, sometimes isolated institutions. These digitization projects -- some of them including culturally significant material such as First Nations language resources – are no longer supported. As a result, these archival materials will continue to have very limited distribution. If Canadians are to be able to find and tell all of their stories, then the records that tell those stories must be preserved, organized and made accessible. They cannot be neglected due to the location and resources of their steward agencies or to the form in which they are preserved. NADP provided funds to enable the smallest institutions to preserve their records and make them accessible to the world. The advisors and training opportunities it supported empowered archives large and small to make the best and most effective use of their human and financial resources – and all for $1.7 million per year.