Memorandum 1
October 4, 2013
To:

The Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on 'The Status and
Future of Canada's Libraries and Archives'2

From:

Professor John Smart, PhD (Retired, Archives Technicians
Program, Algonquin College)

Subject:

Library and Archives Canada Needs Your Help

My best wishes to the panel as it undertakes its important work. I believe Library
and Archives Canada deserves special attention from the panel. I write as a retired
archivist and teaching professor in the archives field in response to the September
10, 2013 letter of Patricia Demers to the library and archives communities asking
“to hear from Canadians generally about the value they place on libraries and
archives...” I make two basic points only. First, Library and Archives Canada is in
serious trouble and needs help. Second, the library and archives field in Canada are
seriously overinvested, intellectually and financially, in digitization and it is time
to examine the ways in which this overinvestment is harming services to
researchers.
Library and Archives Canada has been embroiled in controversy for the past
eighteen months with its 2012 staff and budget cuts, its 2013 near-police state
Code of Conduct for employees and its leader’s sudden resignation on May 15 ,
2013 over questions involving $170,000 in expenses, including public pay for
private Spanish lessons3. There are even rumours that the government may close
This memorandum is based in part on a paper I presented at the Archives
Association of Ontario Conference in Ottawa in May 2013 entitled “Retreating
from a researcher-based culture: The case of Library and Archives Canada, 19672013". Full text of that paper is available upon request.
1

2

On the occasion of their meetings in Ottawa October 4-5, 2013

See “Library head Daniel Caron resigns as $170,000 in expenses found” Teresa
Smith, Ottawa Citizen, May 15, 2013 Viewed May 16, 2013.
3

395 Wellington, LAC’s research headquarters in downtown Ottawa, and, perhaps,
open a McArchives (with a drive-through window?) as part of the re-branded
Canadian Museum of Civilization/Canadian History Museum across the river in
Hull.
LAC these days has a record of mistreating its staff4, misunderstanding its
legislated mandate, and following policies that are reducing its role in the heritage
community. Its traditional role as the essential site for historical research in Canada
is disappearing. Most important among LAC’s mistaken policies is LAC
management’s overcommittment to a policy of digitization. Digitization is no
panacea for the current problems of libraries and archives in Canada. Only a very
small portion of the holdings of libraries and archives will ever be digitized. It is
hoped that the RSC panel can put some needed focus on LAC’s problems and
make recommendations for repairing this important national cultural institution.
The panel, in my opinion, should look particularly at the arrangements LAC
appears to be making with outside organizations such as ancestry.ca and Canadiana

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Library+head+Daniel+Caron+resigns+expens
es+found/8391614/story.html#ixzz2TSP3itNK
A significant number of archivists at LAC were made to re-apply for their own
jobs in 2012 and this pointless process dragged on for months with significant
damage to morale. Although the article cited below talks about senior executives
rather than working level federal public servants it is worth noting that on
September 25, 2013 the Ottawa Citizen reported the results of a study of the
deteriorating health of executives in the federal public service. The study, carried
out by the Association for Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada
(APEX) found “deteriorating physical and psychological health among executives
while raising worrisome questions about the organizational health of the
departments and agencies they manage. Executives who report less commitment —
more than half say they frequently think of leaving — can’t help but eat into
performance and productivity.” See “Depression among PS executives nearly
doubles, new study finds. Senior bureaucrats report harassment, lack of recognition
in workplace” By Kathryn May. Ottawa Citizen September 25, 2013, page A1. It is
no stretch to conclude that lower level civil servants, including those at LAC, are
also being made ill by their working conditions.
4

to have some of its holdings digitized and afterwards to be available primarily only
through these organizations.5
Let us look at LAC’s current budgetary situation. In May 2012 The Canadian
Association of University Teachers pointed out:
On April 30, 2012, it was announced that LAC would lose approximately
20% of its staff -- a cut of 215 positions from 1065 to 850 staff.... Prior to
the April 30 2012 cuts, staff levels had already declined by more than 48
full-time positions since 2004. LAC’s annual budget is, in constant dollars,
$33-million less than it was in 1990. This is before the cuts announced in the
2012 budget. The 2012 federal budget has further reduced LAC’s funding by
$3.5-million this year, $6.6-million next year, and $9.6-million in 2014-15,
and each year thereafter. By 2014-15, adjusted for inflation, LAC’s budget
will be just 58% of what it was in 1990-91.”6
Many of the policy changes announced by Library and Archives Canada in the past
two years make research in the LAC headquarters building at 395 Wellington in
Ottawa far more difficult. In 2012 Library and Archives Canada reported that
2,000 researchers (24,000 annually) visited 395 Wellington each month.7 In this
same 2012 statement LAC announced its intention to bid farewell to the face-toface researcher.

Professor Michael Geist of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa has
reviewed LAC’s digitization contract with Canadiana and sees some problems with
it. See “The untold story behind Canada’s digitization plan: Geist”, Toronto Star,
27 September 2013. Story viewed on
http://www.thestar.com/business/tech_news/2013/09/27/the_untold_story_behind_
canadas_digitization_plan_geist.html October 4, 2013.
5

The Canadian Association of University Teachers Save Library and Archives
Canada campaign website, viewed January 13, 2013.
6

LAC website, LAC announcement May 2012 “... new approach to delivery
services”, viewed 8 September 2012.
7

“LAC’s goal is to shift its service model from a largely in-person approach
to service to a largely unmediated (self-service) approach focused on
enhanced virtual access to content and services.”8
LAC gave an indication of its thinking in this area a year earlier:
At one time, people usually needed to deal with documentary heritage
institutions to gain access to information resources. In the digital
environment, Canadians expect to gain access to these resources directly,
immediately and without having to do so through someone else. This change
provides opportunities and introduces challenges for both documentary
heritage institutions and clients.9
The limits of the online archives
This memorandum is, in part, a reaction to two of the panel’s Framing Questions,
numbers two and three, which appear in the section New Directions - Digitization
of the Framing Questions document. They read as follows:
2.

What role libraries and archives should take in the digitization, the
dissemination and the long-term preservation of Canadian heritage (print
publications and archives)?

3.

What will be the function and future of a brick-and-mortar library or
archives in a paperless future?

I fear that the panel may already be on the way to prejudicing its findings by
framing these questions in this way. (No “paperless future” awaits us, for
example.) I suspect that the directors of archives and libraries with whom the
panel will meet will inevitably ask for more funding for digitization. I hope the
panel is prepared to push back on this front. Digitization has become a panacea in
the archives and library worlds and over-concentration on digitization has
8

idem

Library and Archives Canada 2010–2011 Departmental Performance Report
Modernizing LAC for the Digital Age page 5 Viewed on
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/dpr-rmr/2010-2011/inst/bal/bal-eng.pdf May 26, 2013.
9

particularly harmed the world of Canadian archives beginning with Library and
Archives Canada.
No one, certainly no researcher, and certainly not this researcher, wants to be
without web access these days. But LAC’s excessive love for digitization in recent
years blinds us to the limits of and drawbacks of digitization in archives.
Obviously many bright dedicated people in archives currently devote their careers
to digitization when I think they should instead devote themselves to organizing
and describing the mountains of analogue records archives already hold. The
people who should be devoted to the acquisition and care of analogue records are
more interested in making online archives. Mistakenly, they see digitization as the
way to make analogue records available to potential millions of researchers. How
can anyone argue that making a small percentage of our records available to the
whole world over the Internet is better than looking after the thousands of
researchers who annually make their way into our reading rooms? The question is
often put - why should we not remake archives into something new different and
100% digital?
It is the concept of the 100% digital archives and the halo of ideas associated with
the concept that are the problem. We cannot leave our analogue collections
behind. The dissemination of archival holdings through new technologies goes
back a long time in archives. It predates the computer age. Let’s recall our
historical use of microfilm and Xerox to make archival holdings more widely
available to researchers. Our use of computer based technology to manage finding
aids and other types of archival information useful to researchers also has a long
history. (In its Annual Report for 1971-1972 the Public Archives of Canada is
already talking about its use of electronic data processing (EDP) to produce
finding aids for the Prime Minister’s papers.10) With digitization, however, we
have too often let the technology become its own objective. We are forgetting that
digitization is supposed to benefit researchers. It is not meant to provide us with
excitement.
We need to re-state to ourselves the importance of the original document as a good
in itself. The classic argument in the art world is that of Walter Benjamin: “In even
the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work
of art - its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence - and
10

Public Archives Annual Report 1971-1972, 3.

nothing else - that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been
subject.” (Emphasis in the original.) 11
Although there is not an exact parallel with the situation of archives no one
proposes that the great art galleries or museums of the world should be closed in
favour of viewing their contents online. In those worlds seeing the original up
close and face-to-face is still highly valued. The Louvre got 9.7 million visitors in
2012; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York got 6.1 million; the Los
Angles Museum of Contemporary Art got 218,558 visitors. Yet all stay open and
encourage visitors to come. Why, when they could digitize all the art and put it
online? No one would then have to visit any of those places.12
With a digital only archives what is lost is the ability of archivists personally to
help researchers to shape and deepen their research. There is no sense of an
intellectual partnership between archivist and researcher. It may not have
happened always in the pre-digital past but such a partnership between archivist
and researcher was always possible. Now - with researchers and archivists never
meeting and specialist archivists disappearing - it can’t happen anymore. Much is
lost on both sides as a result.
This point must be emphasized. Current technologies will never enable archives to
digitize more than a very small percentage of the records they hold. Digitization
cannot be relied upon to make available to researchers the records they need.
Based on LAC documents provided to them under a Freedom of Information
request the Canadian Association of University Teachers estimated in September
2012 that approximately 0.5% of LAC holdings (both textual and non-textual) had
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ” Second
version, 1936 in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael
Y. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2008, page 21. Benjamin was not
opposed to technical reproduction of works of art but insisted on the primacy of the
original work.
11

“Newcomer Makes Splash in Museum Attendance”, New York Times, 30 March
2013, C2.
12

been digitized up to that time. 13 (LAC told Treasury Board in 2011 that only 0.3
% of its collection was available online.14) Ian Wilson (former head of Library and
Archives Canada) told the Globe and Mail in August 2012 that he thought that
LAC would have only 1% of its holdings digitized by 2022.15 In September 2012
the Smithsonian reported that it had only digitized 1.3 million objects out of the
139 million objects it holds.16 The National Archives of the United Kingdom
(which used to be the Public Records Office) says it has put online “over 5% of
what we have...” 17 To their credit, when their new building opened earlier this
year, officials of the French national archives told Radio France International:
“With some updates, the concept stays the same: physical documents stored for
people to access.”18
We can, perhaps, compare the digital drive in the archives world to the current
mania for online courses in the university world. Within the past few years a
CAUT website, section Save Library and Archives Canada September 2012
Campaign Update The real scoop on digitization at LAC viewed April 13, 2013.
13

Library and Archives Canada Departmental Performance Report 2009-2010
page 7. Viewed on
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/dpr-rmr/2009-2010/inst/bal/bal-eng.pdf May 23, 2013.
14

“Standing on guard for Canada's records”, James Bradshaw, Globe and Mail,
Aug. 20 2012.
15

Digitization of Smithsonian Collections, article posted September 5, 2012 on the
Smithsonian website, section Newsdesk, Newsroom of the Smithsonian, viewed
April 14, 2013.
16

National Archives of the UK website, What’s Online section, viewed April 10,
2013.
17

News story “Hollande opens new purpose-built centre for French national
archives” By Sarah Elzas published February 11, 2013 on Radio France
International English website, viewed April 11, 2013.
18

number of prestigious American universities have begun to offer free online
courses via the Internet to anyone who wants to sign up for them.19 Offerings differ
somewhat but in most cases students who complete one of these free online
courses do not receive an academic credit for their work but may receive an email
from the university acknowledging completion of the course. Some educators
believe online courses of this type could revolutionize post-secondary education
around the world, democratize it, make it affordable to all. Face-to-face teaching
(like face-to-face archival research) would be made obsolete. MOOCs, (Massive
Online Open Courses) as these courses are called, would obviate the need for
physical libraries, classrooms, most tuition fees, and most professors. The
Chronicle of Higher Education recently studied the first MOOC efforts and
reported some results. 20 72% of professors who had taught MOOCs did not think
even students who successfully completed their MOOC should get formal
academic credit for the course. (Though 79% of MOOC professors thought the
courses “worth the hype.” ) Other studies of MOOCs say that less than half the
people who enrol in a MOOC even complete one lesson assignment. The MOOC
drive is in its early stages but so far it seems that none of the hoped-for benefits
have been realized.
In the present mania to digitize our archives, let’s at least maintain some honesty
with our researchers. Let’s make it clearer to them how little we are able to put
online and how much they still need to come to our archives to do research.21 And
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology made history in 2008 when it
announced that it would post all its course materials online free. Anyone could
follow an MIT course without being enrolled but would gain credits only for
courses in which they were formally enrolled. The next year two Stanford
University professors enrolled 120,000 students worldwide in a course on
computer programming.
19

See “The Minds Behind the MOOCs: The Professors Behind the MOOC Hype”
The Chronicle of Higher Education Results of a February 2013 study. Viewed on
The Chronicle website May 11, 2013. For more information on MOOCs see
Nathan Heller, “Laptop U: Has the future of college moved online?”, The New
Yorker, May 20, 2013, 80-91.
20

For an examination of the difficulties which ensue from an over-reliance on the
Internet see Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of
Technological Solutionism Public Affairs, New York, 2013. Morozov concludes
21

let’s be more honest with ourselves. Digitizing archival holdings is neither simple
nor cheap22. And digitization of a record is no guarantee of its permanent
existence in digital form. There are numerous cases already of important banks of
digitized records disappearing off the Internet.23
Some Conclusions
I offer here some conclusions based on my research to date and on my experiences
as an archivist, teacher, and researcher within the archival community.
1.
Based on the evidence provided by its Annual Reports and its other
statements and policy decisions, Library and Archives Canada has retreated
significantly from what Canada’s national archives used to value and
promote as a research-based culture. This retreat began at least as early as
“... most Internet theorists venerate an imaginary god of their own creation and
live in denial.” page 357.
As some wise people said recently “: ... we are dealing with a lot of complexity
when it comes to data.” Judith Hurwitz, Alan Nugent, Fern Halper), Marcia
Kaufman, Big Data For Dummies. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken New Jersey,
2013, page 10. And “ .. the likelihood of errors increases as you add more data
points.” Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution
That WillTransform How We Live, Work, and Think, Hodder and Company UK,
2013 page 33.
22

See, for example, the news stories and arcan-l objections which accompanied
the Canadian federal government’s “streamlining” and purging of federal
government websites (including LAC’s) which took place in the spring of 2013.
On April 18, 2013 when LAC put up its new/revised website seventeen messages
objecting went up on arcan-l. Some noted that listings previously on the LAC site
had disappeared or were harder to find. See also “Social Media Networks
Stripping Data from Your Digital Photos” David Riecks, leader of the Photo
Metadata Project, on The Library of Congress website, The Signal: Digital
Preservation, posted April 11, 2013, viewed April 13, 2013. For an intelligent
discussion of one case illustrating the difficulty of dealing with digital conversions
see the March 25, 2013 posting to arcan-l of Ghislain Thibault of the Centre for
Research into French-Canadian Culture/CRCCF of the University of Ottawa.
23

the 1990s and the drive to digitize, greatly accelerated in recent years, has
increased the pace of this retreat. LAC has been quite frank about its
withdrawal from in-person service to researchers. Ian Wilson told Treasury
Board in 2008 “... resources were reallocated from areas of relatively lower
priority, such as traditional in-person service levels, to areas of higher
priority in line with its corporate priorities, such as increased investment in
the digitization of its collection....24 It has to be acknowledged that
digitization brings benefits to researchers but those benefits are limited. It
might be noted, for example, that in 2010 only 72% of LAC’s online users
were satisfied with what LAC had up online.25
2.

Of course, researchers’ practices and needs are changing on their own,
independently of anything we do in the archives world.26 But researchers
are practical people. If archives move away from researchers, researchers
will move away from archives, stage their own retreat, and find their
sources elsewhere. Researchers go where the records are. As LAC closes
down they just won’t go there and Canada’s national stories won’t be told.

3.

No one, certainly no researcher, and certainly not this researcher, wants to be
without web access these days. For an illustration of the what is being
achieved daily in online archives creations see Nouvelles du patrimoine
documentaire - Documentary Heritage News, the weekly postings on
arcan-l by David Rajotte. See, too, the recent report by John D. Reid on
Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections on what is being done with genealogy

Library and Archives Canada Departmental Performance Report 2007-2008 A
Strategic Assessment of 2007–2008 page 9
www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/dpr-rmr/2007-2008/inst/bal/bal-eng.pdf Viewed May 24, 2013
24

Library and Archives Canada Departmental Performance Report 2009-2010
Program Activity 1.3 page 26 . Viewed on
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/dpr-rmr/2009-2010/inst/bal/bal-eng.pdf May 23, 2013. In
2009 the satisfaction rate was 64% and in 2008-2009 it was 62%. .
25

See Roger C. Schonfeld & Jennifer Rutner, Supporting the Changing Research
Practices of Historians Published December 07, 2012 Viewed on Zotero May 23,
2013. Thanks to Sara Allain’s posts for pointing out this study.
26

records at Library and Archives Canada.27 But the paper record still remains
key to deep historical research28 and LAC today is making such research
more and more difficult.
4.

Let’s use digital for all we can in archives but, if we don’t also stand up for
paper and analogue records of all types they will certainly be lost. I fear that
the Dr. Strangeloves of the bureaucratic world will close the archives
buildings where such research is now done and incinerate the records held
there in the name of the 100% digital archives future.

5.

The problem with the Caron years at LAC was not primarily incompetence
or gross personal spending. M. Caron was quite clear about his objectives in
his reports and statements. His intention was to refashion LAC completely to make it a smaller and less important institution, dispensing whatever
services it could manage to researchers in a 100% digital manner. Closing
the National Archival Development Program (NADP) , reducing overall
services to researchers, reducing staff and budget29, ending Interlibrary
Loan services (ILL) - none of these things mattered as they did not affect
the digital future. With LAC we are seeing the hollowing out of a great
Canadian cultural institution. It has already happened to the Science and

John D. Reid, “Genealogy at Library and Archives Canada”. Canada's
Anglo-Celtic Connections , posted Monday, May 13, 2013. Viewed May 20,
2013..
27

In 2007, the latest year for which I have been able to find figures, the average
visitor to the LAC website saw eight “page views” , hardly enough for deep
research. See Library and Archives Canada 2009–2010 Report on Plans and
Priorities . Figure 1: Growing Demand for LAC Web Content page 5. Viewed on
www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rpp/2009-2010/inst/bal/bal-eng.pdf? May 21, 2013.
28

By 2015-2016 LAC’s annual budget will have fallen to $90 million, down from
$123 million in 2009-2010.Library and Archives Canada Report on Plans and
Priorities (RPP) 2013-14 Departmental Spending Trend (This document is not
paginated.) Viewed on
http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/report-plans-priorities/rpp-2013-2014/Pages
/rpp-2013-14.aspx June 3, 2013.
29

Technology Museum and to the Canadian Museum of Civilization. (It will
be done as well to the CBC if the government thinks it can get away with it.)
Those who defend LAC and its services to researchers s are engaged in a
battle of primary importance to Canadian culture. We should try hard not to
lose it.
__________________________________________
John Smart worked as an archivist at Library and Archives Canada for eighteen
years and as a professor at Algonquin College in Ottawa for twenty years. . He
holds a PhD in History from Queen's University. (His 2004 doctoral thesis dealt
with the early years of the computer industry in Ottawa.) In January 2013 he
organized a panel held in Ottawa by the Archives Association of Ontario East
chapter on the topic What We Have Lost: What We Stand to Lose: The Future of
Archives and Archivists in Canada. In May 2013 he presented a paper “Retreating
from a researcher-based culture: The case of Library and Archives Canada, 19672013" to the Archives Association of Ontario Conference in Ottawa. In February
2014 his paper “Will Library and Archives Canada still exist in 2017 and how
much do we care?” will be presented to the Interrogating Access: Current and
Future Directions for Scholarly Research and Communications in Canada
Conference at Wilfrid Laurier University.
His email address is jsmart@rogers.com.
Copyright John Smart October 4, 2013