Library of Parliament
Submission brief to the Royal Society of Canada
Re. Libraries and Archives Public Consultation
Ottawa, October 4, 2013
The Library of Parliament is submitting this brief as an individual library recognising that
our responsibilities are broader and on a larger scale than those of our member colleagues
in the Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada (APLIC-ABPAC).
We have reviewed and we support the submission to the RSC prepared by APLIC, but
offer this individual response in addition.

Q1: What is your mandate and who are your members?
The Library of Parliament (LOP)’s mission is to contribute to Canadian parliamentary
democracy by creating, managing and delivering authoritative, reliable and relevant
information and knowledge for Parliament.
We carry out our mission through these services:
 Provide customized research and analysis to parliamentarians and their staff
 Keep parliamentarians informed and up to date, and deliver news and information
that is relevant to our clients

Support legislators and committees with the information they need to examine
the issues of the day, consider legislation, and hold the government accountable
 Preserve Parliament’s documentary heritage and ensure access to its collections
 Help parliamentarians inform Canadians about Parliament and the issues before it
Our clients are:
 Individual parliamentarians and their staff
 Parliamentary staff
 Parliamentary committees and associations
 Organizations that support Parliament
 The Canadian public, on behalf of parliamentarians

Q2: From your collective perspective, what challenges or issues are most prominent
for your organisation today?
The issues that we face are:

OTTAWA, CANADA K1A 0A9

 making our digital resources easy for parliamentarians and the public to find and
access on their own, and the cost of doing so;
 staying abreast of technology and implementing solutions that take into account
our clients’ information needs, our staff’s capacity, and our shrinking financial
resources;
 recognising and taking into consideration the changing needs of our client groups,
acknowledging that our primary parliamentary clients want timely, personalised,
customised and in-person service;
 Given that our clients work in a very fast paced environment they require very
quick turnaround from us. They function in a highly visible and mediatized
environment so the Library has to offer them access to knowledge and
information that is very competitive in terms of content but also in terms of
response time;
 Competing with Google, the www, user-generated info resources, and personal
networks —as information providers
 functioning in a hybrid environment has been a challenge for many years; as a
library we are finding that we have less control over what documentation we can
acquire/retrieve (on one hand too many sources, and on the other dealing with
information that is “here today, gone tomorrow”)
 market changes –fewer vendors, and more proprietary practices, especially with
respect to digital content;
 Library vs consumer availability of e-resources
 the advent of social media presents challenges: how do we harness them for
improved outreach and awareness of our services and, how can we search for and
harvest relevant knowledge from the glut of data;
 preserving and providing effective and broader access to our historical and unique
collections as well as recognising the importance of preserving current born
digital information for future clients;
 attracting, retaining and developing bilingual staff in a competitive environment

Q3: What do you anticipate as future challenges (by 2020), and how do you see your
membership contributing to address them?
We assume many of the current challenges will persist, though the pace of change will
increase. We anticipate that the use of physical library spaces where we meet clients and
where we provide staff workspace will change markedly.
By 2020 Parliament Hill will be undergoing significant renovations which will impact the
use of the historic Main Library building. We expect to digitize more of our print
collections and disseminate these more widely; and, we hope that we will benefit from
other libraries (e.g. APLIC and the recently announced CGI-PLN Network) doing the
same thing. In order to be able to afford this digitization, we anticipate the need to create

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innovative partnerships, networks and collaborative arrangements to make sure we are
not all digitizing the same titles but loading them in different systems. Finally, there will
likely be new legal and licensing considerations that present challenges for libraries and
their users.
We anticipate that we will have more competition from information sources that may not
yet exist (i.e. web4.0?) and that are available anytime, anywhere and on any device. As a
library we will have to differentiate ourselves.
For libraries, the cost of storing print materials will have shifted significantly to the cost
of storing, migrating and providing access to huge quantities of data (not just written but
images of all types and audio ++). Decisions about keeping conservation copies of print
publications will need to be agreed upon at a provincial and national level – which
organization is best suited to lead this?
Data management will require new investments in technological infrastructure and staff
competencies, which in turn will create pressures in an environment that is already under
pressure.

Q4: What would your organisation be doing if funding were increased? And what
are you not doing because of cutbacks or reduced funding?
If our funding were increased we would be providing better tools for our clients and staff
to use to efficiently discover the information they need. We would invest in digital
preservation and description to enhance retrieval. We would implement better content
management. We would develop a capacity to provide more graphical and geographic
information systems to better respond to our busy clients’ needs. We would carry out
more outreach about Parliament on behalf of parliamentarians. We would invest in
continuous staff development to stay ahead of our clients’ information needs. Data
mining and further value-added services would become more prominent.
The government wide Strategic and Operating Review affected the Library of Parliament
leading us to cut positions, reduce collection expenditures and to rethink the way we offer
our services.
We have noted an increase in “offloading” from a variety of partners/providers. The
decision of LAC to cut ILL services has had an impact on our services as noted in Q5
response. The decision by providers to cease distributing print materials has required
changes in our work processes and even in some cases has led to reduced exchanges of
publications. The increased awareness and commitment to avoid duplication is
encouraging greater collaboration which in turn leads to changes over who controls
certain activities in which we participate – sometimes we gain and sometimes we lose,
the same can be said for our clients.

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Q5: How does your organisation relate to Library and Archives Canada (LAC)? Or,
in your view, how should LAC relate to major archival and librarian organizations?
The Library of Parliament has had a very long history of collaboration with Canada’s
national library, until 1952 the LOP held the legal deposit role. As a result we provided
the bulk of LAC’s initial collection of published materials and, had continued to donate
Canadian publications we no longer required until 3-4 years ago. At their request we
stopped doing so.
We partnered with LAC to digitize the parliamentary debates in 2009-2010 which in turn
enabled the LOP to build in partnership with Canadiana.org the recently announced
Historical Debates Portal.
We use AMICUS to assist us with ILL requests, we download records from the union
catalogue to save us time and effort, we use the Canadian Subject Headings maintained
by LAC and we search the PAC records for a variety of research requirements. We used
LAC’s excellent ILL service extensively until it was cut in 2012. We have noted a
significant increase in requests to borrow from the LOP since that time.
We link to certain records on LAC’S website to add detail to our parl.gc.ca products thus
reducing duplication of effort. (e.g. Prime Minister pages).
We contribute to numerous consultative exercises such as Last copy initiative, Analogue
Preservation, the Pan-Canadian Digital Network.
Overall, we relied on LAC to provide standards and leadership to the library community
in Canada and to represent us abroad. On a more local level they provided leadership and
kept the government libraries informed of developments within the federal government
information management network.
This community coordination/ leadership role is very important. One example: as
libraries try to do more with less, a national coordination of digitisation initiatives would
be very helpful in reducing duplicated efforts, clarifying responsibility, and making
others aware of resources that are digitally available from other Canadian libraries.
Other initiatives (e.g. the GCI-PLN) have developed to fill the leadership gap, but it is
unfortunate that these initiatives seem to be responding to a gap left by a national
institution.
Library and Archives also has a role to play in:


Establishing standards and guidelines for libraries and archives

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




Leading initiatives and being a centre of expertise for libraries and archives to
support them in implementing new technologies, modernize practices, and reduce
duplication (e.g. in digitization) etc.
Negotiating collective licensing
Developing expertise in
- Training
- Access and preservation (esp. digital, but all formats as required)
- Open access digital repositories to house national collections (esp.
government publications, but also significant Canadiana)

Submitted by:
Lynn Brodie
Director General, Information and Document Resource Service
Library of Parliament

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