Mind (The) Shift: LAC Digital Strategy

Now available, Library and Archives Canada's Digital Strategy which "articulates the digital opportunities that we can leverage to fulfil LAC’s mission and achieve greater value, relevance and credibility."

"By advancing our digital agenda, LAC will empower Canadians to discover and access their documentary heritage when and where they want. We are heading toward a digital future, using three themes as our compass."

The themes and elements of the strategy are:

THEME 1: DIGITAL CURATION

1 DIGITALLY ENABLED
Building the technology and instruments required to enable us to achieve our business model goals through the use of a Digital Curation Platform (DCP).
2 DIGITAL HERITAGE
Ensuring our collections include new forms of born-digital documentary heritage, such as data, web, and other sources of digital content.
3 DIGITIZE WISELY
Optimizing our services by digitizing portions of LAC’s analogue holdings based on popularity, ad-hoc requests, preservation needs, and other criteria.
4 DIGITALLY DESCRIPTIVE
Ensuring all our holdings (analogue and digital) have comprehensive metadata and descriptions
that are continually enriched.

THEME 2: DIGITAL DISCOVERY

5 OPEN ACCESS
Facilitating discovery and use of as much of LAC’s holdings as possible by anyone, anywhere,
anytime.
6 SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
Enhancing the value of our holdings through active promotion and social engagement with clients.
7 NETWORK CONTENT
Playing a leadership role in creating a network of memory institutions providing comprehensive
access to Canada’s documentary heritage.

THEME 3: DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

8 CLIENT AWARE
Embedding client needs and outcomes into all levels of our policies, governance and actions.
9 DATA INFORMED
Making LAC an organization whose decisions are informed by timely and observed data.
10 DIGITAL CULTURE
Building an organization with the skills, capacity and culture to digitally manage and
deliver Canada’s documentary heritage.

Some of the items I noticed in the strategy are:

• Establish an advisory panel with private-sector digital leaders to help shape internal digital culture.
• Create a “Digital Innovation meet-up” at LAC 
• Skilled LAC workforce, working in tandem with partners and the “Citizen Librarian/Archivist”
• Exchange performance measures with partners
• Hold digital “town halls” or gatherings online or at cultural institutions to engage clients with collections as a mutual exchange of value
• Seamless client experience in the discovery and use of Canada’s documentary heritage
• Use gamification to increase engagement with collections
• Crowdsource the enrichment of existing metadata
• Crowdsource digitization priorities

There is a cryptic mention of "federal policies that can make it difficult to solicit public opinion on what clients want digitized"

LAC is looking for feedback from clients (a word that occurs 49 times in the document). If you have questions or comments on the strategy, please contact Paul Wager, Senior Director General and Chief Information Officer by phone at 819-997-4111, or by email at paul.wagner@bac-lac.gc.ca. 

A detailed implementation plan and other key documents will further guide in advancing the
Digital Strategy. That's when we'll see if the f in the title of this document is justified!