Walker, Ron. 2011.

Canadian Content Online: an Assessment 2011, Stratford Institute Prepared by Ernest Hoffman The author is the executive director of Canadiana.org (henceforth referred to as Canadiana), one of the most important and empowered TDRs in Canada. This report provides an overview of the state of Canadian online archives, as well as the processes that led to the formation of the TDR model and its relationship with LAC and Canadiana. The ramping up of Canadianas development, budget and mandate came in the wake of the 2005-2006 drafting of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS), which was led by LAC in collaboration with 200 stakeholder organizations from a variety of sectors: publishing and media producers, creators, rights bodies, academics, provincial and federal officials and memory institutions *+ The key tenets of the strategy are mass digitization and increased digital preservation capacity, and included providing powerful search and discovery tools to make these digital archives accessible to the public (Pg. 63). Following the articulation and adoption of CDIS, Canadiana was given a leading role in working to achieve the CDIS objectives. It is the hub of the ongoing collaboration between 35 of Canadas major memory institutions, including LAC, CARL, BANQ, and large public libraries. This collaboration has led to the expansion of Canadiana.orgs role to facilitate planning and coordination as well as provide a focal point for initiatives such as Canada Online (a proposed national digitization programme), a network of Trusted Digital Repositories, and a Canadian Metadata Repository and Discovery Portal (Pg. 64). The author analyzes ongoing CDIS initiatives in terms of Digitization, Preservation and Access, with the latter two relevant to born-digital content. Following an overview of digitization efforts to date, the report notes that *t+here are a number of preservation projects underway, notably, LAC, BAnQ, University of Alberta and University of Toronto and Canadiana.org are collaborating on a Preservation Network of Trusted Digital Repositories to provide mutual redundancy, interoperability, standards and criticallyperpetual preservation (Pg. 65). Under access, the report states that *o+nline collections of digitized and born-digital content are held by many memory institutions across Canada *+ we need to make it possible to find it using modern search tools that can search all the collections at once (Pg. 65). Canadiana is working towards this goal through the Canadian Metadata Repository and Discovery Portal launched in January 2011. The report also summarizes digitization and preservation initiatives around the world, noting that Norway and the Netherlands are comprehensively digitizing their newspaper archives, and states that it is essential to provide a preservation and access infrastructure for all digital media, new and old, as it enters the Canadian corpus. This description reinforces the impression from other sources, including LAC documents, that LAC is now in a more passive role (receiving government archives and legal deposit, etc), and Canadiana is leading the active collaboration and acquisition, including in the formation of the TDR network itself. It appears likely that whatever major Canadian ongoing or planned initiatives there are for archiving born-digital news, they are or will be situated within the TDR network led by Canadiana.