Directions for Change

Section 2:
What will guide LAC?

2.4 New approaches to describing Canada's documentary heritage

Metadata-information that describes information resources-are key to our ability to manage, preserve and provide access to our digital and non-digital holdings, as well as to the documentary heritage resources residing elsewhere in Canada. To users, metadata can be key to resource discovery and a means to manage, focus and reduce search results, understand the meaning and context of the content, and know in what ways they are permitted to use it.

There are many forms of metadata including descriptive, preservation, administrative, rights management, and technical metadata, as well as unique identifiers. In the library world, descriptive metadata has traditionally been captured in the MARC format following the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2). Archives have adopted MARC or the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format, and their descriptive practices are increasingly standardized according to the fonds, series and file level hierarchies prescribed in the Rules for Archival Description (RAD).

The library, archival and government information management communities expect LAC to build strong expertise in metadata and to work cooperatively with others. However, at the present time, our metadata efforts are fragmented, the systems in which metadata reside are not interoperable, and our understanding of the key challenges is uneven.

Metadata standards work

For LAC to play a lead role in creating an interoperable network of Canada's documentary heritage, and a central agency role with respect to information management in government, we must continue to contribute to the development of common metadata standards and to drive their application within Canada's information environment. LAC has recently made significant headway in assuming joint leadership with Treasury Board Secretariat in aligning government descriptive metadata efforts. We will need to pay equal attention to educational metadata, preservation metadata, and rights management metadata. We must work with others to develop approaches that will work for the whole of Canada's documentary heritage.

Assessing current descriptive practices

LAC must take a new look at its practices and standards related to description. We need to be clear in our purpose and certain that our methods achieve that goal. What is the level of granularity and detail in description required to support access and contextual understanding? How can we increasingly adopt layered approaches, prioritizing the level of description provided for collections and for items according to use-driven priorities? How can we make better use of technology? How do we weigh the trade-offs between the quantity and timeliness of the descriptive records we make available and the quality of those records? We will continue to study our standards, systems and workflows to ensure optimal efficiency for this part of LAC's operations.

Alternatives to in-house metadata

Alternative approaches to metadata creation will also be sought. Powerful automated indexing tools exist not only for digital text but show increasing success with indexing images, audio and video. We must better understand whether, or when, full-text indexing usefully complements or replaces the use of structured metadata to provide access to resources for information seekers. Search engines such as Google have demonstrated that content-based retrieval can be extremely powerful and highly effective.

Metadata created elsewhere in the information environment, for example, by publishers, government departments, copyright collectives, or users such as genealogists can be adapted for our purposes. (Likewise, our metadata should be available for reuse by them.) We will look increasingly to adopt or adapt, through automated processes, metadata developed by others. Ideally, useful metadata will be created once, preferably at the time of content creation or publication, then enhanced, tailored, repackaged and reused in a variety of ways as its use over time requires.

Understanding the environment

The current national metadata repositories for documentary heritage holdings (AMICUS national union catalogue and Archives Canada), as well as LAC's local catalogues, must evolve to have continued relevance and impact in the rapidly-changing information environment. As we look to integrate access to our holdings, we will also seek to modernize and improve both our "back-end" metadata work processes and "front-end" user interfaces.

To change, we must understand the potential of emerging metadata standards, of mapping schema to one another, and of metadata harvesting protocols. An R&D; program will point the way in the use of innovative technologies that effectively connect information resources with client needs. We need to better understand the ways in which clients seek information, how and when they use metadata, and which elements they use. Clients should not have to adjust their search practices or vocabularies to suit our information systems and metadata. LAC needs to strengthen its expertise in the broader, fundamental theories of information (particularly digital information) use and organization, and understand how it fits with current and emerging metadata standards and practice. Partnerships or complementary activity are foreseen with scholarly communities, government departments, others in the archival and library network, and private sector companies who are also engaged in this field of research.

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