Let's Put Canada's Knowledge Online

While we need to ensure new creative content industries grow and thrive we must also celebrate and preserve over 400 years of Canadian creativity and make it accessible to Canadians. We believe the strategy should be expanded to include not only new digital media, but also the creation of digital media through the digitization of Canada's existing documentary heritage. Further, it is essential to provide a preservation and access infrastructure for all digital media, new and old, as it enters the Canadian corpus. To do so will multiply the value of digital content through the widest possible distribution for present and future generations. Converting Canadian documentary heritage to new digital media will add the knowledge essential to the new digital economy, which, in turn, is a key ingredient for Canada's competitiveness in the global economy. Other countries are investing substantially in putting their cultural and scientific heritage online as well as building infrastructure and capacity to manage and exploit digital content. To be competitive, Canada must also invest in heritage content and infrastructure for online preservation and access.

Canada's documentary heritage is held by many memory institutions across the country. These institutions have had the responsibility and capability to preserve and make accessible Canadian content for many decades. They recognize the critical importance of making their collections available online now and for future generations. It is important to continue to entrust these institutions with the responsibility and provide the funding required to ensure Canada's new and old documentary heritage is accessible for present and future generations. Canada needs to continue to entrust its heritage to the memory institutions.

Our memory institutions are self organizing regionally and nationally in collaborative projects to benefit from shared expertise, economies of scale, common goals and interoperability. After over a dozen years of digitizing content, creating digital preservation repositories and modern web based access to the collections, they can provide a strong base on which to build and grow Canada's digital content. The job to be done is well understood and documented in the business case for the Canada Online project, a Canadiana.org collaborative initiative. A pan–Canadian collaboration of major memory institutions has been organized and, with funding, is ready to undertake programmes to create, convert, preserve and make accessible Canadian digital media now.