Canada’s libraries, museums, art galleries, and other memory institutions are lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to preserving their digital archives, according to a report released Feb. 4.
Canada was once a global leader in digital archiving but has let that reputation fall by the wayside in recent years, says an expert panel assembled by the Council of Canadian Academies.
Other countries, including the Netherlands and the United States, have allowed memory institutions to join forces to pool their vast resources. Those countries are also better at identifying and sorting valuable information that might have otherwise remained useless.
“What we used to do was maintain these records in folders and boxes in print archives. We don’t have those mechanisms anymore,” said Colleen Cook, a member of the expert panel and dean of libraries at McGill University.
“And if information is only digital and it’s lost, or if it is in such a form that we can’t get to the specific information that we need, then the memory of a time is potentially very vulnerable.”
