IDCS steering committee seeks ways to put recommendations into action

A final report published by the Infomation Deficit: Canadian Solutions (IDCS) forum held in October 2001 isn’t the end of the group’s efforts to put Canadian content online. Janice Dickin, chair of the group’s steering committee, says she and her colleagues are in the process of finalizing several grant applications that put the report’s recommendations into practice. Potential funding could come from CANARIE Inc.’s Applied Research in Multimedia fund, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Initiative on the New Economy envelope, as well as through the Networks of Centres of Excellence and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The money, if successfully won, will be used to digitize and post content such as historical drawings or audio recordings online with appropriate contextual material to help students and others use the items. The initiatives are intended to reverse the trend toward a mass of content posted online without review and used by Canadians without consideration for its source or validity. "There’s no quality control on the Internet, and people don’t use their critical thinking," Dickin says of the content currently online. The efforts are in support of several recommendations made by the IDCS in its recently released report, The Internet as a Site of Citizenship. The report – a wrap-up of the proceedings of a national conference held last October – urges several initiatives to help Canadians exploit the web for good quality Canadian content. While several programs have recently gathered steam to put CanCon online, including Canadian Heritage’s well-received Canadian Culture Online Program, Dickin says Canadians have only begun to scratch the surface. The IDCS wrap-up report makes the following recommendations to redress the situation: that an advisory council for Internet policy be established; the creation of a coherent program of research for policy and planning; the establishment of a framework for digital rights management; education in creation for the Internet and use of the Internet be made available to all Canadians; access to the Internet for all Canadians, irrespective of geography and social or physical condition, be made a goal of any plan or policy; a national policy be developed for the preservation of digital content; qualified organizations be encouraged to index and evaluate Internet sites in terms of quality of content; and current models of subsidization be expanded to cover the Internet. While grant applications are being made to cover initiatives responding to many of the recommendations, Dickin tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that there are currently no plans to create an advisory council for Internet policy. A member of the conference’s advisory committee and a keynote speaker, Canada’s head archivist Ian Wilson agrees careful thought must be put into how Canadian content is posted online. "The conference in Calgary was very useful for those in different heritage disciplines to come together. That was key because, I think, to move to some of these bigger ideas such as how we create this resource and all kinds of material on Canada – and link it so that from a user’s point of view it becomes fairly transparent – that was very useful." Wilson says the National Archives of Canada has offered its help to other institutions in Canada with heritage material, including its expertise in digitizing and posting material in context, and even possible help with the digitization itself. He notes that the Archives now has the capability to digitize more than a million pages a year. Further, it is spearheading an initiative to offer Canadians, within two years, a comprehensive online database of all available heritage materials in the country.

IDCS steering committee seeks ways to put recommendations into action

Broadcast | June 14, 2002

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