New Report on Preservation of Web-Based Provincial Government Publications

Andrew Hubbertz, Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan, has just published a report he wrote on behalf of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries on the preservation of provincial and territorial government documents on the Web.

As Hubbertz writes in the executive summary:

"(T)he situation is highly variable from one province or territory to the next. As well, it was found that most collections of significance are being created in legislative or government libraries. The most ambitious project is in Quebec, where the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec has a legal mandate to collect provincial web-based publications. The legislative libraries in Ontario and British Columbia are building comprehensive or fairly comprehensive collections. The legislative libraries in Alberta and Manitoba have more limited programs. In Saskatchewan, the University of Saskatchewan Library is attempting to build a comprehensive collection. There are no comprehensive collections in other jurisdictions."

Beyond the immediate situation, the author writes that the Canadian library community will need to tackle long-term access issues including migration, emulation, and archival standards, collecting digital objects without clear print equivalents, and collecting material accessed from a database via search engine.

As we say in French, the report is a very good preliminary "état des lieux" (description of the lay of the land).