Minutes of the Depository Services Program Advisory Committee (DSP-AC) Teleconference, May 10, 2018

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Teleconference date

May 10, 2018

Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD) representatives

List of participants

Absent

Participating Observers

Meeting summary

  1. Opening remarks by Julie Couture, Director of the Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD).
  2. Minutes from the June 14, 2017 teleconference approved.
  3. Website Renewal (Shannon Taylor and Melissa Graham)
    1. The launch of the new Government of Canada Publications website took place on March 15, 2018 as part of the Government of Canada’s Web Renewal Initiative. Web Renewal began several years ago in the Government of Canada, and its aim is to improve how Canadians access Government information and services online.
    2. The following changes have been made to publications.gc.ca:
      • the look of the site
      • the navigation and information architecture
      • the content of the informational (or “non-publication”) pages

      All of these changes are based on the newest Government of Canada templates and standards designed to make websites more web accessible and more readable. Our site now has the look and feel of a Canada.ca site, although we are not actually migrating to Canada.ca, and we have retained our home page uniform resource locator (URL).

    3. No changes were made to the URLs of the actual publications or to the bibliographic records.
    4. A few technical issues were identified following the launch, however many have already been resolved.
    5. Upcoming changes will include: updating the breadcrumbs to align with Canada.ca, improving some of the search navigation and simplifying the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) page.
    6. Everyone using publications.gc.ca is encouraged to let us know if they are experiencing any technical or usability issues.
    7. Changes were made to the Publication Information pages (bibliographic display). These changes included, but were not limited to:
      • Displaying all subfields of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) field 245 (Title)
      • Displaying MARC field 246 (Variant title)
      • Displaying all the content of MARC 260 instead of just the date, changing the label to Publishing information
      • Creating and displaying local MARC field 693 for Keywords
      • Displaying additional 5XX notes fields under Notes (previously only MARC field 500 displayed here)
  4. Future enhancements to the catalogue (Sophie Wei and Melissa Graham)
    1. The Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD) will implement Resource Description and Access (RDA) in the fall of 2018. The PDSD may start using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in the catalogue records sometime this year or next year.
    2. Plans for future enhancements to the website:
      • Improve Advanced search interface
      • Improve relevancy of search results (weighted ranking)
      • Add filters and ability to download MARC records to search results (same as seen on the Weekly Acquisitions Lists)
      • Add several new linking relationships (for example MARC field 787 for other relationship types, such as supplements or other related material)
      • Remapping publication types to expand on the current types of only monographs or serials, allowing for the inclusion of journal articles

    Action item: Once the requirements surrounding the search functions are finalized, PDSD will be reaching out to the community for input.

  5. Update from Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) on Open Government (Christopher Jaja)
    1. TBS provided a high level overview of Open Government. Please refer to the PowerPoint presentation provided in the invitation.
    2. TBS is trying to build a harvester which will grab all documents available for release from the various departments.
    3. GCdocs is an Open Text system used in the Government of Canada to manage working documents. There would be restrictions such as unclassified documents, no caveats, no sensitive information, etc. for documents available through the Open Government portal.
    4. Working documents are not necessarily translated until they are final; therefore further clarification will be needed regarding having documents in both official languages.
    5. Everything that is released to the Open Government Portal should have the Open Government license but TBS will need to provide some clarity on this.
  6. Sharing of Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD) metadata (Melissa Graham)
    1. Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD) currently has an outdated data set on the Open Data Portal which came from a previous cataloguing system. A new complete refresh of PDSD’s entire catalogue is expected shortly. It will consist of bibliographic data only, not the publications themselves. However, the URLs to the electronic publications will be included as well as Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs) to the records on publications.gc.ca. Three distinct files (Serials, Monographs, and Monographic series) will be sent to the Open Data Portal in MARC 21 as well as Dublin Core Extensible Markup Language (XML). PDSD is exploring with information technology (IT) how often this can be updated in the future and if it can be done automatically.
    2. PDSD had to delay the implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) due to other priorities, but will be re-opening this exploration with our Chief Information Officer Branch this fiscal year.
    3. It is not possible to include information regarding the Weekly Acquisitions Lists within the bibliographic records. However records that were migrated from PDSD’s previous cataloguing system may contain information regarding which Weekly Checklist and Supplementary Checklist each publication was listed on. This information would be recorded in local MARC field 590 which will be included within the dataset update where available.

    Action item: Publishing and Depository Services Directorate will be looking at including full text search.

  7. Statistics Canada Historical project—PDSD MARC records (Melissa Graham)
    1. Once Statistics Canada historical project is complete, PDSD will export the MARC files and make them available to other libraries and a message will be sent on Infodep. 156,079 files have been received to date. Currently no target date for completion.
    2. Statistics Canada mentioned that they have approximately 100 publications that are deemed very fragile. A callout might be sent to see if better copies could be found for the digitization.
    3. A representative from the University of Victoria talked about its involvement with the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) last copy project. Anyone wanting additional information can consult the following link: Shared Print Archive Network.

    Action item: Once the Statistics Canada historical project is complete, PDSD will post a message on Infodep.

  8. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) update (Sarah Stacy and Tom Smyth)
    1. LAC informed members that they will be replacing their Integrated Library System (ILS) system by going from AMICUS to Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). AMICUS is expected to be decommissioned to the public in October 2018 but LAC will get back to us with confirmation. A contract has been put in place with OCLC and was launched internally in February 2018 to allow training of staff before launch to the public. A subscription to OCLC will be required to have access to all catalogue records.
    2. LAC captured the commemoration of the Canada 150, the Olympics, the Humboldt tragedy, and much more within their web crawls for the web archive. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s web archive will also be available.
    3. LAC noted that they already have previous crawls in the Government Web Archive as far back as 2005 which represents 40 TB of data.
    4. LAC mentioned the full-text search engine has just been launched internally in beta form which will enable key word search, limit by type, host and more. The full launch is expected in the next few weeks.
    5. LAC’s communications strategy will be shared via LAC’s website and social media.
  9. Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB) student portal (Sophie Wei)
    1. There is no update regarding the CGSB student portal.
  10. Annual Statutes update (Julie Couture)
    1. An update was provided regarding the Annual Statutes.
  11. Infodep
    1. PDSD reminded members that Infodep is there for the library community to use as a communication exchange. All members are encouraged to use Infodep to share information.
    2. There was mention that the low traffic on Infodep is because the current tool is no longer a true listserv. Anything posted on Infodep must be posted by the moderator which can make it difficult to have conversations between librarians.
    3. PDSD wants to look at other options and wanted to know how librarians are communicating among themselves.
    4. Some members indicated they feel a bit isolated and mentioned it would be nice to know what’s happening in other parts of Canada. There was also mention of having a national listserv like Canadian Library Association (CLA) used to have. Another option was the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) listserv.
  12. Questions, answers and follow-ups
    1. A request was made to have an update from the Library of Parliament at the next DSP-AC meeting.
  13. Next meeting
    1. Julie Couture thanked all participants for attending the meeting. She indicated that the next meeting would be in the fall of 2018.
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