Minutes of the Depository Services Program Advisory Committee (DSP-AC) Teleconference, June 13, 2019

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Teleconference date

June 13, 2019

Publishing and Depository Services Directorate representatives

List of participants

Absent

Participating Observers

Meeting summary

  1. Opening remarks by Marc Saint-Pierre, Director General of the Publishing and Depository Services Directorate (PDSD). Stéphanie Côté is the Acting Director in Julie Couture’s absence and Lisa Haughton will chair the meeting.
  2. Minutes from the May 10, 2018 teleconference were approved.
  3. LAC update (Sarah Stacy)
    1. The National Overlap Study on Federal Government Publications, to ensure print copies of Canadian publications are preserved and accessible, was launched.
    2. 26 libraries across Canada which contribute bibliographic records to OCLC are involved in this study.
    3. It began with federal publications identified as at risk during the @RiskNorth Conference in 2017.
    4. Almost 600,000 titles have been discovered through this project, almost three-quarters of them are monographs.
    5. The Project uses Greenglass, which does present some obstacles, including the identification of serials. Further analysis of the results is currently underway.
    6. The final results and datasets will be provided to participants in late June.
    7. The Project did not involve libraries not using OCLC, including those in the federal government library community, for technical considerations, although there is interest in exploring options with these partners in the future.

      Note: Slide decks in English and French that accompanied this presentation were provided to participants after the meeting.

  4. Update from Library of Parliament (Jennifer Beaufils)
    1. The digitizing project began in 2013 with historical debates being made accessible through the Library of Parliament’s online portal.
    2. In 2015, Journals from 1867 to 1995 were added.
    3. Most recently, work of the Committees were added and Bills will be added in the next month or so.
    4. The portal contains over 4.5 million pages.
    5. Future collections to be digitized and made accessible include Votes, Proceedings, and Rules of the Senate. The collection of historical sessional papers (1867 to 1900) is not quite complete yet, but will be expanded up to 1925.
    6. The digitized collection is bilingual, except for very early senate debates that had never been translated.
    7. The portal is widely used, by many different groups, including academics and the press
    8. It is a text-based platform, with searches enabled through Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
  5. Annual Statutes (Stéphanie Côté)
    1. The documentation regarding repealing the Publications of Statutes Regulations has been approved. We will be able to print the Annual Statutes in the fall. Digital copies for 2016, 2017 and 2018 are already available on the website (publications.gc.ca).
    2. An email for those wanting print copies was sent out a couple of months ago. If you were not included but still want print copies, please contact Stéphanie Côté.
  6. PDSD name change (Stéphanie Côté)
    1. The Publishing and Depository Services originally consisted of two separate entities, which merged in 2003. The publishing arm has not existed since 2014. To better reflect the activities of the program, PDSD’s new name will be the Government of Canada Publications Directorate/ Direction des Publications du gouvernement du Canada.
    2. The program name Depository Services Program will not be changed.
    3. Our website URL will not change.
  7. Cataloguing and systems website update (Carlie Maloney and Melissa Graham)
    1. PDSD statistics, 2018 to 2019:
      • Publications.gc.ca now includes over 366,000 electronic publications that are free to download.
      • In the last fiscal year, there were over six million page views and more than two million downloads.
      • The cataloguing team added over 50,000 publications in 2018 to 2019, and there were over 4,300 applications for ISBNs.
      • In early 2018 PDSD began adding HTML links alongside their PDF equivalents. There are now more than 4,000 records containing links to a departmental HTML.
    2. Cataloguing projects:
      • PDSD officially completed the Statistics Canada project. It included more than 156,000 publications. PDSD Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) batches are available upon request.
      • The Environment and Climate Change Canada project is ongoing. 3,000 items catalogued so far, at least 32,000 more are expected.
      • The Industry, Science and Innovation Canada project is also ongoing. 1,000 items catalogued thus far, another 1,500 or so expected.
      • The Royal Commissions from the Privy Council Office is an ongoing project. This is comprised of 300 items, supporting studies by the Royal Commission of historical interest.
    3. PDSD continues to pull items regularly from the Fugitive Publications Google Doc created by CGI DPN (Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network).
    4. PDSD also encourages members to continue to let them know if they find a publication that should be in the collection. If your library is digitizing federal government documents, PDSD would love permission to add them to their collection.
    5. PDSD has recently transitioned to Resource, Description and Access (RDA) for cataloguing and will implement Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Répertoire de vedettes-matière (RVM) subject headings in the next few months.
    6. Outreach remains a key component of PDSD’s work. In the last fiscal year, the team met with 11 different departments to provide guidance on publishing and answer other questions.
    7. Open Data Portal Refresh
      • Updated datasets have been posted to the Government of Canada Open Data Portal. They are in two formats: MARC (.mrc files) and MODSXML. The data dictionary is for the MODSXML files only, but the supporting documentation includes notes on MARC 21 and definitions for our local fields.
      • This is phase one of the Open Data Portal update; there is no schedule in place yet for future updates.
    8. The Archived Content Notice has been removed from all electronic bibliographic record pages and from the interstitial page. The new note at the bottom of each record page and on the interstitial page regarding alternate format requests may face re-wording for clarity.
    9. LOCKSS and CGI DPN – the Archive-IT tool is experiencing difficulties in harvesting publications from publications.gc.ca because of the presence of the interstitial page. PDSD is exploring options with IT support to allow Archive-IT to harvest publications from the collection.
  8. HTML publications and their impact on the DSP
    1. Technically, Government of Canada departments falling under “Schedules I, I.1 and II of the Financial Administration Act, unless excluded by specific acts, regulations or orders in council” are obligated to abide by the Procedures for Publishing. This means they are still obligated to provide the Depository Services Program with portable electronic copies of all publications they produce as laid out in section 6.5.2: providing electronic copies in portable formats only of all publications in all language versions to Public Services and Procurement Canada.
    2. As far as PDSD is aware, there are no new HTML standards for producing publications.
    3. Out of approximately 2,000 reported publications, only 76 publications (3%) were produced in HTML only. Out of the thirty-five departments evaluated thus far, only eleven produced some publications in HTML only. (Eighty-three departments are obligated to submit an index of their publications, the evaluation process of the indexes is currently underway). There have been seeing vast improvements as PDSD continues their outreach and education efforts with departments.
  9. Statistics Canada update (Lisa Haughton and Jennifer Pagnotta)
    1. Some issues of the Canada Yearbook cannot be digitized because Statistics Canada lacks the legal permissions to some of the photographs they contain.
    2. Statistics Canada is looking into how they may blackout the photographs, though they may lack the resources. They would be happy if some other group or organization, perhaps in the academic world, would partner with them to help complete this project.
  10. Update on broken DSP links (Melissa Graham)

    Regarding some legacy domains:

    1. http://dsp-psd.communication.gc.ca was decommissioned in 2013; redirects not maintained.
    2. http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca: redirects previously inoperable outside of the GC network have been corrected.
  11. Book Announcement: Government Information in Canada: Access and Stewardship, edited by Amanda Wakaruk and Sam-chin Li
    1. Many members of the Depository Services Program Advisory Committee (DSP-AC) contributed, including Susan Paterson, Tom Smyth and Graeme Campbell.
    2. Congratulations to all on creating this valuable resource.
    3. A free pdf version is available.
  12. Questions, answers and follow-ups
    1. Lisa Haughton wished to thank Caron Rollins for her many years of contribution to the committee, as Caron is set to retire at the end of June.
    2. A request was made for a link to the Open Data Portal to be sent through InfoDep.
  13. Next meeting
    1. Lisa Haughton thanked all participants for attending the meeting. She indicated that the next meeting would be in the winter of 2020.

Action item: Please send out a poll to check everyone’s availability ahead of the next meeting to avoid conflicts with other conferences.

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