As an informal advisor to Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, I was invited to comment on the Library and Archives o Canada's recent draft Canadian Digital information Strategy (see http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cdis/012033-1050.51-e.html). Why is it that such documents are so sterile and predictable? Ian launched this exercise as a way to promote the digitization and online access to all of Canada's publications, which was a truly radical idea floated in his MW2005 keynote in Vancouver (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/wilson/wilson.html). But the requirements of involving all the stakeholders, holding extensive public reviews, and turning it over to senior bureaucrats from the LAC, has given birth to an anodyne prescription for public policy where what is needed is strong action, now.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the report (http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cdis/012033-1000.01-e.html) is a bibliography that cites dozens of similar national digital strategy reports which recommend such safe policies as coordination of national digitization of out of copyright publications, promotion of trusted digital repositories, and increased public access to publicly funded research. There is nothing wrong, of course, with these ideas except the lack of urgency they betray and the absence of strong commitment on the part of the issuing bodies to do anything concrete themselves.

What we need is for national libraries and archives do what is within their purview, or even their mission, rather than calling on everyone else to take action. For the LAC I proposed that it take the three foci of its report and act on each one immediately and unilaterally, as follows:

"To strengthen content, LAC should publicly declare Canadian content metadata so that its digital capture can be monitored by public awareness of its existence. Such a strategy ensures capture of the current digital records of government by instantaneous publication of metadata describing every government record at the time of its creation, and a process for systematically making past records of government available in digital form as they are requested by users, with a register of user requests (user-identity privacy respected) and their fulfillment, including all FOI requests government-wide. Such a register would also be a scorecard of the success of mass digitization of Canadian publications: textual audio and video.

To ensure preservation, LAC should build an infrastructure that makes long-term preservation possible. Frankly, I don't think it has, and anything short of actually doing it is simply passing the buck. Such a strategy requires LAC to build an infrastructure for deployment of Permanent url's, require DOI's of everything published in Canada, provide for certification of public and private archives, and support redundant storage and registration of copies of content at repositories nation-wide.

To maximize access, LAC should make freely available in electronic form all past, current and future Canadian government publications and records. This means advocating revision of the Crown copyright doctrine and addressing the systematic digital capture and online publication of out of copyright texts, creating a legal regime for publishing orphan works and reimbursing claimants after the fact, requirements for publicly funded research to be made openly available, and a set of policies (not unlike the public lending right as applied to library loans) to encourage provision of online access to all contemporary published works, including audio and visual works.

In addition, to promote access, you should annually publish an assessment of the degree to which Canada's information providers and governmental policies make digital services ubiquitous and functional including its success at implementing an infrastructure for location-aware knowledge delivery, a framework for competitive telecommunications services nationwide with regulatory requirements for openness to new services and provision of value-added information services as a public good."

Until public institutions just do some of what obviously needs doing, rather than trying to engage everyone in their community in building an endless consensus, we will, I'm afraid, be treated to more reports on the changing digital opportunities, without benefiting from them.