Canadians live in a time when “we visit libraries almost as much as we go to the movies and as many of us have library cards as have passports.”
So begins the Royal Society of Canada’s most recent report – until it takes a troubling turn, describing Library and Archives Canada, the Centretown-based hub of the country’s knowledge network, as a “national embarrassment.”
Located on Wellington Street, the LAC exists to ensure the survival of Canada’s heritage by making books and archival material accessible to Canadians. In its decade-long decline, the LAC has scrapped several important initiatives, including the National Archival Development Program and the Portrait Gallery Initiative and severely restricted its interlibrary lending.
The Royal Society commissioned its first arts focused expert panel to get professional insight into how technology is transforming libraries and archives. The report, titled “The Future Now: Canada’s Libraries, Archives, and Public Memory,” recommends LAC create a task force to assess progress. Ultimately LAC’s decline has had a negative impact on individual researchers such as Jane Urquhart, a Canadian author.
“I feel uncertain about entrusting current and future archives to what has seemed to be such an unpredictable organization,” writes Urquhart.
But despite the LAC’s 140-year history, Marie DeYoung, president of the Canadian Library Association, says too few Canadians are aware of the historic institution.
“It’s important Canadians understand bodies like LAC exist,” she says, “because the intention is to curate on behalf of Canadians the things that are important for communities.”
This year, the LAC suffered a budget cut of almost $10 million. While it still has an annual budget of $90 million, it blames the cut for a major decline in its services.
Although LAC’s budget is suffering, Charlotte Gray, one of the report’s authors and a history professor at Carleton University, says this is unlikely to hurt neighbourhood libraries.
“The cuts to LAC’s funding and shrinkage of its services is on a whole other scale than the nibbling away of funds to local libraries, particularly in rural areas,” she says.
But despite the decline at the federal level, Gray says LAC’s weakening may have positive implications at the municipal level. “I think LAC’s decline has probably increased usage of public libraries locally,” she says.
The decreasing quality of service at LAC comes at a time when municipal libraries across Canada – rural and urban – are grappling with the challenges and opportunities of digital upgrades.
Danielle McDonald, CEO of the Ottawa Public Library, says Canadians expect from their local libraries “access to technology that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access, such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and iPads.”
Many local libraries are taking the opportunity to grow. The Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library recently began renovations to outfit a new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system this year. McDonald says the benefits to this system are numerous.
RFID produces a low-level radio frequency able to scan multiple items at once. It is estimated that by 2017, RFID will completely replace the traditional barcode system of categorizing books in all Ottawa library branches.
“Essentially, with RFID, items are easier to find, holds arrive quicker, and are re-shelved faster,” says McDonald.
Still, DeYoung says there’s room for improvement even at the municipal level.
“The government needs to recognize there is a disparity between urban and rural libraries and it is causing hardship at the economic level. If you limit libraries it creates yet another hurdle for these struggling rural communities.”
While the Centretown library gets new RFID technology, DeYoung says the struggle to provide comparable basic services in rural areas outside the city remains an issue.
“It is such a tragedy that in the 21st century we have rural communities that don’t have access to high speed Internet, or even adequate Internet,” she says.
Although the Main branch looks forward to upgrades in the next few months, it is unknown what the long-term effect will be if government agencies such as LAC continue to decline.
“Declining library services at the Library and Archives Canada signal the changing face of library services,” says McDonald, “at the Ottawa Public Library we have been focusing on what we can do to remain relevant to our customers.”
The Royal Society report’s recommendations for municipal libraries focus on the necessity of providing “virtual” sources such as databases and ebooks. There is also mention that the Canadian Library Association will be initiating talks with publishers about their pricing models for ebooks, hoping an agreement can be reached that will make ebooks more accessible for all libraries.
“Certainly, just about anyone who’s had contact with a library today has an expectation that it will provide a full run of resources,” says DeYoung. “But this is ultimately not the case.”