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Minister's Message

Each year, the Canadian Heritage Portfolio organizations, including Library and Archives Canada (LAC), work very hard so that Canadians across the country can benefit from their rich culture and heritage. As Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, I am proud to present the 2010-2011 LAC Report on Plans and Priorities.

LAC is steward of a unique collection of documentary heritage that is a window on Canada's diversity and cultural strengths over time, as well as its social and economic development. LAC's recordkeeping responsibilities, in collaboration with Government of Canada departments and agencies, are fundamental in supporting government accountability to Canadians. At the same time, LAC is seizing the opportunities presented by a rapidly changing environment to better fulfill its roles and responsibilities in Canadian society.

Digital technologies give Canadian access to more information than ever. They enable Canadians to add to our documentary heritage in new ways and with new tools. LAC is modernizing how it focuses its work to better meet the needs of Canadians today and in future generations. This modernization is ambitious and innovative. It ensures effective, efficient spending that puts Canadians' interests first.

The 2010-2011 Report on Plans and Priorities demonstrates that Library and Archives Canada intends to be innovative and effective in delivering its mandate, in order to achieve the objectives of the Canadian Heritage Portfolio and the Government of Canada. In this way, LAC will contribute to Canada's cultural, social, and economic vitality.

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Section I - Department Overview

Raison d'être

Responsibilities

Documentary heritage takes many forms. What was once largely printed and recorded items such as books, historical documents, government records, photos, films, maps, music, and documentary art is becoming increasingly digital: the websites, audio, video, and social technology that capture the stories of Canada today.

Describing that shift does not begin to capture the scale of change. Library and Archives Canada works in an information universe of phenomenal growth. Researchers have estimated that the world's information production in 2003 was approximately five billion gigabytes. Current reports predict there will be 988 billion gigabytes of information in 2010-or almost 5,000 times more information than just seven years earlier. Much of this comes from user-generated sources that were barely imaginable a decade ago. Uploaded videos, self-created audio, the massive contents of social networking sites are all part of the documentary heritage that Canadians generate today. This explosive growth of content, combined with the expectations of Canadians that they should be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime, have generated fundamental and sweeping change for LAC and all memory institutions.

No matter the format in which Canadians generate documentary heritage, its sources or its volume, in LAC, we have recognized three business lines that must be approached in integrated, strategic ways to continue to meet our mandate effectively:

1. Acquisition;
2. Preservation; and
3. Resource discovery.

As noted above, the work of LAC in all three business lines are taking place in a context of significant change. Beyond the rise of the digital universe, we are driven by other factors such as the evolving needs and interest of Canadians and government-wide commitments to get the best results from available resources. This challenge leads LAC to review our responsibilities through modernization. To remain relevant, we are tackling the issues and communicating and collaborating more than ever before with others who share our goals. These factors and responses are described in detail later in this section.

Acquisition

We see acquisition in terms of finding the most meaningful documentary heritage in a world where information is not only abundant; the amount being created is growing massively. There are currently three main LAC acquisition processes. First, legal deposit requirements in the Library and Archives of Canada Act obligate publishers to provide us with copies of materials published in Canada. Second, Government of Canada departments and agencies transfer to us their documents and records of expected business or historic value. The third process covers all other acquisitions, such as donations, purchases, and our work to gather material online. The rapid growth in available materials demands that LAC take a strategic approach to acquisition. This approach considers items of value to understanding Canada's social, economic, and cultural development, as well our roles in support of Government of Canada recordkeeping.

Preservation

Preservation at LAC involves managing the care of items that we hold so they are appropriately accessible to this and future generations. We have specialized staff who are experts in diverse preservation fields, a range of tools and technologies as well as dedicated infrastructure such as the LAC Preservation Centre to care for the items we have. Given the growth and diversity of the material that we have as well as its fragility, we act on preservation priorities that reflect factors such as risk and importance.

Resource Discovery

Resource discovery centres on the client-driven processes that LAC is using to make it as easy as possible for Canadians to explore and interact with the collection on their own terms. Many Canadians are using Web-enabled searches of material in the collection as they pursue interests such as family history or for other research. The Library and Archives Canada website has become a major destination for Canadians and people interested in Canada. [www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/collection/index-e.html] LAC staff members organize exhibitions and learning events that are increasingly online or at partner sites across Canada.

Resource discovery is also linked to government accountability, through access to the Government of Canada digital, paper, and other records that we manage. LAC Access to Information responsibilities often involve reviews of archival records, personnel records of former civilian and military government employees, and business records. Our eight Regional Service Centres manage more contemporary records in all media on behalf of clients in more than 90 federal government organizations across the country, including holding backup copies in case of disasters or emergencies.

Figure 1.4: Access to information requests trends

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Our thinking about resource discovery continues to evolve in line with the expectations of Canadians that they should be able to find information easily, immediately, and autonomously. We are increasingly meeting these expectations through improved online access to the collection, our programs and services, and the work to digitize millions of images from our collection to make them more accessible in collaboration with partners.

The processes we use to describe the items in the collection are essential to resource discovery and are models that other Canadian memory institutions also use. Our development and use of effective, consistent description standards enables Canadians to understand the stories behind the collection, to find items of interest to them, and to provide their own descriptions of items as necessary. This extends to helping clients understand how we have organized the collection and resources as well as assistance in their searches.

Strategic Outcome and Program Activity Architecture (PAA)

The program activity architecture (PAA) below sets out the existing LAC accountability structure. The single strategic outcome noted below is equally applicable to digital and analogue documentary heritage. While LAC activities are aligned with the Social Affairs Government of Canada priority area, our role in relation to government records is recognized as also supporting the Government of Canada strategic outcome: Government Affairs.

We expect a new PAA to be in place for 2011-2012 that will reflect our most current understanding of our core activities and the updated organizational structure designed to meet the commitments of Modernization that will be described later in this section.

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Planning Summary

Financial Resources ($ thousands)

2010-11	2011-12	2012-13
120,285.2	117,985.8	99,758.5

Human Resources (FTEs)

2010-11	2011-12	2012-13
1,109	1,109	1,109

Strategic Outcome: Current and future generations of Canadians have access to their documentary heritage

Performance Indicator	Targets
Extent to which the LAC collection is accessible to Canadians measure by the use of the collection	2010-2011 determines the baseline *
* The indicator and target are being revised to be more precise on how the accessibility to the collection could be measured.

Program Activity	Forecast Spending 2009-10 ($ thousands)	Planned Spending ($ thousands)			Alignment to Government of Canada Outcomes
		2010-11	2011-12	2012-13
Program Activity 1.1 - Managing the disposition of the Government of Canada records of continuing value	10,682.8	6,915.6	6,807.2	6,807.2	Government Affairs*
Program Activity 1.2 - Managing the documentary heritage of interest to Canada	58,127.3	64,370.2	62,286.0	44,058.7	Vibrant Canadian Culture and Heritage
Program Activity 1.3 - Making the documentary heritage known and accessible for use	25,169.2	19,483.0	19,432.4	19,432.4	Vibrant Canadian Culture and Heritage
Program Activity 1.4 - Internal Services	30,938.9	29,516.4	29,460.2	29,460.2	N/A
Total Spending	124,918.2	120,285.2	117,985.8	99,758.5

* Effective recordkeeping establishes an essential administrative and business foundation within government for services to Canadians. It is an essential element in supporting ministerial and managerial accountability within Canada's democratic process. Therefore, program activity 1.1 relates to Government Affairs.

Risk Analysis

Soon after LAC came into being, we began to assess the risks facing us and our ability to deliver on our mandate in a sustained way. We identified major trends reshaping what Canadians expect from us, the information environment in which we operate, and how LAC generates results of relevance to Canadians and the Government of Canada.

• As described earlier in this section, we no longer have just the predictable flow of items for the collection in forms such as books, maps, and sound recordings that we once did. Canada's collective memory is now expanding digitally at an extremely rapid rate. LAC has to deal effectively with this explosive growth of material, while continuing to acquire, preserve, and support resource discovery for analogue items.
  
• We had well-established ways of offering programs and services, including providing access to the collection. However, Canadians now expect to go online to find information-easily, immediately, and autonomously. New technologies create interactive ways for LAC and far more Canadians to connect than has ever been possible before, increasing our presence, visibility, and relevance.
  
• The scale of change and the rising expectations of Canadians, combined with relatively stable funding, means that LAC must be more strategic and creative than ever in our use of resources. We know we must reinvent our processes and pursue the most compelling new investments to get the most from the funds we have. We know we need to build partnerships and leverage the efforts of others to meet common goals.

An Initial Corporate Risk Profile took these and other factors into account. It enabled an examination of our environment and the issues to be addressed over the long term. We determined that five of the eight key risks to the achievement of LAC's mandate and commitments were particularly significant due to a combination of their expected impact and their probability. These risks were considered in LAC planning and analysis since that time.

The Need to Address Canada's Digital and Analogue Documentary Heritage

We operate in a climate in which we will continue to acquire, preserve, and support resource discovery for the wealth of documentary heritage in traditional analogue formats. At the same time, we have to build the specialized capacity to deal with the growing volume of documentary heritage being generated in digital formats. No matter which format, LAC needs to meet the expectations of Canadians so that they can explore and make use of items in the collection in the ways they prefer. LAC needs to set acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery priorities that best meet the needs of current and future generations of Canadians. As this is a challenge that is common to memory institutions, which include libraries, archives, galleries, and museums, we need to identify and engage partners that share our commitment and our vision of how memory institutions must evolve.

Long-Term Accommodation and Technological Infrastructure

We have a rapidly growing collection in a wide range of digital and analogue formats. It requires specialized infrastructure, both in terms of facilities and technologies, so that we can preserve a diverse array of holdings and enable us to support resource discovery by Canadians well into the future. That specialized infrastructure must be kept up to date with preservation requirements and the resource discovery needs of LAC clients.

Managing for Financial Sustainability

It is always important to find the most efficient ways to realize our mandate. This is particularly true in the face of ongoing resource constraints combined with rising costs associated with emerging realities such as the need to preserve digital documentary heritage and expand resource discovery opportunities. This underlines the importance of interpreting our mandate strategically so that we focus our attention and align our resources with the interests of Canadians. It encourages us to build partnerships with the extensive range of memory institutions in Canada that have mandates that complement ours and that are dealing with similar opportunities and risks.

Enabling the Full Contribution of LAC Employees

The expertise and commitment of LAC staff members is a fundamental strength. Many of them contribute the highly specialized expertise needed for us to achieve our goals. However, many LAC employees are approaching retirement age and all are working in a rapidly evolving professional climate. We recognize the importance of ensuring that institutional knowledge is transferred from experienced employees to newer staff members. We understand the need to recruit and develop our staff so that they have the knowledge and skill sets needed to deliver the best results as our working environments and operations continue to evolve.

Engagement in Government-wide Initiatives

LAC needs to be able to allocate resources to meet our mandate and responsibilities. At the same time, we need to ensure the flexibility for us to respond to broader government-wide commitments. This will ensure that we continue to be relevant to the government's agenda and that we can bring our unique expertise and capacities to bear when needed.

Corporate Priorities

LAC knows that to be able to address the risks presented earlier and to be relevant to Canadians and responsible to the Government and Parliament that provide our funding, we must modernize in order to embrace the new world of information in which Canadians live, work, learn, and create.

Building a Path to Tomorrow

LAC took important first steps to become a modern memory institution soon after our creation in 2004. By 2006, we identified five strategic choices that served as our departmental priorities for the past three fiscal years. As described in previous Reports on Plans and Priorities, those strategic choices indicated our goals and the factors we saw as critical for our decision making. They influenced our priorities, while we launched specific initiatives to test new approaches to delivering on our mandate.

For example, our work with our partners across the Government of Canada led to a new approach to government recordkeeping. It is already reducing the demand on LAC resources by focusing on records of enduring business or archival value to support government accountability.

New technologies are already making it easier to acquire digital material that documents Canadian society. Our digitization strategies are making more items easily accessible to Canadians. New partnership strategies and initiatives are connecting Canadians with items from the collection in more places and through the shared effort of more partners, including as a strategy for our Portrait Gallery of Canada program. Government support is putting essential infrastructure in place to address preservation challenges.

Modernization and Four Guiding Principles

We drew on our experience and analysis to frame LAC modernization during 2009-2010. A major step was to identify four guiding principles that are beginning to drive our acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery decisions and priorities.

• Significance focuses our attention on the documentary heritage material that best represents the development of Canadian society and its identities, cultures, values, and experiences, which is captured for current and future generations of Canadians, and for others interested in Canada. We will focus on the items of significance.
  
• Sufficiency points us towards collecting Canada's documentary heritage in the quality and quantity adequate to meet our objectives of documenting Canadian society and fulfilling the needs of Canadians. While we have never aimed to collect everything, now we will strive consciously to identify and fill in priority gaps.
  
• Sustainability will encourage acquisition choices that are within our resource capacity-in terms of immediate resources needed for acquisition and those needed over the long term to preserve that documentary heritage and make it accessible for resource discovery. We will emphasize acquiring items that do not present preservation and access challenges.
  
• Society will emphasize the LAC commitment to document Canada's diverse society, and the importance of serving and benefiting Canadians through the use of the collection. It spurs us to work with and influence partners who share our commitment to documentary heritage.

The Path Forward - A New Documentary Heritage Management Framework

The four guiding principles are now being applied to the development of a Documentary Heritage Management Framework that is beginning to take shape in 2009-2010. As it takes more detailed shape in 2010-2011, the Framework will begin to guide how LAC deals with the acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery priorities for all LAC activities related to documentary heritage, including our partnerships with other memory institutions. The Framework implementation will generate several strategic initiatives in each of the program activities which will align orientation and processes towards modernization.

The Documentary Heritage Management Framework is being designed to generate the following outcomes:

• Canadians will identify with Canada's documentary heritage and see it as personally relevant.
• LAC will demonstrate a more disciplined, holistic, and transparent approach to acquisition decisions with more effective use of resources.
• LAC will have a more responsive and agile organizational approach to business by structuring along the business lines of acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery.
• LAC will be the steward of a documentary heritage collection that we can sustain.
• Memory institutions across Canada will collaborate to meet Canadians' need for a more cohesive approach to Canada's documentary heritage.

Detailed instruments will bring greater clarity to how we will set and act on priorities that meet LAC goals and address the long-term risks described earlier in this section. Those instruments will influence our priorities in relation to human resources, information technology, infrastructure investments, and other internal services.

While challenging, with the right fundamental choices, the Documentary Heritage Management Framework will enable LAC to:

• build and support access to documentary heritage with the breadth and depth to be significant, relevant, and accessible to Canadians and people interested in Canada around the world;
• respond appropriately to clients who need onsite service and support as well as reaching out to others through online technologies; and
• make sound investments in people, technology, and infrastructure that will align with evolving needs and meet emerging opportunities.

Contribution of Corporate Priorities to Our Strategic Outcome

Operational Priorities	Type	Links to Strategic Outcome	Description
Implement the Documentary Heritage Management Framework	New	Current and future generations of Canadians have access to their documentary heritage	We will implement instruments for acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery that will establish in detail how we will apply the Framework principles. We will pursue initiatives under acquisition, preservation, and resource discovery that will test best ways to implement the Framework and support the introduction of necessary elements and supports.
Implement a sound recordkeeping capacity among federal institutions to support their accountability and to preserve their continuing memory.	New	Current and future generations of Canadians have access to their documentary heritage	We will supply expertise and support to Government of Canada departments and agencies as the new recordkeeping regime is implemented.

Management Priorities	Type	Links to Strategic Outcome(s)	Description
Manage the change within LAC needed to support the Documentary Heritage Management Framework	New	Current and future generations of Canadians have access to their documentary heritage	We will address the implications of the Framework for our enabling activities. This will include attention to human resources issues, information technology needs, infrastructure priorities, and other internal service contributions.

Expenditure Profile

The permanent funding of Library and Archives Canada has remained constant at approximately $100 million per fiscal year over the past four years. While we have experienced growth in our permanent funding for items such as, supporting our increased workload resulting from the implementation of the Federal Accountability Act and collective bargaining funding, we have equally contributed on a permanent basis to government-wide initiatives such as the strategic review exercise to relocate spending to higher priorities of government, which results in the appearance of our permanent funding remaining stable. For example, effective in 2010-11 LAC is receiving a permanent amount of $4.8 million for collective bargaining; however, during this same time frame, LAC is contributing $4.6 million towards the government-wide strategic review exercise. In response to this last reduction, LAC has revisited its activity base and will continue to do so throughout 2010-2011 toward delivering its mandate in a more efficient manner.

Library and Archives Canada's spending trend beyond our $100 million permanent funding is related to specific projects for which we have received temporary funding. The spending fluctuation is mainly explained by the following temporary projects:

• Between 2005-06 and 2009-10, we received approximately $22.5 million from the Department of Canadian Heritage in support of collaborative activities to advance the creation of cultural content online and other digitization projects (Canadian Culture Online program);
• Over three years beginning in 2007-08, we received $21.7 million to replace obsolete systems and provide the capacity for managing electronic publications and the digital records of the Government of Canada;
• In 2008, we received approval for the construction of a preservation facility that will safeguard Canada's cellulose nitrate-based documentary heritage (photograph negatives and films). We anticipate spending $7.7 million in 2009-10 and an additional $6.4 million in 2010-11; and
• In 2009, we received approval to initiate fit-up work for a Collection Storage Facility with a high-density shelving system. This will lead to planned spending of $1.3 million in 2009-10, $12.8 million in 2010-11 and $19 million in 2011-12.

The latter two projects reflect the element of the LAC mandate to safeguard and preserve Canada's documentary heritage.

Library and Archives Canada is committed to prudent spending and ensuring measurable results are attained for Canadians. We work in close collaboration with other government departments and external partners to ensure the effective and efficient delivery of our activities and to provide increased access to the collection.

Canada's Economic Action Plan (CEAP)

As part of Canada's Economic Action Plan announced in Budget 2009, LAC has received approval for $3 million over two years. This funding has been allocated to support renovations and improvements to the LAC laboratories where preservation and restoration work is performed on the fragile items in our custody. More information.

The spending graph below (figure 1.5) shows that the Government continues to invest in specific initiatives and new infrastructure for LAC including funding from CEAP.

Figure 1.5: Departmental Spending Trend

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Planned Spending by Program Activity

The pie chart (figure 1.6) displays the allocation of Library and Archives Canada's financial resources by program activity. Planned spending in 2010-11 for program activity 1.2 includes investments of $19.2 million for the capital projects described in the expenditure profile section.

Figure 1.6: 2010-2011 Planned Spending by Program Activity ($ thousands)

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Voted and Statutory Items

Voted and Statutory Items displayed in the Main Estimates
($ thousands)

Vote # or Statutory Item (S)	Truncated Vote or Statutory Wording	2009-10 Main Estimates	2010-11 Main Estimates
50	Operating expenditures	110,215.9	97,071.1
52	Capital expenditures	0.0	11,998.0
(S)	Contributions to employee benefit plans	11,166.8	11,216.1
Total		121,382.7	120,285.2

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