BIBLIOCRACY

Caron’s Interim Successor Announced

This just in - you’ll note the new incumbent, who is indeed neither a librarian nor an archivist - continues to refer to himself as “Deputy Head” and not as “Librarian and Archivist of Canada”. Plus ça change?

This contradicts an earlier e-mail indicating Cecilia Muir had been tipped for the post on a six-month appointment.

(Bilingual message / Message bilingue)

 

 

Entre nous : Administrateur général par intérim

 

Suite au départ de M. Caron, on m’a demandé d’agir à titre intérimaire comme Administrateur général et Bibliothécaire et archiviste du Canada jusqu’à la nomination d’un nouvel Administrateur général.

 

Veuillez continuer d’acheminer la correspondance et les documents par le bureau de l’Administrateur général, comme le veut la procédure habituelle.

 

Je vous remercie pour votre collaboration et votre professionnalisme durant cette période de transition.

 

 

Hervé Déry

Sous-ministre adjoint et Secrétaire général

Politiques et collaboration

 

************************************************************************************************************

 

 

Just between us: Interim Deputy Head

 

Following the departure of Mr. Caron, I have been asked to fill on an interim basis the position of Deputy Head and Librarian and Archivist of Canada until a new Deputy Head is appointed.

 

Please continue routing all correspondence and documents through the Deputy Head’s Office as per usual procedures.

 

Thank you for your cooperation and professionalism and during this time of transition.

 

 

Hervé Déry

Assistant Deputy Minister and Corporate Secretary

Policy and Collaboration

Expert Panels on Canadian Librarianship - First Look

You may remember that a few months ago (when things at LAC were looking a lot more intractable and a lot less in flux than they are now) two government-sanctioned ‘Expert Panels’ were convened to investigate the future of librarianship in Canada. One was under the auspices of the Royal Society, the other was overseen by a think tank called the “Canadian Council of Academies”. Some of us have been watching the early days of these panels with interest - whatever they decide, in their Infinite Wisdom, may have profound bearing on the future of library funding at all levels in Canada.

The composition of both panels has now been revealed. The CCA Panel consists of:

Dr. Doug Owram, FRSC, Chair, Professor and Former Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus (Kelowna, BC)

Sebastian Chan, Director of Digital and Emerging Media, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (New York, NY)

C. Colleen Cook, Trenholme Dean of Libraries, McGill University (Montréal, QC)

Luciana Duranti, Chair and Professor of Archival Studies, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)

Lesley Ellen Harris, Copyright Lawyer; Consultant, Author, and Educator; Owner, Copyrightlaws.com (Washington, D.C.)

Kate Hennessy, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Arts and Technology (Surrey, BC)

Kevin Kee, Associate Vice-President Research (Social Sciences and Humanities) and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, Brock University (St. Catharines, ON)

Slavko Manojlovich, Associate University Librarian (Information Technology), Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. John’s, NL)

David Nostbakken, President/CEO of Nostbakken and Nostbakken, Inc. (N + N); Instructor of Strategic Communication and Social Entrepreneurship at the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University (Ottawa, ON)

George Oates, Art Director, Stamen Design (San Francisco, CA)

Seamus Ross, Dean and Professor, iSchool, University of Toronto (Toronto, ON)

Bill Waiser, SOM, FRSC, Professor of History and A.S. Morton Distinguished Research Chair, University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, SK)

Barry Wellman, FRSC, S.D. Clark Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto (Toronto, ON)

And the FRSC Panel consists of (thanks CLA for the heads up on this one):

Dr. Patricia Demers, FRSC, Chair Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and the Comparative Literature Program University of Alberta

Dr. Guylaine Beaudry, Director, Webster Library Concordia University

Pam Bjornson, Director General, Knowledge Management National Research Council

Michael Carroll, Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property American University Washington College of Law

Carol Couture, Professeur honoraire Université de Montréal

Charlotte Gray, FRSC, Author and Adjunct Research Professor, Department of History Carleton University

Judith Hare, Chief Executive Officer Halifax Public Libraries

Ernie Ingles, FRSC, Vice-Provost and Director, School of Library and Information Studies University of Alberta

Eric Ketelaar, Professor Emeritus University of Amsterdam

Gerald McMaster, Curator, Canadian Art Art Gallery of Ontario

My Statement to the Heritage Roundtable on LAC, 17 May 2013

The impact of mismanagement at Library and Archives Canada has been especially profound in my province - to our members, the services LAC provides at a distance to support the work of the library and archival community are crucial. The cancellation of the National Archival Development program, for example, has devastated archival digitisation & preservation efforts in British Columbia and caused employment prospects for young, talented archivists in the province to dramatically contract. Much of that talent has been lost to the United States.

The baffling cancellation of the interlibrary loan program and the seemingly diminished online sharing of LAC holdings means British Columbians may now actually have less access to Canada’s documentary heritage than ever before. For people in BC, travelling to Ottawa to access a document or book is not feasible, and that needs to be recognised! This is a vast country, and LAC is part of what it means to be Canadian. If it fails in its mission and mandate, our sense of ourselves as a people suffers - and that is a tragedy.

Calls for Caron’s replacement to be drawn from the professional community of archivists and librarians have been well articulated by a number of my colleagues in the media and at the table here today, and I would echo those calls. But we need more.

We need a systematic thinker with a demonstrated ability to understand how large organisations work and how their functions and business processes relate to one another. We need someone with clear management experience who understands the vital import of making front-line employees feel valued and cherished for their hard work. We need someone who knows how to delegate without fear to the professional expertise of their staff - that’s why you hire experts, after all, and the expertise of LAC staff has been cruelly underutilised in the last few years.

We need a firm commitment to bilingualism and to working with - and for - all Canadians no matter where they live. We need a clear communicator who does not shy from plain speaking. We need humility and a conciliatory approach, someone who can rebuild LAC’s relations with the professional communities upon which it depends to function and with the public it exists to serve.

We need someone who will not shy away from the difficult task of paring down a bloated and self-serving management culture which has treated LAC as a personal fiefdom. And we need someone with a strong personal understanding of information technology as it relates to libraries and archives - this point cannot be emphasised enough.

But most of all we need an advocate for LAC as a strong and independent institution at the very heart of Canadian democracy. We need someone who cares about the place and who can convey the import of its mandate and activities - and the work of its staff - to Canadians and the world. A vibrant, outward-looking, consultative national library and archives is something we should be proud of, not ashamed of - it’s time to see someone at the helm who feels the same way.

What now?

Onward!

As a number of people have pointed out on Twitter and blogs (like this excellent post from Jacqueline Whyte Appleby), it’s a shame that it was something as silly as overpriced Spanish lessons which finally moved Heritage to pull the plug.

What of the loss of the NADP, the baffling cancellation of ILL, the seemingly complete lack of progress on infrastructure to support digital preservation? What of the huge loss of skill and expertise from an institution already struggling to meet its mandate in the face of enormous budget cuts? What of the straitened relations between LAC and stakeholders both in the public and the professional communities LAC depends on to function? And what, pray tell, of the endless, vacuous trumpeting of the digitisation strategy that never was?

Daniel Caron Resigns

I have just received word that Heritage Canada has confirmed Daniel Caron’s resignation as Librarian and Archivist of Canada. Here is the announcement sent to LAC staff.

The Last Straw for Daniel Caron

Library and Archives Canada has been taking a beating in the press lately.

First there were the revelations about its Code of Conduct, which generated an embarrassing amount of press coverage (and international ridicule) and which eventually forced a chagrined James Moore to publicly disavow LAC’s management in Parliament. Then word got out that LAC was hiring managers who were completely unqualified to oversee the departments to which they were appointed. Next it was revealed that LAC had been terribly naughty about disclosing these employment criteria in the first place.

Then came a call for LAC to be formally investigated by the federal Information Commissioner over its inappropriate gagging of civil servants. This was followed by a lengthy piece in the Ottawa Citizen where LAC overboss Daniel Caron’s bizarre rhetoric was examined in some depth, painting a none-too-flattering picture of goings-on at the beleaguered institution under his leadership.

And now comes the revelation that the same Daniel Caron authorised the spending of nearly $15,000 of taxpayers’ money - yes, fifteen THOUSAND dollars - on private Spanish lessons for himself. The best defense he could come up with was that he had only actually spent five grand so far.

This was the last straw for some long-suffering archivists, even those who had tried to keep an open mind and give LAC the benefit of the doubt in spite of all the upheavals of the past few years.

One such was my colleague Melanie over at the archives of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster. She was so incensed that she wrote to James Moore - and the result is one of the best, most elegant, most effective protest letters I have ever seen.

I am honoured, with Melanie’s permission, to share her letter.

May 7, 2013

The Honourable James Moore
Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

RE: Misuse of public funds and the future of archives in Canada

Dear Minister Moore,

I am the sole, part-time archivist in a small non-profit archives. Our operations and the future of our holdings were severely impacted by the cancellation of the National Archival Development Program (NADP) in 2012. Because the Anglican Church of Canada was operating on the west coast of Canada before there was an organized “government” presence, we hold a lot of incredibly valuable, unique records – some of first contact with local First Nations populations.

I have worked hard to use the small resources we have to make these collections available and to keep them safe and properly preserved. NADP grants helped me to hire contract archivists to assist with archival Arrangement and Description, helped migrate our descriptive records to new, updated open-source archival software, and scan vulnerable photographs into digital formats.

That work is at risk without the assistance of the NADP. I have been trying to cope with this great loss of a program that was invaluable to our institution, and trying to understand and give credit to the changes in economy and priorities – but the article in today’s Toronto Sun regarding Daniel Caron’s use of public money for his personal Spanish lessons has made that completely impossible.

The $4,482 that Mr. Caron has already spent could have bought 438 acid-free Hollinger Boxes for our records, or 36 hours of technical support for our database, or 5 map cabinets, or about 180 hours of a contract archivists’ time for records processing, or a new computer and multi-sheet feed scanner, or a freezer for the preservation of
photographic negatives – among SO many other things. The $10k that comprised his next contract for lessons is larger than my entire annual budget. The misuse of these funds is simply unacceptable and insulting to those of us trying to stretch every nickel to preserve Canadian archival records for future generations.

I would appreciate an answer as to why Mr. Caron’s Spanish lessons are more important than providing grant funds for projects and equipment such as the above-mentioned. Why Spanish lessons are more important to the preservation of Canadian archival heritage than investing in actual projects in actual repositories which are struggling to do what the current administration at the highest levels of this government are refusing to do – protect and preserve Canadian history for future generations.

Sincerely,

Melanie Delva, Archivist
Anglican Diocese of New Westminster
Provincial Synod of BC & Yukon
6000 Iona Drive
Vancouver BC, V6T 1L4

Then and now: reflections on tragedy

This is a blog about libraries and archives. But it is also a blog about humans. So perhaps I may be forgiven for deviating briefly from the prevailing theme in this post.

I have observed the events which took place this week at the Boston Marathon with a mixture of horror and contemplation. The latter has largely been a factor of how the American public - and the world - have reacted to the events concerned. There has been, as yet, no outpouring of violent patriotism, no widespread cries for pinning responsibility for these heinous acts to a racial or ideological “other”. This is no 9/11.

Have we, at last, learned something from that most famous and world-changing act of terror? My academic background is in the religious and political history of the Eastern Mediterranean from about the late Byzantine period to the early Ottoman years, so these are themes I have thought about a great deal.

I take something of a meta-narrative approach regarding terrorism. Whatever the ideological motivation attributed to acts like 9/11 and the Boston attacks, they are ultimately inspired by a sort of insidious, nihilistic sociopathy which has as its only goal the destabilisation of people’s ways of life and their ability to relate to one another as people - in other words, the perpetrators of such acts ultimately are seeking to create the same feelings of hopelessness and despair which have blighted their own lives. Misery loves company.

There is also a strategic dimension to consider. Terrorism as a tactic hinges on perpetrators’ recognition that their enemies’ capacity to harm themselves vastly exceeds the terrorist’s own ability to harm them. Terrorists, as the name implies, set out to create circumstances which will result in maximum terror - and therefore self-harm, because terrified people do not make good decisions - on the part of people they hate.

In the case of 9/11, I think we must sadly regard the fundamentalism which informed those acts as supremely successful. It has seen the United States turn viciously on its own citizens’ civil liberties (the very things which nominally separate us from fundamentalists in the first place), give in to its most grotesque racialist theories and notions about how the world and society works, bankrupt itself in two spectacularly violent and inconclusive foreign wars, and set into motion a perpetual diminution of American credibility on the world stage.

This has been compounded by the spectacular inability of policymakers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom - chief architects of these failed military adventures - to appreciate the exigencies of history, culture and language in the post-Ottoman heartlands of Islam. One consequence of this ignorance, and the brutality of the wars it engendered, has been a serious undermining of credibility for religious and political moderates in many parts of North Africa, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, and Central Asia.

In other words, it would have been hard for the United States to do more to play into the hands of the ideology behind 9/11. I can only hope we awaken from our collective madness and stop believing that violence is any sort of way to eradicate an idea - education and compassion are the only things that can achieve that. Do the sort of people who would blow up a plane care terribly much about the millions of Muslims killed as a result of the absurd misfire that was the post-9/11 backlash? No, an atmosphere of grief and blood and chaos always plays into the hands of the manipulative and the hateful.

There are also, it must be said, unpleasant truths to consider. To say nothing of our own domestic predilection for extremist thinking and our demented fetishisation of violence in our own society, feigning ignorance of our own complicity in generating the foreign policy crises which have leant fuel to hatred and inequality around the world - not just in the Muslim world, either! - has been a path of folly for the United States. Sadly it is one which shows little sign of abating at the level of policy - but what of the people themselves?

Here, at least, there are signs that things may be changing for the better. The media and public comment have been curiously restrained in the wake of the Boston tragedy. The first reaction of a bewildered public has not been to rattle the sabre against a dreaded Other, whether domestic or foreign. Where attempts have been made to pre-emptively tie the attacks to race or creed - such as that by the New York Post - the reaction has not been one of acquiescence but of outrage.

The world is vastly different than it was in 2001. I am hopeful that we have begun to learn how terrorism really works - that, as mentioned above, its power lies in its ability to turn us against ourselves, to make us destroy our own lives from within. I am hopeful that we have learned that we should refrain from lashing out in fear without considering the consequences our anger may visit upon a weary and dangerous world. I am hopeful that we will remember the victims of the Boston atrocity not as martyrs but as friends, lovers, family members; therein lies the true tragedy of violent acts large and small. Such crimes do not require hyperbole to communicate their senselessness, their barbarity, the pain they cause. The survivors of the Boston bombings, and the people of the world, have done a lot this week to encourage me in these hopes.

Let us, then, come together to mourn, to grieve, to try to understand “why”. But let us also, as we have thus far, work towards true healing by refusing to permit violent, hateful people to pull us into their madness. We are better than that. Thank you to the people of Boston and the world for remembering it.

Curiouser and Curiouser

- understanding of the principles, theories, techniques and practices of library and information science

- knowledge of related methods of acquiring, organizing and disseminating information,
- understanding of the principles, theories, practices, terminology and requirements of another discipline or
subject field,
- understanding of departmental policies and programs, administrative practices, legislation and
regulations,
- understanding of technological developments having an impact on library practices.

Leaked: LAC Employment Criteria

A newly leaked Library and Archives Canada “Statement of Merit and Criteria for Employment” confirms what many have suspected or at least speculated for some time: library and archival degrees are indeed no longer required for a host of management positions at LAC. Among them are positions responsible for some very highly specialised portfolios— including archival and bibliographic description. What education is required for these positions?

“Graduation with a degree from a recognized university with acceptable specialization in Economics, Sociology or Statistics.”

Since when did they start teaching MARC and RAD and AACR2 in sociology classes? In any case, lest potential applicants be immediately overwhelmed by LAC’s high expectations, the document goes on to clarify:

“The courses for the specialization do not necessarily have to be part of a degree program in the required specialization”

I think this is LAC’s way of saying that if you’ve ever taken one of those obnoxious mandatory first-year sociology or stats courses during your undergrad…you’re well on your way to a rewarding career in the loftiest reaches of Canadian librarianship! Of course, education isn’t everything. The document does soberly advise that all of these management jobs require:

“Significant* and recent* experience in managing archival programs and/or major projects relating to archives and/or library and/or information management.”

See those asterisks? They actually point to endnotes—isn’t that adorable?—which read:

“*For purposes of this process, significant experience is defined as one (1) year or more and recent is defined as in the last five (5) years.”

I’m sure that seeing LAC set the bar so high for our nation’s foremost librarians and archivists is a very great relief to all of us.