Digital Preservation

Follow:

  • RSS
  • Cite
Submitted By
Anonymous
Tags
Votes: 46

The government of Canada should developing and publicize a clear policy on

the preservation of digital material.

Add new comment

Rules of Engagement

We look forward to hearing from you. Your ideas and feedback are central to the development of both the Open Government portal and the Government of Canada’s approach to Open Government.

While comments are moderated, the portal will not censor any comments except in a few specific cases, listed below. Accounts acting contrary to these rules may be temporarily or permanently disabled.

Comments and Interaction

Our team will read comments and participate in discussions when appropriate. Your comments and contributions must be relevant and respectful.

Our team will not engage in partisan or political issues or respond to questions that violate these Terms and Conditions.

Our team reserves the right to remove comments and contributions, and to block users based on the following criteria:

The comments or contributions:

  • include personal, protected or classified information of the Government of Canada or infringes upon intellectual property or proprietary rights
  • are contrary to the principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Constitution Act, 1982
  • are racist, hateful, sexist, homophobic or defamatory, or contain or refer to any obscenity or pornography
  • are threatening, violent, intimidating or harassing
  • are contrary to any federal, provincial or territorial laws of Canada
  • constitute impersonation, advertising or spam
  • encourage or incite any criminal activity
  • are written in a language other than English or French
  • otherwise violate this notice

Our team cannot commit to replying to every message or comment, but we look forward to continuing the conversation whenever possible. Please note that responses will be provided in the same language that was used in the original comment.

Our team will reply to comments in the official language in which they are posted. If we determine the response is a question of general public interest, we will respond in both official languages.

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous on May 02, 2016 - 8:48 PM

I forgot to note that this idea was among the top recommendations of Mary Francoli in her Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) Progress Report, which she worded as "Develop and publicize a clear policy on the preservation of digital material" [1]. Open North's feedback to the draft 2014-16 action plan included a proposed commitment to "Complete public consultations with citizens, civil society and the private sector on how to ensure that open data of continuing value remains accessible and usable and continues to be collected" [2]. The “Retention Guidelines for Common Administrative Records of the Government of Canada” [2] are relevant to this proposal. I am unsure to what extent they already respond to the needs expressed in this proposal. 1. http://www.opengovpartnership.org/sites/default/files/Canada%2014-15_PublicComment_Eng_1.pdf 2. http://open.canada.ca/en/canadas-draft-action-plan-open-government-20#comment-1971 3. http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/services/government-information-resources/guidelines/retention-common-administrative-records/Pages…

Submitted by Patrick Connolly on April 15, 2016 - 10:46 PM

A different sort of approach here might involve government support of a project like IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ IPFS is a storage layer aspiring to become a critical part of internet infrastructure. It basically stores and finds data via a random-looking ID, that is derived directly from the contents of the file. This is in contrast to the current way of finding things, which involves storing named (ie labelled) files on specific servers. The benefit of IPFS's approach is that anyone can store the data and serve it. Since any version of -- for example -- a specific PDF file would the exact same label, anyone with the file could send it in response to a request. So instead of someone looking for "some-file.pdf", their computer would look for the random-looking (but NOT random) ID of the file, something like "f5dd819a2018b2283e80bbf3b14c74b7e0f1bc48017e764364908a8584c7d846". That ID is derived directly from the contents of the file itself. Changing even the smallest thing (like the "last modified date" of the file), would completely change the ID. So long-story-short, as long as at least one person in Canada was interested in a file, they would have it in a Dropbox-like folder in their computer and could serve it to anyone else interested in having it. When IPFS gets up to speed, it's expected that some organizations (akin to the Internet Archive) will likely step up to warehouse lots of important information, like they currently do on the web. But the nice part of IPFS is that it allows anyone to contribute to the warehousing of data, just by keeping it on their own computer in a specific shareable place, preventing it from being lost.

Submitted by James McKinney on April 12, 2016 - 1:41 PM

With respect to this idea, we should explore whether the Government of Canada Web Archive, operated by Library and Archives Canada, is already sufficient or whether its operations ought to be expanded to meet citizens' and civil society's expectations for digital preservation. Of course, that first requires establishing what those expectations are. If we can add more detail here, that'd be a good start. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/index-e.html

Submitted by James McKinney on April 12, 2016 - 2:54 PM

If this idea is developed into a commitment, I recommend consulting with library associations, such as: The Canadian Association of Research Libraries http://www.carl-abrc.ca/ The Canadian Federation of Library Associations (once it's operational) The provincial associations in BC, AB, MB, ON, QC, NS

Submitted by Jérémie D. Dro… on April 08, 2016 - 1:45 AM

I just "Voted Up" your idea. I wrote a comment on the idea entitled Meaningful Dialogue (Enabling Citizens), it addresses your idea regarding Digital Preservation, including preservation and public use on an indeterminate basis of the contents contained within this Digital Open Government Consultation Process.