Content Strategy Committee Appointment

Alison Ambi, Interim Head, Collections from Memorial University of Newfoundland, has been appointed to the CSC for a three-year term starting November 2018, replacing Jennifer Richard, Academic Librarian from Acadia University, whose term has ended. Alison Ambi also served on CRKN’s License Transition Task Group in 2017-2018. Thank you for your contributions, Jennifer, and welcome Alison! Visit the CRKN website to see the full CSC. 

Strategic Planning 2019-2024

CRKN is nearing the end of the first phase of strategic planning after having consulted with over 140 individuals from over 60 institutions. One-on-one stakeholder calls continue throughout December and January. A report summarizing the feedback from the consultations is being prepared for presentation to the Board of Director’s as key input to their strategic planning session to be held on January 14, 2019. CRKN members will have a further opportunity for input to the final strategic plan during the first half of 2019 as management bring the draft strategies and actions defined by the Board, back to members for further consultations. If you are a CRKN member and have not yet had a chance to participate in strategic planning, please contact Rebecca Ross, Director, Marketing and Stakeholder Engagement by email: rross@crkn.ca.   

Stakeholders and Researchers: Participate in CRKN Strategic Planning
Take the CRKN stakeholder survey
Take the Canadiana user survey 

Contribute to the Future of CRKN by Participating in a Task Group 

CRKN is currently recruiting members for two new task groups. Consider applying or nominate a colleague.  

Heritage Content Priorities Task Group (HCPTG)
The purpose of the HCPTG is to develop principles and criteria that CRKN staff may use to evaluate and prioritize heritage content for digitization and ingestion, conversion and augmentation of the Canadiana collections. Visit the CRKN website for more information. 

Platform Technical Task Group (PTTG) 
The purpose of the PTTG is to evaluate and make recommendations on the development of the Canadiana access and preservation platforms (TDR). Visit the CRKN website for more information.

2018 AGM Recap 

Thank you to all those who attended the 2018 Annual General Meeting and the Joint NHDS and CRKN Workshop on Documentary Heritage in Vancouver! A summary of both events, including video recordings, is available on the CRKN website. 

Read the recap of the CRKN AGM
Read the recap of the Joint NHDS and CRKN Workshop on Documentary Heritage 

Ron MacDonald Distinguished Service Award

On October 17, 2018, CRKN honoured Benoit Séguin as the recipient of the 2018 Ron MacDonald Distinguished Service Award. Congratulations, Benoit! Read the full announcement on the CRKN website. 
 

License and Content Updates

Negotiations have been finalized and offer documents sent to members for the majority of 2018’s license renewals, including AMS MathSciNet, American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, Clarivate, Center for Research Libraries, Elsevier Scopus, Institute of Physics, and Royal Society of Chemistry. Negotiations are completed for Oxford University Press journals, and offer documents for members are forthcoming before year’s end. 

Work continues towards reaching an agreement with Springer Nature, and further communications with the membership will be forthcoming as developments occur. 

CRKN once again contributed to the global COUNTER community by providing a French translation of the “The Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Librarians.” We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Carolle Blais of Université du Québec à Montréal and Lino Tremblay of Université du Québec à Chicoutimi for reviewing the guide. We hope that the French version of the Friendly Guide will be of use to our bilingual and francophone members as we transition to Release 5 of the COUNTER standard. 

Digitization Update

The digitization team continues to work on various projects for members and stakeholders, including a project with the University of Victoria Libraries to digitize and OCR The British Colonist newspaper. The digitization team has also added content to the Canadiana collections and since July has added OCR metadata to 71 reels in the Heritage collection, enabling full-text searching on printed documents. Check out The War Cabinet Committee (1938-1945) and the William Lyon Mackenzie King: Family Papers. Since July, over 600 CIHM monographs have been digitized and uploaded into Canadiana Online. There are now about 1,100 CIHM monographs left to OCR and upload. The majority of the CIHM monographs collection (comprised of over 88,000 titles) is now online.  

Canadiana Online MARC Records Now Available 

75,497 MARC records for the Canadiana Online collection are now available. That means that MARC records are available for 85% of the monographs currently in the Canadiana Online collection. In the spring of 2019, MARC records for the remaining Canadiana Online monographs, as well as for periodicals, government publications, and newspapers in the collection will also be available. 

To download the MARC records, visit the CRKN website. 

Platform Update

Recent Canadiana platform development has been focused on preparing the platform for access at no charge to users as of January 2019. Ongoing general maintenance has continued to improve our sustainability over the long term. With the removal of the paywall to Canadiana content, work can begin to make Canadiana content more immediately accessible to users in a variety of formats, including as IIIF manifests to encourage interoperability. 

Projects & Collaborations

ORCID-CA Update

ORCID-CA held its first annual online National Forum on October 31, 2018 with 122 participants. The goal of the workshop was to showcase the work of the ORCID-CA consortium, share insights from ORCID’s Director of Partnerships, Josh Brown, and to provide an update from the Tri-Council Agency on their grants and CV system. A recording of the national forum is available on the ORCID-CA website. 

Updates on Financial Information

On December 6, 2018, CRKN sent its quarterly financial update to members. The update included information on the CRKN finance team, updated plans for the Heritage Content Access and Preservation (HCAP) fund, details of the 2018-19 foreign exchange services, invoicing schedule and information on other administrative topics. 

Staffing Updates

CRKN is pleased with the results of recent recruitment efforts for staff in the areas of digitization, platform development, finance, and licensing. More information about the new roles will be shared in the New Year. 

During the year, long-time Finance Officer Bill Kuurstra announced his retirement and Monica Ward, Senior Content & Licensing Officer, became the Head of Collections Strategy at the University of Ottawa.  As of the New Year, Digital Heritage Services Specialist Lindsay Bilodeau is leaving to begin her PhD program in New Zealand. Digital Services Intern Rachel Nielsen’s contract concludes in mid-December, and she is joining the digitization team in January. 

Events

Access Conference 

Sascha Adler, Lead Application Developer, attended the 2018 Access Conference hosted by McMaster University, October 10-12. The conference featured a wide variety of interesting and relevant talks, with key discussions about accessibility, user experience, and the integration of Indigenous representation within the library community. The conference also provided a useful opportunity for networking and discussion of issues and workflows pertaining to the maintenance of a digital cultural heritage repository.

Charleston Conference

Craig Olsvik, Senior Content & Licensing Officer, attended the Charleston conference in early November. Attendance at Charleston by publisher representatives is high, and several highly beneficial meetings were held with publishers currently undergoing renewals with CRKN for 2019. 

Congrès des professionnels et professionnelles de l’information 

Jason Friedman, Senior Member Services Officer, attended the Congrès des professionnels et professionnelles de l’information (CPI) in Montreal in mid-November. The conference was a great opportunity to connect with Quebec CRKN members.

Force11

Jason also attended the Force11 conference in Montreal. The conference brings together a variety of people from the scholarly communications community including researchers, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders concerned with promoting the open dissemination of knowledge.

@ Risk North 2

CARL, CRKN, Library and Archives Canada and BAnQ sponsored a forum on digital preservation on November 9, 2018 in Montreal. The full-day open forum, organized by CARL, assessed current digital preservation readiness, resources, and collaborative initiatives, with a view to identifying opportunities to strengthen the collective capacity for digital preservation in Canada. The event was meant for practitioners and administrators within academic libraries, public libraries, national libraries, museums, archives, and any other organizations who are involved in the digital preservation of cultural and documentary heritage.