Directions for Change

Section 3:
What supporting strategies will enable us?

3.5 Being technology-enabled

Technology is essential to achieve our vision. Effective use of technology will enable us to acquire, manage, preserve, and access digital and non-digital content into the future, while creative use of technology will permit delivery of innovative services to Canadians anywhere, anytime.

Our technology needs are more complex than those of many organizations because our business is collecting, organizing and disseminating information. Our investment in technology will continue to be significant. The rapidly changing information environment is creating new needs, new uses for our information, an unprecedented volume of information, a need for new work processes, and complex security, authentication and digital rights management requirements.

Agile systems

We will need agile and scalable systems to keep pace. We must seek to increase flexibility, foster reuse of both systems components and data, and reduce development costs.

Integrated architecture

Our systems and information architecture must enable us to present library and archival resources as an integrated whole, and allow us to integrate work functions to acquire, manage, describe, preserve, and interpret the collection. We must also integrate with systems of the government of Canada, and within national networks. To achieve the integration we need, our systems must be interoperable. For this, we will look to common standards, interoperability protocols, and platform independence.

Managing digital content

We will invest significantly in virtual programs and services. Our information technology must be Web-enabled, focused on facilitating the delivery and management of digital content and services. We must also have all the technologies necessary to support a large-scale digitization program, as that is essential to both our preservation and content delivery goals.

Supporting daily operations

Like most organizations, technology also serves our day-to-day operations. Our employees depend on reliable access to email, Intranet, Internet and desktop systems as the foundation for operations. For our corporate support systems, we will look to corporate standards and to leverage government-wide common services to the extent possible.

We want our information technology to be agile, scalable interoperable and web-oriented so that it enables achievement of our goals. Our first step will be to define an integrated information and technology architecture that will inform IT decisions and shape IT development for the next few years.

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