Library and Archives Canada’s 2024–25 Departmental Plan

Key priorities

• Deepening its commitment to reconciliation through the Indigenous Heritage Action Plan and continuing to build respectful relationships;
• Stabilizing its Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) function and improving access to government records;
• Transforming its services to attract new audiences and better serving existing users to meet or exceed their expectations;
• Improving access to collections by advancing our digitization efforts, deploying a robust metadata strategy and improving our systems; and
• Integrating equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility (EDIA) principles throughout its services, collection management and workforce to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Refocusing Government Spending

In Budget 2023, the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, starting in 2023–24, and by $4.1 billion annually after that.

As part of meeting the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, LAC is planning the following spending reductions.

• 2024-2025: $2,324,000
• 2025-2026: $3,610,000
• 2026-2027 and after: $5,368,000

LAC will achieve these reductions by doing the following:

• Reducing travel expenses compared to pre-pandemic expenditures;
• Reducing funding provided through the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP); and
• Primarily limiting annual investments in the development and modernization of the digital infrastructure and online access tools.
  

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  As in previous years, here is a look at the number of mentions of some keywords giving insight into importance and trends. Here they are in this year’s plan with last year’s in parathesis: Digit* 30 (66), Continu* 41 (33), Indigenous 27 (42),  Innov 3 (6), Geneal* 2 (2), Ādisōke 8 (23), newspaper 1 (1), director* 0 (0), census 0 (0).  There is one mention of artificial intelligence, the same as the previous year —”LAC will work on topics such as artificial intelligence with academic partners or on genealogy services with companies working in that field.”

The following is extracted from a table showing the planned results, the result indicators, the targets and the target dates for 2024–25, and the actual results for the three most recent fiscal years for which actual results are available.

The increase in the number of images digitized for access shows an increase to 6.5 million, up from 3.5 million in 2022-23, and 2.4 million in 2021-22.

Looking back this digitization falls far short of 2015-16 when it was 11 million files, not images! If a microfilm with 1,000 frames is scanned is that 1,000 images, but one file? Clarity please.

Where is the committment to making the content of the images digitally searchable? Is that meeting the priority  “to attract new audiences and better serving existing users to meet or exceed their expectations”? How does LAC know what the expectations are?

The impact of government-wide spending reductions on services to LAC clients is unclear. How much will DHCP funding be reduced? What will be the impact on clients of changes to digital infrastructure and online access tools?