- Consultation on Service
LAC maintains communication with clients through various consultation and mechanisms to better understand its client base and their needs.
– Services Consultation Committee has been inactive since 2024 and has not met recently.
– 2025 Service Improvement Survey results were posted on 23 February 2026 linking to an extensive contractor report. The vast majority of clients expressed satisfaction with the quality of the interactions they have had in person with LAC staff. Opinions on online services were positive but less favourable. Two-thirds of current LAC clients pointed to genealogy and family history (67%) and Canada history and land (65%) as areas where LAC’s collections are of interest to them. Kudos to LAC for funding the survey.
– Youth Advisory Council is documented in a webpage dated 12 December 2025. 10 people. age 16 – 25, served for 2025-26. The Council met four times, January — April 2026 with meeting summaries posted. While there’s good evidence of there being a genuine consultation opportunity, there’s only suggestive, not confirmed, evidence of lasting impact.
– Stakeholders Forum comprises 15 professional organizations that meet twice a year. The last reported meeting was Fall 2025. It featured presentations sharing highlights of activities currently underway within three organizations. While the Canadian Historical Association is a member, there is no representation from any genealogical or family history group, even though they represent two-thirds of LAC’s clients.
- Newspapers
Two decades ago LAC made a decision to reduce the resources it dedicated to newspapers. Staff were let go. Today, on LAC’s Research Guides and Tools for Finding Newspapers, it states “Most of our newspapers are not digitized, so you will need to view them in person.” An exception is “Four Indigenous newspapers (that) have been digitized as part of LAC’s National Heritage Digitization Strategy.” That was achieived through earmarked external funding.
Much of LAC’s legacy newspaper collection is on microfilm, available at the Ottawa location. A substantial part of that is open self-service access, although that will likely change with the move to Adisoke. Unlike other countries newspaper initiatives, LAC remains in the microfilm age.
- Quarterly statistics on access to information and privacy
Posted on 11 August is an overview of LAC’s ATIP workload from April 1st to June 30th, 2026 .The total number of carried over requested increased from 5,965 to 6,106, or 2.6%.
Military requests outstanding decreased by 8.5% in the three months. Government records requests outstanding increased by 12.7%.
Processing capacity for military and public servant files has scaled up dramatically over the year, meaning those seeking essential service records are experiencing better turnaround times.
General government archival requests receive a much smaller share of attention, creating frustrating bottlenecks for deep historical and lineage research.
Thousands of requests are still carried over from quarter to quarter, with some multi-year delays, guaranteeing that anyone investigating restricted historical collections will continue to face major obstacles accessing primary sources.