Library and Archives Canada: Planning for a new union catalogue

Basic question: What form does LAC envision the solution taking?

Will it be:

• "Library and Archives Canada begins adding records and holdings to WorldCat" as listed for many other countries in http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/national/timeline.en.html;
• Or a separate, standalone but openly searchable WorldCat Local catalogue that Canadians can use like the Dutch or United Kingdom union catalogues (which lack significant functionality that standard WorldCat possesses, like the integrated schema.org discovery markup)?
• Or a separate, standalone but closed catalogue like the Dutch union catalogue GGC and the Combined Regions UnityUK that require a subscription to access?

The answer was "yes, we will be adding records and holdings to WorldCat, and yes, you will be able to search a WorldCat Local instance for both LAC-specific and AMICUS as a whole" - but they're still working out the exact details. Later we determined that it will actually be WorldCat Discovery--essentially a rewrite of WorldCat Local--which assuaged some of my concerns about the current examples we can see of other OCLC-based union catalogues.

Privacy of Canadian citizens

The "Canadian office and data centre locations" requirement does not mean that usage data is exempt from Patriot Act concerns. Specifically, OCLC is an American company and thus the USA Patriot Act "allows US authorities to obtain records from any US-linked company operating in Canada" (per a 2004 brief submitted to the BC Privacy Commissioner by CIPPIC). Canadians should not be subject to this invasion of their privacy by the agents of another nation simply to use their own national union catalogue.

The response: The Justice, Agricultural, and NRCan agencies use US-hosted library systems (the latter running the open-source Evergreen, by Equinox). However, one of the other participants from a federal agency reported that they had been trying to update to Sierra from their Millenium instance but have been stalled for two years because whatever policy allowed them to go live with US-hosted Millenium is not being allowed now.

LAC claimed that, due to NAFTA, they are not allowed to insist that data be held in Canada unless it is for national security reasons. They noted that any usage data collected wouldn't be the same volume of patron data that would be seen in public libraries. They did point out that Netherlands sends anonymized data to OCLC, but that costs money and impacts response time. Apparently the OCLC web site, they claim not to have had a request under Patriot Act.

Privacy of Canadian citizens, part 2

I didn't get the chance to bring this up during the call...

LAC noted in their background that modern systems have links to social media, and apparently want this as part of a new AMICUS. This would also open up potential privacy leaks; see Eric Hellman on this topic, for example; it is also an area of interest for the recently launched ALA Patron Privacy Technologies Interest Group.

Open data

Opening up access to data is part of the federal government's stated mission.

Canada's Action Plan on Open Government 2014-16 says "Open Government Foundation - Open By Default" is a keystone of its plan; "Eligible data and information will be released in standardized, open formats, free of charge, and without restrictions on reuse" under the Open Government Licence - Canada 2.0. I therefore asserted:

• A relaunched National Union Catalogue should therefore support open data per the federal initiative from launch.
• The open data should include bibliographic, authority, and holdings records. Guy Berthiaume's reply to CLA and CAPAL that libraries can use the Z39.50 protocol to try to access records from individual library's Z39.50 servers ignores one of the primary purposes of a union catalogue, which is to avoid that time-consuming search across the various Z39.50 servers of the institutions that contributed their data to the union catalogue in the first place.

The response: The ACAN requirements document indicated a requirement that the data be made available under an ODC-BY license (matching OCLC's general WorldCat license); and LAC needs to get the data back to support their federated search tool.

I asked if they had checked to see if ODC-BY and Open Government License - Canada 2.0 licenses are compatible; they responded that that was something they would need to look into.

Happily, the CLIPol tool indicates that the ODB-BY 1.0 and Open Government License - Canada 2.0 licenses are mostly compatible.

Contemporary features: are we achieving the stated goals?

The backgrounder benefits/objectives section stated: "In the current AMICUS?based context, the NUC has not kept pace with new technological functions, capabilities, and client needs. Contemporary features such as a user?oriented display and navigation, user customization, links to social media, and linked open data output were not available when AMICUS was implemented in the 1990s."