#canadaaaa

Anyone with a conscience is disappointed about the provincial election last week. A stunningly stupid political party promised such things as walking back a minimum-wage increase in exchange for a tax cut that will result in a worse deal overall - and a stunningly stupid minority of voters elected them - and a stunningly stupid first-past-the-post system allowed 40% of the vote to result in a majority of seats. 

Governments like these destroy stability, reverse progress, and cause devastation to social services that take decades to recover from - or, with the way the world is moving, that we’ll never recover from. To try and narrow my anger down, let’s look at heritage.

Right-wing governments destroy affirmative-action and equality employment standards, ruining whatever small chances we’ve had to enshrine in law the pathetically weak attempts thus far to diversify the profession. They’ll take away scholarships and grants that would make higher education affordable to people who aren’t white and middle- or upper-class. 

They’ll walk back the public records protections that bring the limited amount of government transparency we already enjoy. They’ll reduce staff at the provincial archives and take away money for R&D programs on digital recordskeeping, privacy, and accountability for public service. They’ll privatize what they can and outsource and subcontract what they can’t, probably with some level of cronyism. 

The new Digital Public Library will probably be scrapped. The increases in annual funding to public libraries that was so tirelessly advocated for? We’ll see, but I’m pessimistic. Schools that have libraries and media commons will probably lose them. The curriculum, where it once may have included even a modicum of discussion on Canada’s and Ontario’s discriminatory and inhumane policies, will be bland patriotism, eschewing the use of primary sources and firsthand testimony of the Indigenous peoples and immigrant groups we’ve abused. 

Grant programs will contract. Collaborations from other sources will dry up, as we’ll all be working under reduced capital funding. The funding that runs my own nonprofit will probably become less available, including the grants with which I’ve been working to explore projects on diversifying the digital historical record. Higher education funding will be cut. Tuition will be raised. 

None of these things were campaigned on, none of these things appeared in a platform or in any kind of policy. They didn’t need to - we know what these people stand for, we know what they think and how they think and what they do when handed power. This isn’t news. We’re going to feel it, and we’re going to feel it right away. 

The funny thing about politics these days is that no one needs to campaign on anything. We know what each of our political parties stands for - and we know what is about to happen to us and the things we stand for.

I’m not going to pretend that all GLAM workers have the same politics, and I know all too well that the reality is far from it. But the mission of public libraries is quite clear - offer equitable service to everyone, encourage inquiry and independent thought, and protect patron privacy and autonomy. That will include people who choose genders other than what they were born with, regardless of whether the provincial government walks back gender-neutral identification. That will include advising people against information sources that are known to spread lies and propaganda. That will include serving immigrants and refugees regardless of their documentation status. This, at least, we can all stand behind. 

The mission of archives is clear, too - document the lives of Ontario residents and the decisions and events that affect them. That will include documenting government actions whether or not the government uses proper protocols or channels. That will include offering access to documents that researchers have a right to. That will include continuing to collect records that show the lived experiences of the people who are suffering in our society, and the ways in which our government fails to serve them.

Lately there has been a resurgence of conversation about the actual costs of running an open access journal. I first started my napkin-scratches on the subject over a year ago, but never published anything on it. But, let’s try it out.

Agreed. $300 is a good estimate for OA publishing including all 'classical' services provided by publishing industry. https://t.co/2IZmmbfMUP

— Alexⓐnder Grossmann (@SciPubLab)

June 28, 2017

One journal calculates that, with an entirely volunteer staff, hosting and DOI and Crossref costs about $3.50 per paper if you’re publishing 200 papers a year (which, in my field, is very high, but that’s a good and healthy goal, so we’ll leave it).

In my experience, working on an OA journal with an entirely volunteer staff and with hosting donated by a university, I think we only have the DOI expenditure. (We get a wonderful honourarium in the form of a free conference registration which normally runs in the $600 range.) So, it varies.

Regardless, I would like to think about an even better use-case: paying professionals for their expertise. While we generally think of peer-review as a “pure” task worked into academics’ salaries so that money can’t corrupt the process, the truth is that there are lots of fields using peer-review labour from practitioners and students and others without that “compensation” available to them. Still, I think peer-review could stay volunteer, and so could the editorial board. Where I want money to be spent is on professional copyediting and professional design.

In fact I feel quite strongly about this.

oh no, now I must fight @petersuber to the death pic.twitter.com/mnr54aW1Vc

— Ʌǀǀɑnɑ (@allanaaaaaaa)

June 26, 2017

So, here’s my math, knowing what I know about OA:

Editorial board - volunteer or small honouraria

Peer reviewers - volunteer

Social media - free & volunteer or small honouraria

Hosting costs - $150-200 a year

Printing - not applicable!

Where could the costs be? I would say, *worst case scenario*:

Paying a layout and graphic designer - Two weeks full-time pay per issue -- so, assuming quarterly publication, two months of work. $60,000FTE (generous!) / 6 = $10,000 a year

Similarly, paying a qualified fact-checker and copyeditor = $10,000 a year.

That’s worst-case scenario -- if you paid well and the work was hard. (Most journals I know do not require the services of a talented graphic designer. Often they’re creating PDFs using Microsoft Word.) 

So let’s be really precious and round up to $25,000 a year to include hosting, honouraria, DOIs, Crossref membership.

That seems to be about what was awarded to these journals (many of which are OA):

http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/recipients-recipiendaires/2015/journals-revues-eng.aspx

Now, let’s assume we can cut those costs down by centralizing: say, a library houses a number of journals and pays one in-house copyeditor and one in-house designer a full-time wage to work on as many journals as they can (obviously this involves some schedule-staggering). Assuming two weeks per journal per quarter, that’s maybe seven journals per editorial duo. Seven journals for $120,000/yr for staff expenditures, plus let’s again round up a bit to cover the other expenditures - $5,000/yr * 7 = $155,000. So, just over $20,000/yr/journal.

(If a quarterly journal publishes 20 articles per issue, then it works out to $280 per article. Very close to other estimates. I'm starting to feel pretty good about this napkin.)

This how many millions of dollars one #Canadian university must pay to subscribe to top 5 article databases. #academicpublishing #libraries pic.twitter.com/zMdfzX61xo

— Matt Huculak (@jmhuculak)

June 6, 2017

Assuming an average serials budget in the, oh, I dunno, $2 million range? (There are 98 universities in Canada and many of them are smaller than UAlberta.) There would be ~$200 million in public funds available, which could pay for about 10,000 high-quality, sustainable Open Access journals in Canada alone. (So, over a quarter of all the existing journals in the world. The DOAJ currently lists 9,000 OA journals.) Not including colleges. (And not charging $300 APCs to recoup costs, which, for some journals some of the time, I'm not against, mostly, I think.)

Repatriation, besides being a word I cannot type, is in the news. A private members’ bill in Canada suggests a national strategy for repatriating Indigenous artifacts away from our settler institutions and back to their communities of origin. (Germany pushed one through just this week.) An “outcry” from museum staff claims to centre around whether the items had been bought and paid for in good faith (just like our land treaties, yes?) and not really whether the Indigenous communities have the means to care for said artifacts, which is a concern I’ve seen in other discussions (brought up only once in the article). 

A digitization project by the Newberry Library brought this to my thoughts in a few ways, with news coverage using the phrase “decolonization” and the Newberry eschewing such labels. There were questions about whether community members had any say over what was digitized and how it was shared, and why creators weren’t attributed in all cases. And, to circle back, about how items remained in the ownership of the library.

I thought about it a lot on Thursday when I took a quick tour of the Canadian & Indigenous galleries at the National Gallery of Canada, where Indigenous artifacts are shown alongside capital-A Art by white settlers (and very few people of colour, but that’s a story for another time). The gendered nature of “craft” and the Othering nature of presenting ceremonial clothing, wampum belts, intricate carvings, and beautiful works in every media alongside settler oil portraits and landscapes was not lost on me.

Some curator must’ve thought it was outrageously clever and decolonizing to juxtapose Indigenous and settler works side by side in roughly chronological order. A board of directors and many staff must’ve agreed. Still, it’s hard to tour the galleries and think this is a triumph of reconciliation.

I am deeply interested in the outcome of the recent hiring process at LAC to engage Indigenous archivists who will take archival training back to their communities. My understanding is that the application barrier is quite low; all that was required was that someone have ties to a specific community, have an undergraduate degree, and have some experience with research in primary sources. I don’t expect LAC to give a stellarly thorough education to these applicants; I would much rather see Indigenous students put through archival studies programs at U Manitoba or UBC and get the long-term support they need (which, of course, those programs and universities could probably use some decolonizing themselves, also a story for another time). The eventual intent is to turn program graduates loose in their communities with digitization and preservation toolkits to bring some level of heritage support to languages, stories, and traditions.

I would rather see investments in large scale institutions - museums, galleries, archives, and libraries - right in Indigenous communities, with first-rate facilities and staff: a place where no one would object to repatriating items. Where economic benefits could be derived from sending tourists, researchers, and classrooms to learn about Indigenous history from the communities themselves. Where infrastructure would be required to support all this - clean water, high-speed internet, medical and dental and fire services - to the level at which settler tourists are accustomed. It’s disingenuous and it’s weird and it’s a deeply uncomfortable subject, but if decades of lobbying and outcry haven’t accomplished basic services to these communities, perhaps the only way to engineer it is to mandate it. Certainly the Globe and Mail article makes the same point: making it a “moral imperative" outside legislation means it doesn’t move quickly enough - or at all.

Some personal-ish news: I decided to get involved in some local politics, and volunteered for the Ward One Participatory Budgeting Advisory Committee in Hamilton.

I've been looking for a variety of volunteer experiences in this city since I moved here (as I'm sure most of you know, I'm a chronic volunteer) but have had a hard time finding organizations to take my free labour. Weird, huh? Luckily, the City came to the rescue.

Not only does the entire concept of Participatory Budgeting appeal to my civics, but I want to dig deeper into #Maintainers-style policy and discover more about infrastructure and upkeep processes. 

hot tip for LIS newbies: resist the urge to Make New Things. we have too many Things. seriously.

— ҩȴȴҩηҩ (@allanaaaaaaa)

June 29, 2016

Ward One’s PB process has been a really great learning experience for this so far, and we’ve only just begun the yearly cycle. 

Without compromising my impartiality too much, I want to jot down some procedural thoughts I'm having about it so far:

One, that this is infrastructure funding, but infrastructure is generally though to be a hidden thing, an expert's realm, tucked away below the surface, inside our sewer grates and running through wires. But this process is entirely crowdsourced: anyone can submit an idea, from anywhere in the world, for infrastructure improvements in our Ward. That means experts who have and will never set foot in my neighbourhood can come up with a proposal for a radical new innovation - but so can I, the resident who only knows my own day-to-day experiences and nothing about the scaffolding that supports it. What do us simple surface-dwellers have to offer on the systems that keep us running? What is the format for us to best contribute to the discussion? And how does our tiny local endeavour ensure that we can procure ideas from experts outside our area?

Two, that this discretionary funding is meant not to supercede or make redundant the regular everyday efforts of city departments who would (or should) be working on a given infrastructure project anyways. But, the same problem arises: how do I really know all the myriad things the city is supposed to take care of? Moreover, is PB a good solution for when a city's services fall short, or is getting things taken care of through PB actually contributing to the problem? (The same way a neighbourhood book exchange isn't a replacement for an actual library, even if it serves a "book desert.") If this reasoning stands, why have volunteer committees for participatory budgeting at all? Why can't cities just be perfect at infrastructure, without needing citizen advice?

As many are noting, it’s been a year since the Liberals won the election with promises of implementing the TRC calls to action in their entirety. 

Ian Mosby spent a few days tweeting each Call with their respective status; here’s the storify:

[View the story "Status of Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action " on Storify]

When Mosby got to the Calls that related to archives and museums, I chimed in to say that the ACA has chosen its Taskforce on recommending responses - or at least, I know that I didn’t make the cut, as of August. They haven’t announced it officially yet. 

TRC Call to Action #57 Status: ❓ Uncertain pic.twitter.com/lI8CDNVXfL

— Ian Mosbγ (@Ian_Mosby)

October 26, 2016

@Ian_Mosby @ArchivesOntario is working on identifying, reproducing and sending all of its Residential School materials to the NCTR

— Desmond (@desmondcwong)

October 26, 2016

Here’s what I recommended during a listserv discussion about this last year (which occasioned this resource list on archives, decolonization, and indigenization):

Call #70 promises federal funding to the ACA to undertake a review of archival policies and practices to align them more with providing access to records about human rights violations in residential schools. There are also a number of Calls that indicate archives must begin working in earnest to prioritize services for Indigenous knowledge - for public school curricula, journalism, artistic projects, annual commemorative events, and anniversary exhibits in 2017.

Call #57 is for education for public servants at all levels on Aboriginal issues (which I take to mean education both for and by archivists). Call #76 and others imply that Aboriginal communities will guide many of the efforts of cultural-heritage professionals.

In terms of [the] question about how we as a profession can respond, I have a few suggestions on ways to make this a bigger priority (ones that don't require separate funding, only a realignment of values):

1) Archivaria could dedicate space in each issue going forward to dealing with the issues of Canada's Indigenous history and current affairs. A themed issue in 2016 or 2017 may stimulate discussion and responses in future issues.

2) We could have a stream at our annual conferences, in this and future years, that provides dedicated space for presentations on these issues. I would also welcome major keynotes from Indigenous community members and scholars.

3) The CCA and other groups that offer professional development could find Indigenous speakers to give webinars, workshops, and other services. I'd love to hear about lessons learned from other regions who are farther along in Indigenous reparations than we are.

4) It would be nice to see existing working groups nod to Aboriginal representation regardless of their focus: perhaps a commitment by the CCAD to incorporate Indigenous knowledge or languages into their revision of RAD?

I’m reposting this not just because I think I’m right, but because I feel like we’re lacking in some serious public discussion here. Grant Hurley’s editorial in Off The Record, the AAO’s newsletter, cites this listerv discussion as a “turning point” in Canadian archival silence about reconciliation. As much as I wish that was true, I think the silence is still winning.

TRC Call to Action #69 Status: ❌ Incomplete pic.twitter.com/isNq8kqReD

— Ian Mosbγ (@Ian_Mosby)

October 26, 2016

I want the ACA to issue an update on their progress, announce the Taskforce members, and show us some initial ideas. With or without federal funding, the good-faith action to take is to start working. Decolonization will mean restructuring entire work habits from the ground up, not just an event here and an exhibit there and some articles every once in a while. (Although do read the OTR issue on reconciliation; it’s great.) We have to move the concept out of the scholarly record and into our practice, and help each others do so by talking about it.

It means we need to be constantly interrogating our practices and standards. That means we don’t wait for special money for special projects; it means we each change what we’re doing, right now.

It was very kind of Michael Geist to take note of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy released earlier this year. Geist is a copyright scholar, in case you don’t know, and focuses on the legal restrictions keeping Canadian heritage institutions from digitizing and sharing important works that aren’t yet in the public domain- legal issues that are well-known and often discussed in the profession. 

What we also talk about a whole lot, which Geist brushes off in two sentences, is how poor we all are.

Seriously media, if you're writing things like "archivists should do this WHY aren't they?!" 99% of the time it's because of resource limits

— Eira Tansey (@eiratansey)

August 22, 2016

Since none of us can afford to be sued, it’s actually a very bold choice to dictate a National Strategy that requires the digitization of anything not firmly in the public domain and free of privacy or donation restrictions. (See this recent blog post if you’re in uncharted seas.)

Geist says “major digitization initiatives are certainly costly, but experience elsewhere shows that a government-led initiative that brings together public and private resources is possible with the right champion.” I sincerely hope Geist isn’t referring to Ancestry.ca partnerships here, and just means fundraising and endowments from the private sector. The country’s foremost copyright scholar, I’m sure, wouldn’t be endorsing digitization contracts that put publicly-held cultural heritage behind paywalls. Right? (He may also be referring to the Internet Archive, in the States, a vanity project funded out-of-pocket by someone who was made a multi-millionaire in the dot-com bubble of the early oughts. We should be so lucky.)

Geist goes on to say that, since Google can digitize stuff without fear of being sued, surely we can, too. Of course, the fine print of that legal decision (one that took years and years to set a precedent in the USA, and that would certainly need to be tested before being defined here, which would cost whichever guinea-pig organization was in the hot seat something in the way of hundreds or millions of dollars¹) says that Google was providing a new function, namely that of text-searchable books, heightening their discoverability.

Our meticulously hand-scripted, masters-level-quality, bespoke, artisanal metadata on all of our non-textual digital objects would in fact constitute no “transformative” use whatsoever, issuing us no copyright protections.

Also Google doesn’t let you read the whole book - just a fair-use-respecting portion of it. (Let’s see, so you take 90% of all heritage, multiply by one-sixth of each image, and one chapter of each book, and fewer than four bars of each song, carry the one ….)

We don’t have a precedent here for not being sued for sharing copyrighted materials, no matter how “out of print” they are, and we don’t have one on the horizon. Organizations are right to be afraid.

Geist also argues that the 2012 copyright “pentalogy” decisions, which broadened fair-dealing to anything for “research or private study,” would protect educational institutions, public libraries, and just about anybody else digitizing stuff and sharing it.

And, I mean, I agree. Keeping up with “Game of Thrones” is an important social-capital aspect of my life, and therefore any pirating I do of this show within hours of its airing is clearly research on how to be a non-pariah in my workplace. Duh. Therefore, as long as Canadian heritage institutions made users check the “I’m using this for research and private study” Captcha box before looking at their content management systems (and maybe a second one before download, y’know, just to be sure) who could possibly sue them? Right?

Of course, we can’t stick numbers on any of this - what it would cost, how long it would take, how much staff and equipment we’d require. This is because we don’t have current surveys or audits or estimates or even such things from previous years with which to extrapolate what we have now.

Literally no one knows how much Canadian creative or archival materials exist in heritage collections, let alone how many are in the public domain.

I asked people to assess their certainty on how much their organizations held as a control group and found that, at maximum, 70% of organizations were 70%+ certain of what they held in their collections². Almost none were 100% certain. We don’t even have an average guess at what archival backlogs are, except we know that ten-year-old unprocessed accessions aren’t unheard of.

The “bold vision” Geist calls for costs money. Money, money, money. Money just to get us all on the same page, get all of our accession records in one place, get all of our collection mandates in one place, get a platform for reporting the size and material type of our holdings, get Library and Archives Canada back into a leadership position in the industry, get private digitization vendors out of our shit, and get us thinking about what an accessible Canadian culture might mean. Money we desperately, insistently, expressly, notably, international-stage-cringe-inducingly³ do not have.

There was no increase announced for Library and Archives Canada in the 2016 Liberal budget, after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives slashed $10 million from their annual funding between 2012 and 2015. That’s a tacit approval of those cuts! Cuts previously used as ammunition! Heritage Minister Melanie Joly has yet to address this disastrous status quo, despite repeated attempts to bring up the subject.

Maybe we should start with “Why is there no funding available to meet this National Heritage Digitization Strategy?” before we ask “Why isn’t the National Heritage Digitization Strategy better?”

We might even conclude that the first question makes the second more-or-less moot.

-------------------------------------------------------------

1. And yes, I have, on more than one occasion, suggested we take up a war chest so that some institution can go ahead and get sued and make the precedent, already. It got laughs at least twice.

2. YES I KNOW IT IS AN INSIGNIFICANT SAMPLE SIZE. But also, look at the 7th slide and see how most “fairly certain” responses varied widely, even when respondents were from the same institution. Certainty doesn’t guarantee accuracy, which is to say, even the people that think they know their collections don’t actually know their collections because they haven’t actually really truly counted their collections.