The Panel believed that Canadiana should increase its support for professional development of critical repository staff in an effort to improve digital preservation decision-making (TRAC A2.3). In the course of the audit, in discussions with staff regarding practices related to ingest of content, it was evident that some key members of Canadiana staff were not always acquainted with certain digital preservation technologies and practices. To ensure that Canadiana implements up to date digital preservation strategies CRL encourages Canadiana to provide staff more opportunities to interact with others in the digital preservation field. Such activities as working with other digital repositories, attending conferences focused on digital preservation and investigating new preservation approaches and technologies will enhance the organization’s ability to fulfill its commitment to digital preservation.

CRL’s audit noted that in the future Canadiana will, no doubt, be expected to begin to accept and archive born-digital content and digitized content prepared for archiving by other organizations. This service will be a natural expectation of constituencies in the world of academic research that Canadiana serves. At the time of the CRL audit, most of the digital content archived by Canadiana was material created by Canadiana itself, through its own digitization of works on paper and print materials of cultural and historical importance. The processes for ingesting and maintaining that content were determined by CRL to be basically sound. Canadiana has more recently begun to put in place the technologies and processes necessary to manage and preserve born-digital content, but its ingest of digital files produced by other organizations involved processes for verification of file types and format validation that were at the time of the audit still untested and unproven. CRL encourages Canadiana to continue to develop and document this capability.