Canada's National Archives Draws Fire Over a New Digitization Deal - The Ticker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Librarians in Canada are criticizing the nation’s federal archives for giving a consortium exclusive rights to digitize and sell content held by public universities—and for keeping the deal under wraps. Library and Archives Canada is in the process of digitizing millions of pages documenting the nation’s history and heritage. (That project, according to the Ottawa Citizen, was bankrolled in part by $2-million from Canada’s university libraries.) Under the terms of the newly disclosed deal, the digitization will be performed by a consortium called Canadiana, which has also secured a 10-year license to sell access to the material. Until the Citizen broke news of the deal, just days before a planned announcement, neither the archives nor Canadiana had discussed the deal publicly. Now archivists are upset that they haven’t been consulted. 'We believe that digitization is key to providing more access,' said Lara Wilson, chairman of the Canadian Council of Archivists, “not putting it behind a paywall.'"