[CivicAccess-discuss] Closing of NRCan Libraries

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

I never knew I would grow up to discover that the rock stars of my world
would be librarians and archivists.  They have been the knowledge
democratisers of the past couple of centuries and continue to be under the
radar in terms of assuring that the public gets access to information
resources.  They are however under attack from all sides, at a time when we
need them more than ever.  Sure, their form and methods have to change, and
they are, and media are shifting.  Irrespective, we need these data and
info diggers more than ever, as it is still institutions that produce
trusted, 'official' or peer reviewed knowledge, and their products are not
always found or accessible via google search engines, no matter what all
the new undergrads think.

Today I am working in a library, 615 Booth in Ottawa, one of my favourites,
and it will most likely close in the next couple of years as did its other
NRCan cousins:

   - Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria BC
   - Northern Forestry Centre, Edmonton AB
   - CanmetENERGY, Varennes QC
   - CanmetENERGY, Bells Corner Complex, Ottawa ON
   - Mines and Minerals. 555 Booth St., Ottawa ON

(http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/library/6600)

The one I am in at the moment is under incredibly reduced public hours, and
because I am doing some special work with older items in the collection, I
have been given a kind of priviledged access.  The Mines and Minerals
section for instance, contains our Canadian heritage in terms of mineral
exploration in Canada, from 1842 onward when the Geological Survey of
Canada began.  The history of resource discovery, documentation, and
exploitation, is in fact the history of Canada and continues to be our
economic driver, yet the information about it is becoming less and less
accessible to us.

Sure, we are opening data, but data need context, classification systems
emerged overtime even though we think the data we collect according to them
are facts - they are - except, they are socially constructed scientific
facts, the outcome of categorizing things a certain way according to a
certain norm.  How those came to be are stored here, in the libraries.

Open data is mere technocracy if context associated with the data
disappear.  The libraries hold that context and it is librarians who are
the key to uraveling it.

-- 

Tracey P. Lauriault
Post Doctoral Fellow
Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
613-234-2805
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