Governance and Recordkeeping, January 2026

LAC’s approach supports broader Government of Canada priorities for digital transformation, transparency, and citizen-centered services. The goal is to make collections more discoverable, improve services, and strengthen connections between Canadians and their history. To achieve this, LAC is investing in both technology (AI-enabled tools) and people (training staff, running pilot projects).

The report reviews LAC’s performance against its priorities and planned outcomes for 2024–2025. During this period, LAC focused on making its collections more representative of Canada by acquiring a broader diversity of materials. LAC also began implementing its Data Strategy, advancing data literacy, governance, and cross-organizational data practices, alongside many other significant milestones.

The event was cohosted by LAC and the Canada School of Public Service’s GC Data Community. It focused on how information management (IM) is being modernized in government by showcasing strategies, tools, and practices that are transforming how public servants manage and share knowledge. Through real-world case studies, it provided practical guidance on IM and data stewardship.

LAC continues to face backlog challenges due to the high volume and complexity of requests, which makes meeting legislated timelines difficult. LAC also engages in proactive publication, releasing certain information without waiting for formal requests, as required under Part 2 of the Access to Information Act. The report provides details on complaints submitted to the Information Commissioner and how LAC addressed them.

Both Canada and the United States face mounting challenges as their archival institutions contend with political and financial pressures. Historian Charlotte Gray interviews Dr. Colleen Shogan, the 11th Archivist of the United States, and Dr. Leslie Weir, the Librarian and Archivist of Canada, about the vital role of archives, the opportunities and risks of the digital era, and even the cultural significance of everyday practices such as selfies.

The Canadiana collections, comprising millions of digitized historical documents, are a prime resource for researching Canadian military history. Widely used by historians, genealogists, and even surveyors, these collections support both scholarly inquiry and practical applications. Thanks to the support of Canadian Research Knowledge Network members, these resources are freely accessible, enabling historical research while also contributing to public safety.

The investigation highlights the risks of relying on third-party education technology platforms without strong contractual safeguards and effective oversight. It underscores the need for better privacy governance in education, particularly when students’ personal information is managed by external providers. If implemented, the recommendations could lead to stronger data protection for students, educators, and school systems in the future.

Quebec’s leading archival organizations are urging the government to promptly overhaul the province’s Loi sur les archives (Archives Act), adopted in 1983, warning that it no longer meets modern needs in information governance, digital management, data protection, and public access. Without an updated legal framework, they caution, public bodies face increased risks of information loss, fragmented institutional memory, and rising management costs.

The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives is launching its largest-ever digitization initiative to preserve “hidden” 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadian history. The collections being digitized focus on communities historically excluded from mainstream archives. Digitizing these materials ensures that these stories are preserved with dignity, visibility, and accessibility. They will be made available on the organization’s online portal.

This article discusses Winnipeg’s efforts to safeguard electronic records, such as emails, websites, and computer files so they remain accessible, authentic, and intact over the long term. It examines how specialized digital-preservation software is used to maintain formats and metadata as technologies evolve, and highlights the purpose, challenges, strategies, and call to action behind digital preservation initiatives.

The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) has chosen Arcitecta’s Mediaflux® as its central Digital Asset Management System. This move is part of a broader strategy to modernize how Australia’s audiovisual heritage is stored, accessed, and preserved. The adoption of Mediaflux signals a major digital transformation for NFSA, representing not merely a systems upgrade but a fundamental rethinking of how the archive manages its assets and engages with the public.

This issue brief highlights that libraries aren’t just places for books anymore; they are critical digital access points and community anchors. By centering libraries within digital policy, governments and international organizations can make digital inclusion more equitable, trust-based, and people-oriented.

The Scottish Government has introduced a refreshed National Digital Strategy, building on its 2021 version. The goal is to make Scotland more digitally connected, drive economic growth, and improve public services through digital innovation. A new app will launch next year to give citizens personalized access to public services. Education is a key focus, with plans to increase digital education in schools and support lifelong digital skills development for workers.

The organization is redesigning its online gateway to make archival content easier to navigate, more intuitive, and more visually engaging, helping to reduce the sense of intimidation often created by the scale and complexity of archives. This redesign marks only the first step; ongoing enhancements and new features will continue to improve the experience, particularly for expert and frequent users.

The festival is designed to educate participants by helping them trace their roots and to preserve heritage by capturing oral histories, strengthening community connections to Black Miami’s past. Programming included expert-led genealogy workshops, storytelling and oral history sessions, a children’s activity zone, and live music and entertainment.

The State Archival Service of Ukraine has launched a major effort to digitize documents from Crimean archives, making them available in an online section called Archives of Crimea. Ukrainian archivists frame this digitization effort as part of a liberation policy, not just preserving history, but reclaiming memory and asserting the Ukrainian identity of Crimea.

The Welsh Political Archive was founded in 1983 to collect a broad array of political material from Wales, including personal papers of politicians, party archives, campaign ephemera, posters, photographs, and media. The archive is assessing and developing treatment plans for Indigenous treaty documents in its holdings to preserve them more responsibly.

OLA Super Conference 2026

Digital Preservation Summit 2026: Securing Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age

Legal Discovery: The Role of Records Management

RDA 26th Plenary Meeting (VP26)

i-SIGMA Annual Conference 2026

ARMA InfoNEXT 2026

Archives Association of Ontario 2026 Annual Conference

IRMS Conference 2026

International Conference on Information Resources Management (PDF document)

2026 NAGARA Annual Conference

ARMA InfoCon 2026

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries has published a guide to help legal professionals evaluate AI tools for legal research and writing. Intended for lawyers, judges, law librarians, paralegals, students, faculty, and administrators, the guide supports informed decision-making when procuring, using, teaching, or managing AI-driven legal research and writing systems.

The Czech Academy of Sciences has launched a free online digital archive featuring 15,000 traditional Czech folk songs. The collection, which includes lyrics, melodies, and ethnographic notes, aims to preserve cultural heritage and support research and education. This initiative makes rare historical material accessible to the public and promotes Czech folk traditions globally.

The Metadata Quality Assessment (MQA) is a tool created by the data.europa.eu consortium to evaluate the quality of metadata collected by the portal. It helps data providers and portals check their metadata, identify issues, and receive improvement suggestions. The results are accessible through the MQA interface and can also be downloaded. It essentially supports better recordkeeping and data management by ensuring metadata is accurate, standardized, and interoperable.

This publication acts as a practical guide connecting radiation science with heritage conservation, highlighting the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in safeguarding cultural legacy. It is designed for radiation technologists, conservators, cultural heritage professionals, irradiation service providers, and newcomers seeking to understand the use of radiation treatments in cultural heritage protection.

This release makes Impresso much more powerful for researchers, not only through its web app, but also programmatically, enabling large-scale data analysis, modelling, and customized research workflows. By substantially expanding the corpus (especially with French and Swiss newspapers), it offers a more representative view of Western European media history. The revamped access system shows a mature approach to rights management, balancing openness with respect to legal constraints.

Cloudian launches a hyperscale AI data platform designed to help enterprises unlock knowledge from massive unstructured datasets using Nvidia AI technologies. Its purpose is to address the challenge of managing and analyzing petabyte-scale unstructured data, such as documents, images, and videos for AI-driven insights.

This guide provides a step-by-step introduction to researching the provenance of objects from colonial contexts. It helps investigators determine how items entered a collection, whether their acquisition involved involuntary loss, and whether they may be candidates for return to their countries of origin. The guide outlines key sources, methods, and practical tips to support effective and responsible provenance research.

Azerbaijan’s National Library, in collaboration with its Central Asian counterparts, is spearheading the launch of a shared online platform for rare manuscript collections. This initiative involves a forthcoming memorandum, coordinated planning, and the goal of equitable regional access to cultural treasures.

The Government of Canada has published a new Digital Sovereignty Framework to guide how it builds and controls its technology systems. Digital sovereignty is defined here as the government’s ability to exercise autonomy over its digital infrastructure, data, and intellectual property. This initiative is motivated by growing geopolitical tensions, cybersecurity risks, and dependence on global tech suppliers.

In Cambodia, UNESCO is supporting the PEACE (Peace Education, Archives Preservation and Digitization, and Site Conservation for Youth Empowerment) Project in partnership with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The enhancements enable archival films, videos, and audio to be presented in a respectful and immersive way, turning the memorial site into a more powerful space for reflection, learning, and engagement.

Archives New Zealand conducted its largest-ever survey of audiovisual (AV) holdings, identifying at-risk materials still stored on obsolete formats. The survey aims to catalogue AV materials, assess format risks (VHS, Betacam, reel-to-reel, etc.), and establish long-term digitization priorities. By assessing media formats and their condition, Archives New Zealand can target resources where deterioration and equipment scarcity pose a risk.

Paraguay has launched Proyecto Guaraní–Revista Ysyry, a major cultural preservation initiative to safeguard more than 14,000 poems, songs, and texts in Guaraní, Spanish, and Jopará (a blended language combining Guaraní and Spanish). The project includes a free online library called Oremba’e (“what is ours”), and a printed bilingual anthology titled Che Ñe’ẽ, Che Purahei (“my word, my song”), featuring about 200 selected works.

The project will examine a range of digital record types created by public institutions, including emails, audiovisual materials, websites, social media records, and databases. The goal is to develop a roadmap for preserving the trustworthiness of electronic records with long-term, archival, and evidentiary value. It involves consultation with regulatory bodies and archival experts, and it will pilot applications in public institutions to test the criteria for trustworthiness.

The article highlights an oral history project led by Susana Geliga, which records the stories of descendants of students from the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, a federal boarding school in Nebraska. While government records—such as census logs, disciplinary reports, and letters—document some aspects of school life, they don’t capture the personal experiences of the students themselves.

Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Project has released the first fully keyword-searchable online archive, featuring over 750,000 pages of documents from the Nazi war tribunals. Launched in 1998 with 730 boxes of trial material, the project has now digitized 100% of the collection.

The Government of Canada has adopted a “cloud-first” approach for IT projects, prioritizing public cloud solutions first, followed by hybrid cloud, private cloud, and, lastly, non-cloud options. This is supported by updates to the Treasury Board’s Policy on Management of IT, which explicitly reflect this priority.

This study focuses on archive workers’ information behaviour and curation practices in digital cultural heritage archives, viewed through a post-colonial lens. It calls for more research on archive workers (including archivists as users), and investigates how their information needs, expert knowledge, and post-colonial domain knowledge shape searching and curation.

The article discusses the report which stresses that identifiers (persistent, standardized ones) are more critical than ever in the age of AI. Such identifiers help track and manage rights, authorship, and usage across different digital and AI-powered systems. They ensure that metadata remains reliable and machine readable, which is essential for legal clarity and proper licensing in automated systems.

In recent years, a significant portion of these collections, notably the archives of the League of Nations, has been digitized and made freely accessible online through a dedicated platform. Concerned with maintaining the long-standing connection with their audience, the United Nations Archives in Geneva have implemented a range of digital tools. This session presents these tools, explores their impact, and assesses their ongoing relevance.

The research report is organized around three main themes: collections and archives, digital and data, conservation and heritage science. It highlights partnerships and technological innovations, including work on handwriting recognition, optical character recognition, and AI-driven tools aimed at making records more usable and searchable.

The paper is a literature review about the “convergence” of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). Convergence describes the growing alignment of these institutions’ functions, practices, and goals to address shared challenges and meet broader societal needs. The authors argue that stronger collaboration among LAMs could transform not only operational practices but also how institutions envision their future roles and contributions to society.

To protect trust, simple and neutral practices are proposed, based on the principles of Accuracy, Disclosure, Privacy, Education, and Compliance. These practices ensure that users can easily identify modifications while retaining access to the original image. They also enable responsible sharing of AI-enhanced images without overstating their evidentiary value.

India has a deeply rich manuscript tradition spanning centuries, but much of it is fragmented, physically fragile, and hard to access. The author argues that access to these manuscripts is not just about preservation—it's a moral duty. Manuscripts are part of public reason and knowledge production. The article highlights fragmentology: a discipline that brings together paleography, codicology, art history, and other fields to reconstruct the histories of manuscript fragments.

This five-year Digital Preservation Strategy (2025–2030) for the Library at Queen’s University Belfast sets out the principles and goals needed to establish strong, sustainable digital preservation practices. It provides a foundation for protecting the authenticity, integrity, and security of digital collections, ensuring their long-term accessibility for research, teaching, and learning.

Le Soleil is digitizing over 55 years of its newspaper archives to make the documentary heritage accessible to all Senegalese, including researchers, students, and citizens. The Chief UNESCO Archivist emphasized that the archives are more than printed articles—that they “tell the life of our people”—and stressed the importance of careful organization, data security, and ongoing updates to keep pace with technological developments.

For public-sector agencies, centralized document repositories supported by strong records management provide a powerful means of modernizing operations. They help ensure legal compliance, improve access to historical and administrative records, and build public trust through greater transparency. A key element of effective records management is clear retention schedules that classify records as either temporary or permanent.

The text argues that cultural heritage studies have not adequately accounted for the role of often prioritizing material authenticity over the creative ways texts are transmitted and reused. Textual Heritage addresses this gap by examining the afterlives of written artefacts, especially in East Asia, to show how textual practices illuminate processes of canon formation, embodiment, and circulation. Through diverse case studies, the volume proposes a framework of “humanistic heritage studies” that integrates literary and heritage approaches to better understand how culture is preserved and reshaped.

The book explores how AI can be used to translate and create literature. It uses Vladimir Nabokov’s highly self-aware (“hyper-conscious”) literary style as a touchstone. Preface: Seligman reflects on the rise of AI, widely situating it as a major technological shift, and also shares his personal journey with AI.

A practical guide covering the French “série R”: the departmental archives for military affairs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Designed for genealogists, historians, and general readers, it highlights how much more there is than just digitized military conscription records.

This textbook provides a comprehensive and practical introduction to exhibition design and curatorial practice. Organized in a clear, accessible format, it combines theoretical foundations with applied learning through case studies, exercises, and visual aids. The book explores essential themes such as the history of collecting, audience engagement, accessibility, and the integration of digital media and emerging technologies.

The book explores how performance studies can deepen our understanding of both archival practices and performance itself. Spanning 422 pages, the volume brings together essays, theorists, and creative practices ranging from contemporary art and theatre to Brazilian-African dance, Afro-Colombian performance, and pedagogical workshops. Together, these contributions examine the tension between the permanence and authenticity of the archive versus the ephemeral, fragile nature of performance.