# CGI-DPN Collection & Access Policy ## Purpose The mission of the CGI DPN is to preserve digital collections of government information. Digital preservation, for purposes of this policy, means ensuring the long-term viability of digital materials through geographically dispersed servers, protective measures against data loss, and forward format migration. Digital materials produced by government agencies that are at risk of being lost are preserved as part of the program. This network will also be used to act as a backup server in cases where the main server is unavailable. It will also act as a means of restoring lost data. (CGI-DPN Governance Policy, 1.2) ## Scope The CGI DPN’s mission is to preserve and provide access to web-based Canadian government information. The focus of its collecting efforts are regular captures of textual informational outputs of government bodies at the federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal levels of government. The Network is comprised of representatives from institutions across the country. Collecting priorities will reflect our overlapping research interests and government information access needs. The Network may undertake duplicating collecting activities with national partners like Library and Archives Canada if it serves an important community need, e.g. harvesting the Depository Services Program’s E-Collection to ensure independent, non-government stewardship of a nationally significant collection, or to facilitate user access during embargo periods and service outages. ## Collecting Guidelines The collecting priority of the CGI DPN are federal publications hosted by Government of Canada Publications. Other collections may be undertaken with the approval of the CGI DPN Steering Committee. Each new prospective collection will require a short, written proposal which is to be considered and voted on by the Steering Committee. Each proposal should address the following questions: - Alignment with group interests: - is there rationale for national/community interest in the material? - Content types and technical feasibility for capture and access: - Is it predominantly text? Can the content be effectively captured? If not, is web archiving the most appropriate tool? - Data budget and resources: - How many websites will be captured? - What will be the impact on the Archive-It budget? - How many person hours are required to develop the seedlist, run production crawls, troubleshoot, perform quality assurance, and add metadata? - Can the new collection be completed within the constraints of the available data budget? - Duplication/collaborative opportunities - Is anyone else collecting the content, are there any opportunities to collaborate? - Is there a rationale for duplication? - Vulnerability of material – is it not being archived by others or is it subject to removal? ## Collection Policies ### Access CGI-DPN provides public access to its collections through its “Canadian Government Information PLN Web Archive” Archive-It Partner page (https://archive-it.org/organizations/700). Archived web content is integrated with and additionally discoverable via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). We will endeavor to surface our collection through other methods (integration with library discovery layers and open access repositories). New seeds and new collections may be marked private and not made available to the public until preliminary crawling and quality assurance are complete, but the ultimate goal is to provide public access to all content in each collection. ### Copyright Copyright protected material is owned by the government/department/agency that created the information. Wherever possible, CGI DPN will add metadata (rights statement) identifying the rights holder for the material in each collection. CGI DPN preserves and provides access to archived web content under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act. Transmission or reproduction of protected items by subsequent users beyond what is allowed by an exception or specific agreement requires the permission of the copyright owners. Users are responsible for securing necessary permissions from the copyright owners. ### Notification CGI-DPN conducts web archiving activities on an opt-out basis. CGI DPN will not routinely notify site owners that their sites are being archived, however, site owners may request to opt out of CGI DPN’s collecting activities using the Takedown Request form. Where this is not possible due to provincial or territorial laws or publishing practices, CGI-DPN conducts web archiving activities on an opt-out basis. In such scenarios, CGI-DPN notifies site owners of its intention to include their site in the collection, and gives them the option to respond to CGI DPN if they wish to opt out of the collection. ### Takedown Requests The CGI-DPN works to preserve digital online content produced by governments in Canada. For a variety of reasons, both financial and structural, many governments in Canada have not taken steps to ensure long-term public access to publicly funded information and documents that they release online. As a library-based organization, the CGI-DPN has a mandate to collect and preserve such information as documentary evidence for future generations of Canadians. Generally speaking, the CGI-DPN does not collect material from government sources that includes personal information or information subject to other intellectual property rights such as patents and trade-marks. While the CGI-DPN is committed to respecting the personal privacy and intellectual property of the subjects of records captured in our web crawls, there may also be situations where governments have inadvertently posted content on their websites that infringes the rights of third-party rights holders. In addition to the above, while the CGI-DPN takes reasonable efforts to collect openly available material from publicly available government sources, there may be rare situations where the content that is collected inadvertently includes material that is not included in an open government license from the jurisdiction that created it. Added to this is the sheer volume and complexity of the government information collected by the CGI-DPN. Combined, all these factors make it a challenge to determine the copyright status of everything in our collection. Accordingly, the CGI-DPN has a “takedown request” process, whereby rights owners may make their complaint known and request the removal of allegedly infringing material. The request protocol applies only to material that the CGI-DPN has made available to the public via the internet through public access systems that are under the control of the CGI-DPN. The protocol does not apply to materials collected by the CGI-DPN that are not publicly available on the internet. Takedown requests will be reviewed by the CGI-DPN Steering Committee. This policy shall be reviewed by the CGI-DPN Steering Committee every two years. Version: 1.0 Date Approved: May 2023 Next review: 2025