Soft pedal on the great digital shift envisaged for years by the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). One hundred days after her eventful and criticized entry into office as CEO of BAnQ, Marie Grégoire refocuses the flagship of Quebec libraries and archives. Faced with the scale of the task, it falls back on prioritizing essential projects and securing financial resources for the digitization of archives. Against the backdrop of the objective of putting the user back at the heart of the “BAnQ experience”. Portrait of a quarter.
“We have talked a lot about digital transformation, now we will try to phrase it through the“ BAnQ experience ”,” explains the ex-politician and ex-businesswoman. “An experience where employees will have a high happiness index doing what they have to do, that is to say a task proportional to what we are able to accomplish. We are not going to spoil each other. “
“With our partners, we will ensure that we have a collaborative, benevolent and open approach”, continues Mr.me Grégoire on the move, “and an experience for our citizens, whether they are online or on site. We are going to think about how people are going to interact with us on the Web. We are in the process of redesigning the portal, to make it simpler, because we know that there are so many things that we end up not knowing what is there and we loses a bit ”.
Find your azimuth
Concretely ? “The priority for 2022: prioritize. Find our azimuth in this digital society. ” But still ? Redo the Internet portal, to facilitate research, and access to both BAnQ and the Grande Bibliothèque. “Teams of archivists are being trained to mediate on the Web. They learn to write differently. “Make the Grande Bibliothèque more welcoming, because” people do not yet feel at their place there, and it is a paradox because we see people of all ages and all socio-economic levels “.
Credits have been claimed from the Quebec government to catch up with BAnQ’s budget, condemned to a deficit in 2025 if it continues its momentum. Requests in three parts: for the costs of systems, and to foresee the increases; for the aging digital infrastructure and obsolete IT infrastructure; and for the digital turn.
What are the precise financial needs, according to the possible scenarios, to effect this digital turning point, named for a decade as major? Despite the insistence of To have to, will come as figures only those of the digitization of archival documents. And these resources are called into question.
“We need the tools to make our digital transformation. The digital cultural plan of Quebec (PCNQ) comes to an end in 2023, for us it is crucial, claims Marie Grégoire. It is all the digitization of our collections that is at stake. We are quite unique: we always have more material coming in. Our level of 4 to 5% of digitized collection is maintained even if we continue to digitize, because of new content coming in all the time. “
Since the creation of this plan, “BAnQ receives $ 1 million annually to digitize its collections,” the institution specified. This amount is in addition to the $ 1.1 million annually from the Quebec Infrastructure Plan. Exceptionally, BAnQ received 1 million additional credits in 2019-2020 in order to digitize funds in high demand ”.
“The archives team is working on being a data optimization model for digital warehousing,” continues M.me Grégoire, because BAnQ, like all government corporations, has a government obligation to move from servers to cloud computing. “Just because we do a good pruning does not mean that it will be cheap. How can we be the most efficient, optimize our way of doing things? We are in the process of evaluating that. How, for digitization, are we going to work better together? In the way of quantifying things, you have to be able to have done a certain amount of work, to know how much more you are going to ask for and how much efficiency gain you will also see. “
Filter, prioritize
“We must also prioritize. Do we need to digitize 100% of BAnQ’s collections? No. What worries us, because the PCNQ is shutting down, and what are we looking at for the future? “The idea of a” digital cathedral “advocated by the ex-CEO Christiane Barbe, or that of the urgency of the predecessor, Jean-Louis Roy, for BAnQ to become” fully an institution “now seems far away. of the third millennium, [pouvant] offer five-star service to Quebecers and contribute to the expansion of the global French-speaking digital space ”.
Among the other established objectives, Marie Grégoire also names “mobilize” and “be a partner of choice with archivist associations and libraries. Sometimes being a wagon, sometimes a locomotive ”.
And add a little touch to the bag given when a toddler is subscribed to a library, as part of the A Birth a Book program, which already contains a gift book, a few bookmarks, advice on how to read to your child. child, book suggestions made by librarians. “Something that will allow all the toddlers in Quebec to be in touch with the culture and learn about it early in life. Learning early in a learning society is really something that is key. The question we ask ourselves is “Are you able to add a BAnQ aspect to this initiative?” To be continued, therefore.