On May 22, the Executive Director will attend, at LAC’s invitation, a day-long program on how they are planning on fulfilling their mandate in these ever changing times.
Documentary heritage institutions face key challenges in the 21st Century. Traditional assumptions and practices that held fast for many years no longer hold true, as the ways that society produces and consumes information are radically shifting. The climate of economic austerity and the demands for relevance and efficiency are changing the way that many documentary heritage institutions operate. The impact of today’s digital environment is destabilizing our understanding of information, and how it is created, shared, and used in society. This situation has prompted an innovative, comprehensive and professional examination at LAC of new approaches to the fulfillment of its mandate: deciding what has value and what to acquire.
LAC has developed a Whole-of-Society model (WoSM), based on social theory, which uses a representative illustration of Canadian society to justify the valuation and the acquisition of information resources. Societal analysis is the foundation of the model. The WoSM is used to document fundamental societal discourses in Canadian society through the agents / structures / networks active in those discourses. Through the WoSM, LAC acquires representative documentary heritage of Canadian society.