2005 APLNB/ABPNB Recognition Award

CANADIAN GOVERNMENT INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET (CGII) Project

Sometimes the right idea comes along at precisely the right time. This is what happened in 1993 when Anita Cannon, then a Reference Librarian at York University, along with many New Brunswick librarians half a country away, began to realize that the Canadian government had started developing websites with no cogent plan for standardizing them, organizing them, or informing the public about them. Basically, librarians woke up to the reality that the web was a growing organism with no hierarchies, no logical approaches, and essentially no real thought processes for efficiently delivering vast amounts of information to their users, whether in public, special, school or academic libraries. Yet, until that time, nobody had taken a first step to make such information readily retrievable and accessible.

Thus it was that in 1994, Anita envisioned and designed the CANADIAN GOVERNMENT INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET (CGII) to help not only her own clients at York, and later at Sir Wilfred Laurier University, find government information, but also to help librarians and their clients across the country, including us in New Brunswick.

At first, Anita developed a paper based resource. In 1995, she converted CGII to a web- based tool with the support and help of a colleague, William Oldfield of the University of Waterloo, which also agreed to host it. As the number of sites grew, CGII captured provincial and municipal sites as well as federal ones. That same year, when Anita moved to her current position as Reference Librarian at the Ralph Pickard Bell Library, Mount Allison University, she took the CGII effort with her and, with Mount Allison’s support, continued to meet the challenge of keeping librarians and their clients informed about government websites.

In the mid-1990's, there were virtually none of those precious little “search” boxes on federal websites and few naming conventions for the disparate sites that had popped up willy-nilly. Having the CGII bookmarked in my then-infant version of Netscape gave New Brunswick librarians and their clients a rational window on the world of internet-based government information long before the government took any initiative to organize itself on the net.

In 1996, the Depository Services Program entered into an agreement with Mount A. and Anita to support CGII. The DSP, recognizing the need for an authoritative integrated overview of government websites, agreed to provide CGII a new hosting home, to make it available in both English and French by absorbing the cost of translation, and to provide it with the operational and technical support required to permit CGII to cope with its burgeoning workload.

Together, Anita and the DSP recruited a base of volunteer contributors amongst Canada’s government documents librarians to try and keep pace with the task of identifying and cataloguing an ever rapidly expanding number of government websites. Later, in recognition of the magnitude of the challenge facing CGII’s contributors, the DSP also introduced a fee-based incentive program as a further measure.

In 1998, thanks to intensive lobbying on the part of many federal agencies and non-governmental organizations such as the CLA, the official website of the federal government was established, and site naming conventions and standardized platforms such as .html and .jpg began to be put in place. As search engines became more refined and powerful, these were superimposed on the government home page and various ministry and agency pages as well. All of these improvements helped librarians and the public in New Brunswick and elsewhere gain better, more accurate information about our government. Yet, there was still a need for the excellent work undertaken through the CGII project and it was still being supported by a New Brunswick librarian and a New Brunswick institution, Mount A.

In April 2005, New Brunswick and other librarians received the bad news from Anita that the CGII was not going to be continued and was being taken offline and archived. CGII grew with the government’s web presence, helped make sense out of its chaos, and became an important part of the tools that we as librarians had at hand to assist our users. As Bruno Gnassi, a former head of the DSP (and as a fate would have it, now the University Librarian at Mount Allison) points out, “CGII provided authoritative independent information on the nature and scope of government websites in Canada at a time when few if any were doing this. Anita Canon, and her small band of dedicated partners and corporate supporters, made this possible. Thankfully Anita and her partners were there!”

For the years of hard professional work and decision-making that Anita Cannon devoted to making sense out information chaos, Anita is the recipient of the 2005 APLNB/ABPNB Recognition Award. Because it is not possible under the Terms of Reference to nominate a currently practicing librarian for this award, the award is actually being made to the project itself, and Mount Allison’s Libraries and Archives, as one of its long-time underwriters, for the award. This project was not only highly useful to New Brunswick libraries and librarians on a daily basis but also demanded and embraced a high level of professional competence for which a New Brunswick librarian and institution were largely responsible. They and the project are worthy of this award.