Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government details how the federal government is promoting transparency and accountability and encouraging citizen engagement by releasing unrestricted government data and information. Releasable information falls under two categories: structured data (machine readable) and open information (unstructured documents and multimedia assets). To make this information easily discoverable and reusable, it will be located on the Open Government website and made available under the unrestricted Open Government Licence. Structured data is made available through the Open Data portal of the website and unstructured information through the Open Information portal.

Library and Archives Canada is in the process of extracting and preserving datasets from outdated storage devices that are related to studies undertaken by federal departments. The studies cover a wide range of topics, such as the environment, health and immigration. The digital content from these studies, acquired since the early 1970s, is being converted from its outdated file structures and encoding schemes so it can be used by contemporary computers that are based on the ASCII encoding scheme.

Once the datasets are migrated, they will be made available on the Open Data portal. Codebooks that describe the file structure of the data and define the variables contained in each field will also be supplied. These migrated datasets will be in the form of raw data. To interpret and analyze the content in each file, you will require specialized software, such as a spreadsheet or a statistical tool. Raw data preserves the integrity of this archival content and will allow you to perform your own interpretation and analysis.

Stay tuned in the coming months for news about dataset releases.