Briefing Note for SLTA
Equitable Access to Digital Content & Services
More than five years ago, Saskatchewan’s public libraries banded together to unify access to public
library physical collections for all residents of the province. While the province-wide public library
system had been in place for decades, the work of Saskatchewan’s public library systems and the
Province of Saskatchewan to form the Saskatchewan Information & Library Services (SILS) Consortium
has literally made the province’s public library collections available to everyone at the click of a button.
In the ensuing years, the SILS Consortium has enhanced services, broadened access, and is on the cusp
of a strategic software migration to create an online environment that is even more open to service
enhancement and integration.
Saskatchewan’s public library system, and now, its digital public library are nationally recognized as a
leading public library service. The transition to online content and service access has been a tremendous
success in terms of user access to physical collections and integration of many of the databases available
through the Multitype Database Licensing initiative into the library catalogue for direct patron access.
There remains, however, a digital gap that has been growing since the province-wide SILS catalogue
went live. Unlike most physical collections in public libraries, access to digital content and services varies
greatly depending upon where an individual Saskatchewanian lives. Physical collections are purchased
and can then travel freely throughout the province while digital collections are contractually licensed for
a particular geographic area. The highly variable financial capacities of Saskatchewan’s public library
systems, the members of the SILS Consortium, prevent the purchase of province-wide licenses and are
an obstacle to developing or enhancing province-wide services. As a result, some digital collections and
services are only available to residents of our largest cities. At the same time, the digital environment is
in many ways an ideal mechanism to narrow the gap and provide equitable access to digital content and
services for all Saskatchewan residents.
Following principles for equitable access to digital content, Saskatchewan public libraries strive to
ensure that there is a foundation of digital collections available to all residents. This approach leverages
the government’s investment into making Saskatchewan a very connected province that can ensure
efficient access to and delivery of content. Equitable access to digital services speaks to the challenge of
providing these services through ten different public library systems, potentially with ten different
staffs, when, in fact, the very nature of digital service provision should allow development of online
services once so that it can be used by everyone in the province. An example of this approach is the
founding of the SILS Consortium itself – the public library systems and the province created a single
digital services provider.
For Saskatchewan public libraries, the main obstacles are resources – financial and human. While,
fundamentally, these two resources are both financial, they are noted separately because they
represent effectiveness and efficiency in pursuit of equitable access. To succeed in providing a
foundation of digital public library content for all residents, financial resources are needed to
supplement the already strained collections budgets of Saskatchewan public libraries – all set at a time
when they supported physical collections almost exclusively. Effectively meeting the needs of digital
collections requires an investment in long-term collection development. Achieving equitable access
efficiently requires the financial resources to acquire the technology and the human resources to
develop and maintain the digital services that are provincial in scope and use. By developing systems
and services once on the provincial scale rather than many times, or not at all, on the local scale is
consistent with the resource sharing principles embraced by Saskatchewan libraries, and embodied in
their legislation.
The SILS Consortium, working on behalf of all public libraries in the province, has created the service
delivery hub through the single integrated library system. Public libraries are ready to use that hub to
meet user needs, no matter where they are in the province, through:
 Apps and responsive design for mobile devices;
 Customer empowerment through online self-service;
 Personalized services that can adapt to user preferences;
 Integrated social media to connect communities;
 Partnerships that will add Saskatchewan content; and
 Collections of books, videos, audiobooks, and music for download or streaming.
Equitable access to Digital Content and Services is a goal of Saskatchewan libraries. The challenge is to
adequately fund the program to facilitate aggressive development of new services. If steps are not taken
to deal with the issue of regional disparity, there is a real danger that unequal levels of service among
Saskatchewan libraries will occur. Since one of the goals of SILS is to provide equal levels of service, we
would respectfully request the Government of Saskatchewan work toward equalizing access to digital
content and services.