Industry: Government
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) acquires, processes, preserves, and provides access to the documentary heritage of Canada and serves as a key resource to those seeking a greater understanding of the Government of Canada and its institutions. Headquartered in Gatineau, Quebec, with regional offices in western, central, and eastern Canada, the collections of LAC include military history, Indigenous and immigration records, academic theses, and more.
GoAnywhere MFT Solution Updates Security and Boosts Efficiency
Requirements from various branches of LAC identified a need for a robust and secure way to transfer the many digital publications it continuously adds to its collections as part of a larger Digital Asset Management System (DAMS). “We used an integrator firm, TeraMach, to work with and coordinate our solution providers for an end-to-end approach, selecting GoAnywhere for its wide feature set,” said Kyle Browness, Senior Project Officer in Digital Services at LAC.
The IT team at LAC considered a number of MFT solutions but ultimately selected GoAnywhere for its proven ability with other institutions to support process automation, security, and ease of use for its users.
Prior to implementing GoAnywhere’s MFT, LAC used a solution that dated back to the mid-1990s. “This no longer met our current requirements for security and efficiency,” noted Browness. With the earlier method, files were received via a basic transfer protocol and were stored on a file server. Then staff members had to manually enter information about the transfer into their descriptive systems. Besides being a tedious process for staff, it was also unreliable in terms of availability. LAC can now take advantage of GoAnywhere’s flexibility when transferring files using the solution’s Web forms and SFTP client.
Built-in Security Features Address Current and Future Needs
GoAnywhere addresses today’s security requirements for LAC, as well as its future plans for digital transfers. LAC appreciates GoAnywhere’s security features like secure Web forms, secure FTP, and a Gateway proxy which keeps sensitive files in the private network from being exposed. “GoAnywhere is a good fit for our needs given the security measures already built into the solution. We integrated it effectively with our other software for firewall protection and traffic management which provides us with additional layers of security,” said Browness. LAC also leverages additional modules like Secure Forms and Secure Folders.
While LAC has been using GoAnywhere with unclassified digital publications since 2019, it will soon expand this usage to Federal Government records in alignment with Canada’s ITSG-33 Protected B, Medium Availability, Medium Integrity (PBMM) cybersecurity standards. And, while LAC does not currently use the AS2 transfer capability, Browness noted that they may do so in the future, in particular for transfers from larger organizations.
Process Time Reduced by 90 Percent and Canadian Users Get Faster Access
“In acquiring digital publications using GoAnywhere’s transfer tools and making them available to the public using GoAnywhere as an integration tool for data exchange, we have reduced process time by 90 percent over past methods,” said Browness. “This means that Library and Archives Canada can acquire more digital publications more quickly and improve access for Canadians with less staff effort.”
Efficiency and production results such as these have LAC looking to apply GoAnywhere to more of their internal processes.
Ease of Use Delivers Rapid Adoption
LAC quickly shared GoAnywhere with staff and more than 80 external users to make sure they knew how to use it and enjoyed the experience. As part of this work, LAC rapidly developed online forms for clients based on simple development workflows (Advanced Workflows). Today, a team of approximately five use the software for processing.
Use Case: Theses Procurement and Usage
GoAnywhere’s Advanced Workflows are in place for electronic theses, simplifying what was once a labor- intensive process. The workflow LAC built with GoAnywhere reads a simple spreadsheet to connect to a given university’s repository. Then, once the connection is established, the workflow retrieves metadata for all newly added theses; reads and transforms the metadata; retrieves the associated files described in the metadata; and creates a package.
The transfer package is copied to LAC’s Preservica environment for further processing, preservation, and public access via LAC’s descriptive catalogue. “GoAnywhere allows the data to seamlessly flow between Preservica and our public-facing tools by transforming the associated descriptions of the data (metadata) from one schema to another based on the needs of our staff,” added Browness.
Flexibility of GoAnywhere a Plus
Browness notes, “We have been very satisfied with the professional service provided by HelpSystems for the GoAnywhere product. We find the software easy to learn and intuitive for workflow development and would recommend it to other institutions that have similar needs.” Browness adds, “The flexibility of the software to interact with a wide variety of data inputs is one of the software’s greatest strengths. Given the large variety of digital acquisitions that LAC takes on each year, GoAnywhere is a good fit for our needs.”
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