1. Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN)

An ACAN is a public notice indicating to the supplier community that a department or agency intends to award a contract for goods, services or construction to a pre-identified supplier, thereby allowing other suppliers to signal their interest in bidding, by submitting a statement of capabilities. If no supplier submits a statement of capabilities that meets the requirements set out in the ACAN, on or before the closing date stated in the ACAN, the contracting officer may then proceed with the award to the pre-identified supplier.

2. Definition of the requirement

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is mandated under the Library and Archives of Canada Act to preserve and make available the documentary heritage of Canada and to serve as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada.

Web resources are recognized internationally as an important facet of modern digital documentary heritage. Owing to the precarious availability of web-based resources, managed action is required to select, acquire, digitally-preserve, index, and provide access and discovery services to web resources that constitute Canadian digital documentary heritage.

LAC has conducted web archiving operations since December 2005 to collect key web resources of interest to Canadians for posterity and as primary source for future historical research. Web archiving has appeared in the institution’s Departmental Report for many years now, and is currently conducted as a daily digital preservation activity within the Preservation Branch.

LAC has related contracts with the proposed vendor (Internet Archive) for the collection of web archival data from the Internet (13 terabytes per fiscal for the last five years, herein after the “Archive-IT” acquisition service”), which at the time of writing exceeds 100+ terabytes of data and is also mirrored on the vendor's premises. It also has service contracts for the web archival snapshot management and indexing of master preservation copies, which enables their access over time (hereinafter the “Wayback service”).

A public-facing access portal (hereinafter "the Portal") is required to fulfill LAC's mandate requirement of providing discovery, access, and search functionalities to the public for this 100+ tera of data that LAC has collected under the separate Archive-IT contract.

LAC does not possess the internal technical expertise to develop, create, administrate, conduct data management, develop, manage or respond to service requests for a Web and Social Media Preservation Program public discovery and access portal. Thus the requirement is being outsourced, which is supported by Cloud intiatives and the TBS Directive on Service and Digital.

Historically, the Government of Canada Web Archive access portal and its supporting services including the Wayback Machine snapshop management software has supported Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) and the Open Government Initiative (OG) and is a mechanism of federal-level transparency in providing public and government access to web resources that have been otherwise removed from the the federal web presence under the TBS Web Renewal Initiative (WRI). As the preservation master and access mechanism of last resort to historical web resources in and of the Government of Canada, LAC requires these Cloud services to meet its federal obligations and fulfill its preservation and access mandate by making the web archival copies available and searchable to the Canadian public and the departments of the Government of Canada.

3. Criteria for assessment of the Statement of Capabilities (Minimum Essential Requirements)

Any interested supplier must demonstrate by way of a statement of capabilities that it meets the following requirements:

1) The bidder must have 12 or more years of experience in providing these services.

2) The bidder must demonstrate that the following features can be provided:

Web Crawling:

• Multiple crawling tools, including browser-based and automation archiving technologies developed and maintained by the Archive-It engineering team;
• Downloadable crawl reports, plus quality assurance and reporting tools;
• Advanced scoping tools to expand and limit types of content archived;
• Test crawling features to evaluate capture and replay quality prior to archiving.

Access:

• Full-text search for all archived text content as well as metadata search;
• Public and private collection tools with public access through both Archive-It and Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine;
• Restricted access features to limit access by IP and private collection sharing ;
• Metadata cataloging at the collection, website, and document level.

Preservation and Technology Development:

• Two (2) copies of archived data stored in perpetuity, even beyond the service agreement, with additional back-up replicas in separate internal repositories;

• Fully web-based curatorial and collection management application with no additional fees for data hosting, software improvements, new releases or the need to install software locally;
• Continued and ongoing technical advancements in indexing, search, and crawling technologies;
• APIs for programmatic access to archived data and collection metadata.

Public Access, Discovery, and Full Text Search Portal (“Government of Canada Web Archive”)

• Service shall create, administrate, develop, manage and respond to service requests to enable comprehensive discovery, search, and access to LAC's web archival collections in the context of its legislated Web and Social Media Preservation Program.
• The service shall enable the presentation of two different interfaces, one for each official language of Canada (English and French). LAC shall supply the French text.
• The service shall provide fast full-text search results scored by a relevancy algorithm. The Portal must provide full-text search for all accessible collections, including date, resource type, and source web archival collection facets.
• This service shall scale to provide discovery access and search for all data LAC collects under the related Archive-IT contract for web archives acquisition (at the time of writing this is 100+ terabytes growing at a rate of 13 terabyptes per fiscal). Storage and bandwidth are not a component of the value of this contract.
• The Portal must be WCAG compliant to AA level; built with GCWeb design and align with LAC discovery, access, and search requirements as demonstrated in supplied wireframes/mock ups and written business requirements.
• The service must include two different major presentation layers/versions in order to facilitate specialized access to federal and non-federal web archival collections. The service must provide a publicly-accessible discovery and access portal that permits browsing and searching of the content LAC collects.
• The Portal must have functionalities to withdraw or enable public access to entire individual resources and/or any and all collections on-demand, at LAC’s discretion (managed by functionalities in the associated contracts and Wayback access and Archive-IT acquisition services, which are a dependency of the Portal).
• The Portal must have functionalities to enable LAC to share collections via the discovery and access portal with limited and specific users that it defines on-demand, while remaining inaccessible to the general public (managed by functionalities in the associated contract and Archive-IT acquisition service, which is a dependency of the Portal).

Support:

• A full curriculum of training videos and user documentation as well as live individual application training for all users and advanced topic trainings;
• Full support team of web archivists and software engineers ready to address issues as they arise;

• Participant in multiple, ongoing efforts, including with a number of Canadian institutions, on infrastructure and tools supporting research use of web archives.

Standards & Community:

• Support for international standards, including the ongoing development of the WARC format, the ISO-standard for web preservation files, and other web data formats and processing frameworks such as ArchiveSpark;
• Co-founder and current Steering Committee member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and member of additional international digital preservation consortia.

4. Applicability of the trade agreement(s) to the procurement

This procurement is subject to the following trade agreement(s)

• Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA)
• Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA)
• Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCoFTA)
• Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement (CHFTA)
• Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement (CKFTA)
• Canada-Panama Free Trade Agreement (CPaFTA)
• Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement (CPFTA)
• World Trade Organization – Agreement on Government Procurement (WTO-AGP)
• Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)
• Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)
• Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement
• Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement

5. Justification for the Pre-Identified Supplier

The proposed supplier has a range of features and technologies that do not seem to exist elsewhere while supporting international standards and non-proprietary systems and export data while avoiding data sovereignty and intellectual property issues. The proposed supplier has unique expertise and experience in web archiving and web preservation in general and providing it as a service in the Canadian context in particular, and no alternate suppliers that meets these requirements have been found in the last three years.

6. Government Contracts Regulations Exception(s)

The following exception(s) to the Government Contracts Regulations is (are) invoked for this procurement under subsection:

6(d) - "only one person is capable of performing the work".

7. Ownership of Intellectual Property

Ownership of any Foreground Intellectual Property arising out of the proposed contract will vest in the Contractor.

8. Period of the proposed contract or delivery date

The proposed contract is for a period of one (1) year, from April 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023 and five (5) one-year option periods.

9. Cost estimate of the proposed contract

The estimated value of the contract, including option periods and optional services(s), is $2,086,800.00 (GST/HST extra). The options include three (3) complete crawls of the Canadian country code top level domain (the Canadian .ca domain, to a maximum total cost of $660,000 CAD) and the ability to commission crawls or purchase crawled data in WARC format from the Internet Archive to a maximum of $600,000 CAD).

10. Name and address of the pre-identified supplier

INTERNET ARCHIVE

300 Funston Avenue

San Francisco, CA

94118-2116

11. Suppliers' right to submit a statement of capabilities

Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the services described in the ACAN may submit a statement of capabilities in writing to the contact person identified in this notice on or before the closing date of this notice. The statement of capabilities must clearly demonstrate how the supplier meets the advertised requirements.

12. Closing date for a submission of a statement of capabilities
The closing date and time for accepting statements of capabilities is Monday March 14, 2022 at 2:00 pm EDT.

13. Inquiries and submission of statements of capabilities

Inquiries and statements of capabilities are to be directed to:

Anne-Marie Aubry

Senior Contracting Officer

550 de la Cité blvd.

Gatineau, Qc

K1A 0N4
Telephone: 613-716-2173
E-mail: [email protected]