Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Oct 16/00) - Digital technology is going to make Paul Suvega's life much, much easier.

On Wednesday, Oct.18, when the Legislative Assembly goes into session, instead of running up the road to the legislature to collect audio tapes to produce Hansard -- the official daily record of the legislature's sessions -- Suvega will simply tap into phone lines to receive the sound bytes digitally. His eyes actually lit up as he talked about the new system.

"We're utilizing phone lines from the Legislative Assembly to here. We receive five minute chunks of audio files," said Suvega, the manager and part owner of Innirvik, the Iqaluit-based firm that holds the contract to produce Hansard.

As the files come in, Suvega said he assigns them to a transcriber who immediately types the information into the record. The process continues throughout the day, making it a much faster, more efficient system.

Suvega said perhaps one of the biggest benefits to be realized with the new technology was the identifying tag that appeared with each speaker.

"It's going to have annotation, a label of the person speaking on the audio file. As we're typing it up and listening to it, there will be a little line that says it's Minister Thompson speaking or Premier Okalik speaking," said Suvega.

"That will cut down on search time," he said, a perk that has his staff of anywhere from five to 30 people grinning. "We used to have to rewind or fast forward it. It was quite cumbersome."

Once the activities of the house wrapped up for the day, Suvega said the document was given to translators to produce an Inuktitut version and the "blues" - the first draft of Hansard - by 8 a.m. the next day.

"It goes to the members to make sure that what they have said (is accurate). They'll look for the spelling of names, the issues they spoke on, whether it was the right topic, the right motion number and so on."

While the hours are extremely long, particularly during the annual gruelling budget debate, Suvega said he loves the work and finds it thrilling and important.

"When we first started, there were weeks when we literally spent three days in here around the clock.

"We would actually only go home for three to fours hours in three days, altogether," he said.

"You get into sort of a groove, you can go on for days."