Lori is a Hoosier by birth. She has a B.S. in Finance from Ball State University and an M.L.S. from Indiana University. While at IU, Lori took the Government Documents course taught by Lou Malcomb. One of the things Lou told the class was that people who work with documents tend to become very enthusiastic and feel compelled to "spread the documents gospel." Lori has found this to be true.

After obtaining her M.L.S. in 1987, Lori accepted a position as the State Documents Specialist at the St. Louis Public Library. In 1991, Lori moved to Louisiana and became the Government Documents Department Head at Southeastern Louisiana University's Sims Memorial Library. She continued her involvement with state documents and served many terms as chair of the Louisiana Advisory Council for the State Documents Depository Program. Her curiosity about how other states were handling government publications led her to recruit Lou Malcomb and three other people to co-author a book with her on the topic. Tapping State Government Information Sources was published by Greenwood Press in 2003.

As she nears her 20th year of working with state and federal documents, Lori continues to feel compelled to spread the documents gospel.

I've had a few comments and questions on the Digital Archive, and I'm going to get to them tomorrow on the last day of my guest month in another instalment on that topic. This will be a fairly quick and short post to let you know about a couple of legislative initiatives that, if successful, should greatly increase access to electronic resources in some of the rural areas of New Mexico. It was prompted by Dan's comment to "share the good news" if the whole state was covered by broadband.

Well, we're not there yet, but the Internet to the Hogans Initiative may be one way to get a lot of people there in the near future. State Senator Leonard Tsosie, a member of the Navajo Nation, introduced the bill in the 2006 session of the New Mexico Legislature to "ensure that no New Mexico hogan is left behind in the evolving digital world." The bill would have provided money for Navajo chapter houses to plan for communication corridors, technology education in schools and colleges and other features. The bill died in committee, but there are plans to continue in the next session of the legislature.

Another initiative in 2006 was on the House side of the legislature. Representative Janice E. Arnold-Jones sponsored a bill to create the Rural Library Development Fund. It also died in committee, but Arnold-Jones, an Albuquerque businesswoman who is well versed in the IT and audio-visual production fields, plans to continue her efforts. While the bill focused on materials, equipment and furniture, some of the money could probably go toward improving broadband access.

It's interesting to note, by the way, that interest in library and information technology access comes from both sides of the aisle -- Tsosie is a Democrat; Arnold-Jones a Republican. In the coming months, NMSL will be participating in various ways in these initiatives and watching closely to see where they will go in the upcoming 2007 legislative session.

Library of the 21st Century Symposium

Here you can read transcripts of and listen to presentations made at a symposium on the theme of the Library of the 21st Century, hosted by the State Library of Victoria in Australia.

There are some very interesting ideas floated here. I found particularly interesting the talk by UK-based author and corporate strategist Mr Charles Leadbeater on the topic of Libraries and the Creative Economy. Mr. Leadbeater is the author of a 2003 report on public libraries in the UK, called Overdue: how to create a modern public library service and is a leading authority on innovation and creativity in organizations. He has advised the BBC, Channel 4, Microsoft, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, among others.

Here are some excerpts to entice you:

• ...public libraries, at least in the UK, are institutions that are stuck and librarians as a profession are stuck. Now the good news is that you’re not alone because lots of public professions I think are stuck. I think social workers are stuck, I think teachers are stuck, I think a lot of public service managers are stuck and I think a lot of our public institutions are stuck.
• It’s not about technology.... [Google] is a culture which is incredibly flat, very egalitarian, very nimble, very informal and very entrepreneurial. So you’re not up against the technology, you’re up against that. And what you’ve got to imagine is that public libraries could be as entrepreneurial, creative, open, dynamic and exciting.
• ...libraries of course are, in many ways, of this open, communal world. The atmosphere [in a] library ... is ... open, very diverse, people using tools for their own ends, a common resource but used for very private purposes, a public platform; very peer-to-peer because you’re really using things that other people have used. And so in many ways libraries foreshadow and are part of, should be part of, this world that we’re seeing created except there’s something that seems to stop us getting into it...
• So the library is kind of posed with a foot in both camps. Part of its culture is open, democratic, participative and part, I think, quite closed, inward looking and defensive.... [People] do not just go [to libraries] for the wisdom of librarians.
• Well, how should libraries move forward? Well, I think you see quite a lot of the first ‘reform of the traditional’ model. Let’s create some new services, let’s go digital, put some computers in. Let’s add a cafes because people like that.... I think that can do a bit to stem decline but I’m not sure that it’s the kind of re-modeling, re-thinking that’s really required.
• So I think that you need some new models for public services which are radical and different.... And those models should enact very basic library principles about democratic rights to information, knowledge, sharing, common resources for private uses. But it’s going to require very, very different organisational models.
• I think that you would have to see the people who use your services not as users or consumers but as co-producers and co-designers, that it’s not a service you’re delivering to them. You’re giving them tools and a platform in which they can create things themselves.
• ...all of the evidence of Wikipedia, Linux, and even of MySpace, is that actually people like collaboration, participation, sharing knowledge, common platforms, ease of access: all the values that libraries stand for they like. And they like getting more of it through this technology and our task is to try and create a public culture which is as dynamic and open as these private cultures are being and exploiting it and applying it and using it with people to create new value.
• ..if we’re going to create a more integrated, genuinely equal society, actually access to knowledge becomes critical. And if we give up in the developed world on public platforms for knowledge embedded in libraries, if we let them wither, that idea will wither globally as well.

The Communications Workers of America have a new and very informative web site called Speed Matters where they advocate a "comprehensive national high speed broadband policy to ensure that we all benefit from the telecommunications and information revolution."

One of the areas they highlight is government:

Governments increasingly rely on the internet as the means to provide information and forms for taxes, government programs, eligibility criteria, and other uses.

People without access to such information are, in effect, penalized. Enrollment in the Medicare Part D drug plan, for example, relied on web-based communications.

High speed interactive broadband should allow citizens to increase and improve their ability to participate in civic life.

The challenge they identify is that "The United States has failed to bring the benefits of this telecommunications revolution to most of our population. While more households are adopting broadband, our relative position in the world is worsening."

They note that there is very much still a digital divide:

There is an income digital divide: more than 62% of households with incomes over $100,000 subscribe to high speed broadband at home while just 11% of households with incomes below $30,000 subscribe.

There is a rural/urban digital divide: only 17% of adults in rural areas subscribe to broadband compared to 31% in urban and 30% in suburban areas.

And there is a farm/non-farm divide: only 15.8% of farm households have adopted broadband.

They further note that the FCC definition of "high speed" is tool slow and that "what Americans have come to expect from 'high speed Internet' is far slower than connections in other countries around the world." A typical DSL line has a speed of 200 kilobits per second (Kbps) (the FCC definition of high speed). Compare that to the fact that other countries have already established goals of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

The site has lots of information, a document library, five key principles for improving the US's place in the high-speed Internet economy (U.S. is now 16th), a a blog, a speed test so you can find out how fast your own upload and download speeds are, and more.

Thanks to Washington State Regional librarian Herrick Heitmann for providing this summary of the recent Depository Library Council discussion on digital distribution to depository libraries.

The discussion was facilitated by Ted Priebe, Director of Library Planning and Development at GPO. A handout (see attached) gave a brief background of the issue, listed general assumptions underlying the topic, and posed questions for the Depository Library Council and the audience to consider.

The Council and audience response to the first question (access) was “yes” to all three parts. The value of local digital copies was usually discussed in terms of preservation through “significant redundancy” (Judy Russell’s phrase). (Along with depository libraries, the National Archives and non-government organizations are seen as preservation partners.) Although it was said that FDSys is designed to deliver content in the requestor’s preferred format, the first choice in formats seems be electronic.

The second question was about sufficient local infrastructure for hosting electronic documents and supporting public access to them. People want guidelines to show to their Information Technology folk. The FDSys group is working on “system size” demands for local hosting/storing files. The guidelines might have to vary depending on how much digital content a depository will be hosting—the example given was crashing your local system while trying to deliver a large file with streaming video. It was also felt that guidelines should include naming conventions and file formats.

The third question had to do with the responsibility Regionals would have to accept digital documents. The question whether Regionals should have to accept and locally maintain all digital publications from GPO was greeted with laughter and eye rolling. That’s the sort of unfunded—or, at best, underfunded—mandate that could drive libraries out of Regional status. Also, while LOCKSS is seen as a good thing, the need for over 50 mirror sites to the GPO servers was questioned.

The fourth question was about the distribution of metadata. Depositories want it. The part of the question about what types of metadata depositories want showed me how little I know about the different flavors of metadata. It’s time for Metadata 101.

The fifth question was about selectivity or, more precisely, format options. When should a selective/regional select only the digital version. For selectives, whenever they want. For Regionals, it’s a trickier question, especially until the long talked about dark and light archives are up and running. After all, the LOCKSS model can be applied to tangible documents too.

The sixth question was on version issues and synchronization, especially what to do about superceded versions. The feedback was that libraries need to provide appropriate versions and sometimes a superceded version is the appropriate one, but the user needs to know it is outdated. Earlier the matter of the FDSys having an automatic update feature was brought up. This was seen as a policy question, not a how-to question. “Significant version control” is being built into FDSys.

The final question dealt with ownership. Are digital documents still property of the U.S. Government? Well, yes. They’re much harder to control than tangible documents and usually in the public domain, but they’re still government property. What about recall of digital documents? Procedures for recalling documents are in place at the GPO level, and Judy Russell has told agencies that once something is issued digitally, it’s virtually impossible to expunge it from cyberspace. On the other hand, you have to consider the interagency relationship between GPO and the agency that issued the document. People were uncomfortable with GPO being able to send out automated “delete” commands.

The 5 year retention rule was also brought up. Judy Russell explained that rule has its roots in the cost of printing and shipping tangible documents. GPO didn’t want to pay for items that somebody could toss the day after they received it. There is also a service aspect to retaining items—the commitment to making government information readily available.

If you have summaries, notes or impressions of any activities of the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council, we'd love to post them! Please send your DLC items to admin at freegovinfo dot info and we'll post them.

Amnesty International is launching a campaign to oppose censorship on the internet:

• Irrepressible

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

The Irrepressible site has a pledge on internet freedom that you can sign online. You can also get a snippet of code that will "publish irrepressible fragments of censored material" on your own blog or other web site:

• Add irrepressible content to your site

(While our usual focus here at FGI is on U.S. government information, we are interested in issue of freedom on information world-wide.)

One of these is really new, the other an attempt to revive some of what was once the backbone of travel in the U.S. Both of them have generated some interesting public reactions and both deserve to be closely watched to see how their success or failure might affect their respective industries.

I'll talk about the newest one first, and then later point you to a fun download for the other.

New Mexico's new spaceport is now in operation in the arid plains about 25 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences (the official site is Upham, but neither Google Maps nor the Census Gazetteer search engine can find that). The inaugural launch on September 26 was less than inspiring, as the 20-foot Spaceloft XL rocket from UP Aerospace only reached about 42,000 feet (far short of its intended 70 miles) before corkscrewing off course and crashing in the southern NM desert.

The state has embarked on a highly visible partnership with multi-billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic will be the anchor tenant of the spaceport. Branson hopes to launch paying customers from the spaceport into suborbital rocket rides at $200,000 per person. In addition, plenty of people in the state are hoping that lots of additional high-tech tenants follow Branson and make southern NM a hub of future aerospace development. Will it be an economic booster or a boondoggle? It seems like a risky bet in times of tight hydrocarbon fuel supplies, but time will tell.

Dan's comment on my last posting referenced a study on Alaskan railroads, which brings me to the other new transportation project, which is more down-to-earth and an attempt to help save some of those fossil hydrocarbons. New Mexico's Rail Runner Express launched this past summer with service from downtown Albuquerque north to suburban Bernalillo in Sandoval County. Some delay with rails and other material deliveries has postponed service south to Belen for now. The state hopes to bring the Rail Runner to Santa Fe by 2008. But while folks seem fine with the idea of the spaceport, the public reception to passenger rail has been mixed.

The problem: a quirk of history led to the main line of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railroad (of Harvey Girls fame) bypassing the actual city of Santa Fe and going a few miles to the east (it's since merged with the Burlington Northern to form the BNSF) A later spur line built to downtown Santa Fe is inefficient as it adds quite a few miles to the Albuquerque-Santa Fe trip, so the state wants to build brand-new track branching from the main line south of the city into Santa Fe. Several alternative routes have been proposed and public comments are being gathered. This makes many homeowners anxious. They seem to fear noise, pollution and the idea that the terrible vibrations of a passing train will undermine their homes. Personally, I would love having a train into town to pass within shouting distance of my door, but that's just me.

Oh yeah, now for the fun -- you can download a nifty Rail Runner screensaver from the New Mexico Dept. of Transportation website. It comes in two versions: with our without soundtrack. The latter has guitar music in a soft, easy-listening beat (it may become sort of repetitious after a while, but would be good to nap to) and occasional clanky-clattery rail-crossing noises. They also put out a cool refrigerator magnet, but I'm afraid I can't send you one of those over the web!

Tech-ade blog (Federal Trade Commission)

Welcome to the Tech-ade blog, your gateway to continuous coverage of all aspects of the Federal Trade Commission’s upcoming hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade. This blog will explore new technologies and their impact on products and business practices, with emphasis on the implications such developments will have for the consumer over the next ten years.

A story about the blog:

FTC creates blog to chronicle series on Internet tools by Aliya Sternstein.
FCW (Oct. 25, 2006)

Google seeks better access to government information By Daniel Pulliam, GovExec (October 25, 2006).

As much as 40 percent of the content on agency Web sites is invisible to Google's crawlers, [J.L.] Needham [a strategic partner development manager at Google] said, which means that for a majority of Internet users who do not know how to look beyond a search engine site, that information is effectively invisible.

Needham said he is meeting with a variety of undisclosed agencies to discuss how the information housed in their databases can be made available in the search results from engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. One method would be to use Google Sitemaps..

Perhaps of even greater interest is this:

A Dec. 16, 2005, memorandum from Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, states that all agencies must set up their public information so that it is searchable by Sept. 1, 2006. It states that "increasingly sophisticated Internet search functions" can "greatly assist agencies in this area."

Agencies also were required to provide all public data in an open format that allows the public to aggregate "or otherwise manipulate and analyze the data to meet their needs" by Dec. 31, 2005, according to a separate OMB memorandum signed by Johnson on Dec. 17, 2004.

With thousands of documents issuing forth from Congress and its committees every year, it's impossible to keep up with them all. And besides the "official" hearings and reports, there's a whole category of Congressional information that doesn't make it into the FDLP or other distribution channels run by GPO.

I'm talking about hearings held outside the official committee structure of Congress and reports researched and compiled by committee staffs (usually of a single party) and published mostly on a member's personal website or one established and maintained with party, not government, funds.

There have been a great many of these popping up lately, largely because of the current situation of bitter partisanship in Congress. The Republican House and Senate leaders haven't wanted to hold oversight hearings or conduct investigations into activities of the Bush administration and have aggressively opposed any requests from Democrats to do so. Since the committee chairmen are all from the majority party, they and ultimately the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader get to decide who can hold what meetings in which rooms and when, if ever, they can hold them. As a result, any members who want to look into things have to take extraordinary measures to conduct hearings and investigations.

One of the most well-known of these so far is Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio / Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. It generated enough interest that a paperback version, with an introduction by Gore Vidal, was published by Academy Chicago (even so, OCLC shows only 139 holdings). This attempt to bring to light problems with the 2004 election in Ohio was due to the efforts of John Conyers, the ranking member of the committee (Conyers also publishes similar material on his personal campaign site). He was denied all requests for meeting space until he finally got the use of a tiny basement room that could barely accommodate all the Democratic members of the committee who wanted to participate, let alone witnesses and spectators (the Republicans boycotted the proceedings). Some more recent efforts have come from the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. It has held a number of hearings, several of them on the situation in Iraq, and posted transcripts and videos to the website.

From the beginning of our OCLC Digital Archive, NMSL has been capturing some of these documents for long-term preservation. One early one from 2004 was Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq - al Qaeda Relationship. This report simply has Senator Carl Levin, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as the author, with a note in the preface explaining that the research and compilation was carried out by the Committee's minority staff. It was posted as a PDF on his Senate web page and, as of this writing, is still there. Of course, it can also be found in the Digital Archive.

So are these government publications or not? For my money, they are -- the elected representatives and their staff people are doing their work on the public payroll and using government resources (among others) to gather information. Even if they aren't "official," they're still worth capturing and preserving, in case some of the websites go dark or the content is taken down later.

The quasi-official nature of these resources does raise some issues with copyright and may affect our putting some of them in the Digital Archive. For example, some of the hearings of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee have transcripts with a copyright statement from the Federal News Service, a commercial publisher of Congressional transcripts. These will not be harvested for the Digital Archive. We have yet to address some of these copyright issues in depth.

When Standards Are Political -- ODF (the Open Document Format) by James Love (October 21, 2006), Huffington Post.

James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, writes about open word-processing formats, why they are important for open exchange of information, interoperability, re-usability, preservability, and more. This article does an excellent job of explaining why this technical issue is an important policy issue. He compares and contrasts Microsoft's "Open XML" with the truly open Open Document Format (ODF).

A nice article on how free government information, unencumbered by Digital Rights Management technologies, and designed for use and re-use in the Web 2.0 environment can "re-democratize our democracy."

• Saving Democracy With Web 2.0 by Jennifer Granick, Wired News
  (October 25, 2006).

See our remix page for more examples.

As much as we'd like to think that information policies are free from politics, it just isn't true. It is not often that the press deals with how politics affects information policy, but it is increasingly easy for the press to deal with the issue when it comes to issues of technology. And so we have an article in this week's Government Computer News:

• Election could affect IT programs -- New leadership could alter Congress’ focus on data, health privacy and security By Mary Mosquera, Government Computer News (10/23/06 issue)

Karrie Peterson and I wrote about this in some detail:

• The Technical is Political by James A. Jacobs and Karrie Peterson, Of Significance... 3(1) 2001, p.25-35. Association of Public Data Users. (Full text PDF file)

In the realm of government information, technical decisions about data format, access software and public distribution methods are inherently political decisions. They affect what kind of data can be accessed, how, by whom, and for how long into the future it will be available. To evaluate and respond appropriately to policy changes by government producers of data, technical issues must also be looked at in the light of social values shared by the data-using community.

How does a newly decked-out data product fare with regard to open access? Privacy of individuals? Documentation that allows the data to be correctly cited, tested for reliability, re-used in the future? Social and political concerns also come into play when the flexibility offered by distributing raw data is balanced against locking the data into a "user-friendly" software, and when products traditionally produced by the federal government are privatized.

As private industry pushes harder for information to become a commodity - something that can be sold for profit - it is important for data users to push back with a strong philosophy of information as a social good, and to evaluate data products and access in light of their value to society, rather than on strictly narrow technical grounds.

Former FCC Chairman William Kennard published an opinion piece in the New York Times on Saturday, October 21st.

On the one hand, Kennard rightly points out that there is now a "broadband digital divide" (we have written about the digital divide and govt information before on FGI) and that there needs to be a "full-scale policy debate" about the direction of broadband internet. But then in the very next sentence, he blows off the net neutrality debate as "effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues." It's as if he doesn't even realize that without net neutrality in place, the digital divide chasm will only grow deeper and wider -- and the companies that Kennard works for or sits on the boards of will be the ones with the backhoes!

He DOES disclose that he works for the Carlyle Group, but does not say that he is also on the board of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Hawaiian Telcom and Insight Communications (a cable provider). These companies will benefit directly if the FCC/telco/Kennard triumvarate succeeds in getting Congress to forget Network Neutrality.

Lessig has a good response to Kennard.

On a side note, this is a good example of how to argue with statistics, and also why fact checking and data literacy are such important skills for readers. I still agree with Lessig's basic premise on net neutrality, but notice that he used OECD stats to show that students in the US are not as computer literate as, say Greece, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. His OECD citation was unfortunately from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which probably used data from 2001 -- perhaps a bit out of date. Then a commenter confused the issue even more by pointing to newer OECD data on numbers of broadband subscribers rather than Lessig's original computer usage statistics. Both broadband market penetration to end users and computer literacy per se are kind of beside the point when arguing for net neutrality IMHO, but numbers are like shiny objects to crows.

The numbers that would be really relevant to the net neutrality discussion -- I haven't looked to see if they're available -- would be cost/bit, up/download bit rate comparison and telco profit margins between the US, South Korea, Denmark, Netherlands etc. and then an extrapolation of how much it would cost broadband users for premium rates vs non-premium rates as well as projected telco profit margins in Kennard's unregulated broadband future/present where large swaths of the country will have either no broadband access or monopolistic control over access. Those would be interesting numbers! Profit is one thing, but obscene profit at the expense of user access and future innovation is just that: obscene.

Here is a new "remix" -- public information more easily available from a private source than from the government itself.

• LegiStorm

Storming Media, a private, independent reseller of Pentagon and other US federal government reports on many subjects, is now making available, for free, US congressional staff salaries in an easy to browse web interface. They obtain the data from the official record books: the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House reports.

I've been checking electoral-vote.com fairly regularly for the last 2 weeks. The votemaster (aka Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Holland) tracks electoral votes state by state based on polls from across the political spectrum.

Today, CNET published a story saying that Google plans to release its Google Earth election mashup, a new data layer available on the Google Earth appliance (download Google Earth here). "Google Earth 2006 election resource tool indicates the country's 436 congressional districts with stars on the popular 3D map of the country. Clicking on a star pops open a bubble window that has information on the candidates in that race."

Anyone know of other election tracking sites? Please post them in the comments.

A few months ago, there was much talk about S2530 -- which became Public Law 109-282, the Federal Funding and Accountability Transparency Act of 2006. It was in the news because an anonymous Senator (later revealed to be Senator Ted Stevens of AK) at first blocked its passage (see here and here).

Well now OMBWatch has trumped the Federal govt and announced the creation of a public database called FedSpending.org. The database "allows users to search and aggregate contract and grant information in a number of ways: by individual recipient, by agency, by congressional district and by state, and allows citizens to see exactly where their tax dollars are being spent. There is data going back to FY 2000 so that comparisons over time can be made." There's even a nice tutorial to help users learn how to use the database.

The database is a welcome addition to citizens trying to keep track of federal govt spending and will be a great tool for libraries answering reference questions on govt budgets. Check it out!

How is the Freedom of Information Act doing? It is a key component of government information and essential for that body of information that does not get published and distributed even on agency web sites. Last week, the Department of Justice released the Attorney General's Report to the President on FOIA Administration (October 16, 2006. PDF, 17pp. See also the press release accompanying the report).

Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales

Steven Aftergood points out that the report boasts of "reforms" that "may loom large within the government, but still appear inconsequential from the outside." The report, for example, makes much of using post cards to acknowledge receipt of FOIA requests instead of more formal letters and calls this a "novel idea...an outstanding idea." Such changes, Aftergood notes, are more about efficiency than productivity and "the executive order does little to improve productivity."

• Attorney General Reports on FOIA by Steven Aftergood (October 17, 2006) Secrecy News

The National Security Archive at George Washington University responded to the Attorney General's report with a letter to the Attorney General and a call for congressional oversight hearings to make optimistic FOIA processing goals a reality. It notes that the Attorney General's report is "merely an overview of 91 individual FOIA improvement plans drafted by federal agencies" and that "It fails to acknowledge that many of the admirable goals set by the agencies can only be met with an increased commitment of resources -- which the Executive Order makes clear is not being considered by the Administration."

In separate letters to the two principal congressional committees with oversight responsibility for FOIA the National Security Archive reiterates agencies' lack of basic technology such as copiers and Internet access.

• Attorney General's Report Ignores Serious Problems in Agency FOIA Programs, National Security Archive (October 19, 2006)

For more background on FOIA see Happy 40th anniversary FOIA!! or see the results of a simple search of FGI for our coverage of FOIA.

FGI is more than the blog.

We also have articles of greater length and substance here on the FGI site. Sometimes those show up as blog entries and some are highlighted on the Library page.

Today we feature an article from last year: Government Information in the Digital Era: Free Culture or Controlled Substance?. This is a detailed summary of a paper by Karrie Peterson and James A. Jacobs that we presented at the symposium, Free Culture and the Digital Library, at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia in October of 2005.

Whether you missed it when originally posted or just want a quick overview of some key issues, we recommend it. As always, we welcome your comments. Address them to admin at freegovinfo.info

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release information about who visited Vice President Dick Cheney's office and personal residence...

By law (44 USC 1909), all 1200+ Federal Depository Libraries are required to report on conditions at their library. In 2005, there were a number of questions on how depositories operated and what kinds of services they offered.

Find out how they did in 2005 and earlier years by visited the official biennial survey site. For the compulsively analytical among us, there is a 5.8 MB excel spreadsheet of the raw responses.

It's been a crazy week and I could've used a cup of coffee like this!

Bill Moyers had a recent show on the net at risk. The hr-long video stream is quite well done and gives some very good historical context on the FCC, telecoms and the beginning of the internet. Read David Isenberg's review of Moyers' show. I highly recommend you take the hour to watch this.

Lessig had a couple of good posts this week on 'net neutrality here and here.

And speaking of FCC and 'net neutrality, Ed Felten has a highly readable explanation of the technical issues of net neutrality in the paper entitled, Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality (PDF) (and attached below). Felten knows what he's talking about. He's the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He and his colleagues, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, also recently published a report entitled, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine."

This post, all earlier postings in this series, and my “not a lawyer” disclaimer can be found at http://freegovinfo.info/title44 or through our library under Nonlawyer's Journey through Title 44.

Sec. 1713

TITLE 44--PUBLIC PRINTING AND DOCUMENTS

CHAPTER 17--DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS

Sec. 1713. Documents to be delivered to the Executive Mansion

The Public Printer shall deliver to the Executive Mansion two copies of each document, bill, and resolution as soon as printed and ready for distribution.

(Pub. L. 90-620, Oct. 22, 1968, 82 Stat. 1281.)

Historical and Revision Notes

Based on 44 U.S. Code, 1964 ed., Sec. 80 (Jan. 12, 1895, ch. 23, Sec. 88, 28 Stat. 622).

Executive Mansion is Fedspeak for the White House. I bring this part of Title 44 to your attention to show once again the detailed statutory directions given to the Government Printing Office. I also invite public speculation as why two copies are delivered. One for the President and the other for the Vice-President? Perhaps the President and the First Spouse might want to read the same document in bed and compare notes? I don't have a serious idea myself and I'm not sure whom to ask!

Where does time go? My guest-blogging month is half over and it's been two weeks since my first posting. Staff transition issues here at NMSL have kept us all busy (we will have some interesting positions opening up soon, if anyone is interested), as well as day-to-day work and well, just life. But there's a lot of interesting stuff going on that I will try to do better at posting the rest of the month.

Today, I'm going to start talking about NMSL's Digital Archive Project. It's been going on a while now and is fairly extensive, so I'm going to break the topic up into three or four segments over the next few days. I don't want to get bogged down in the step-by-step details of the process for this blog (if anyone is really interested in that, let me know), but you can get some details on the OCLC website.

Having government publications and other information made available through the Internet is a great innovation. But we all know that one drawback is the problem of preservation of these resources. Websites come and go, are purposely taken down or just die for one reason or another. Even on websites that prevail over a period of time, specific pages may be dropped, either because an agency no longer wants the information to be freely available, or simply because it's old and is replaced by newer information.

About four years ago, the New Mexico State Library (NMSL)had already been looking at this problem and trying to find solutions, particularly in light of its responsibilities in running the New Mexico state publications depository program. Marcia Smith, our state documents coordinator, was especially concerned about how to ensure the continuation and relevance of the state depository program into the electronic age. New Mexico state agencies had been publishing information on their websites for some time, but they were starting to publish born-digital, web-only versions of their annual reports and other publications. The prospect of developing an archiving system from scratch was too daunting and expensive for the staff and resources the library had. With some grant funding for start-up subscription costs and some reallocation of staff time to the project, NMSL purchased the OCLC Digital Archive product and began archiving publications in March of 2003.

As of this posting, NMSL has created 2642 DA records that link to harvested digital content. Since each issue of a serial generates a separate record, that number represents a much smaller number of distinct titles. There are around 300 of the latter and you can see them by going to NMSL's SALSA catalog keyword search menu and searching "oclc digital archive."

Although the project was originally conceived as a way to preserve information resources from New Mexico state government, we have from the beginning experimented with capturing U.S. federal material. We also wanted to publicize the project and see how we might go about collaborating with our state depository partners and others to extend the scope of our efforts to local government information and possibly even resources from NGOs. We have held several information and training sessions for interested libraries within New Mexico and a number of presentations at national conferences. In my next posting, I will talk about some of the specific sites and electronic publications we have captured.

On October 17, 2006, the FDLP-L listserv announced the availability of a briefing paper to be used for discussion at the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting. The paper is called Digital Distribution to Federal Depository Libraries (PDF).

According to the FDLP posting, this document will be used in a discussion at DLC next Wednesday, October 25, 2006. We at FGI strongly encourage you to read the two page document before then. We would also like to commend Council and GPO for having this discussion and asking what seem to be good questions for a system of digital deposit.

The bulk of briefing paper is a listing of general assumptions and questions for discussion in seven different areas. As you might imagine, we have have some thoughts both about the assumptions and the discussion questions. We have begun writing and collecting our thoughts at http://freegovinfo.info/node/680
.

We're hoping to start a discussion here, so if you have comments of your own, or wish to challenge our assumptions, facts, biases, etc, please either use the comments form or send an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo dot info. When discussion appears to have drawn to a close, we will send our commentary plus your comments to GPO.

As of this writing, we've finished the section on general assumptions. By Friday we hope to finish our responses to the discussion questions. But don't wait to join us. Go ahead and comment on any of the sections. If you are going to Council, share your thoughts in person as well.

Update 10/17 7pm - The Access discussion questions have now been addressed. Feel free to comment on that or any other item.