Conservative Group Targets Hillary Clinton's Papers in Presidential Library Library Journal Academic Newswire (August 28, 2007)

The Clinton records request highlights two significant government documents issues now pending before Congress: FOIA backlogs, and a controversial Bush executive order regarding access to presidential documents.

In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance by Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gay, and Laura Granka. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), article 3. (2007)

Abstract

An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.

Thanks to Library Journal Academic Newswire

The iPhone is locked so that it has to be used with AT&T's cellphone network. This article about software that allows users to unlock the phones asks "Would computer owners pick up an iMac that only worked with AT&T's DSL service?"

• Unlocked iPhones highlight DMCA absurdities, By Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica (August 28, 2007)

While cell phone unlocking is now legal under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because of a decision last year by the Library of Congress, this article speculates that AT&T will attempt to block sale of software allowing users to do so.

Allowing consumers to unlock their own property but not allowing them to purchase the tools to do so is the sort of situation that belongs only in Kafka, not in modern rulemaking.

NASA photo, video collection to be digitized, Digital Silence (August 27, 2007)

NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers.

NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.

"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive.  

More interesting details at the above link.

Calling All Presidential Candidates: Who Will Stand Up and Be Transparent?
Meet the only three would-be chief execs who will dare to tell you how the government spends your money.
by Nick Gillespie, Reason Online (August 24, 2007)

The book discussed below doesn't have much to do with government information, but I think it can be a powerful guide to those of us who our passionate about the cause of freely available government information.

Crossposted from Alaskan Librarian:

I feel fortunate that my library participates in a downloadable audiobook project called Listen Alaska through Overdrive, inc. It's given me the chance to do try out books on my mp3 player that I might not have picked up to read but turned out to be great books.

Such is the case with Made to stick : why some ideas some ideas survive and others die by Chip and Dan Heath. I downloaded the audiobook version from Listen Alaska, and was so impressed I ordered the paper copy for my library. If you're a librarian, you should too. Then read it. You can read the introduction right now by going to the companion web site at http://www.madetostick.com/.

Why do I think this book should be read by every librarian? Because the authors carefully lay out the elements needed to convey a compelling message and provide many examples of messages that work. Many well-intentioned people tell us librarians to "tell our stories." The Heath brothers show us HOW to tell our stories. Consultants tell libraries it is important to have a mission statement, but the Heath brothers demonstrate how to generate a "core value" that can actually guide decision making.

The authors start the book with a common and unforgettable urban legend and dissect the "stickiness" aspects that keep the legend in circulation. They suggest that every successful message has characteristics that spell out SUCES:

Simple
Unexpected
Credible
Emotions
Stories

The rest of the book examines how to make messages simple, unexpected, credible, have emotional content and how to tell stories. This is both simpler and more complex than it sounds. The books messages are made clearer by frequent "message clinics" where the brothers provide several ways of getting a message across and let the choose the one that seems most compelling.

Authors Chip and Dan Heath are the first to tell you that this isn't a cookbook. It's not a matter of following SUCES and having success every time. But they and I say that if you do put these elements into your messages, they'll have a fighting chance of being heard and remembered.

One of the things I regret about Library school is that there were no courses in communication or public relations. This is a particularly glaring deficiency because as a group librarians tend to be introverted and self-effacing. We don't have much experience in getting our stories out and tend to lapse into jargon and statistics, two things guaranteed to lose our audience. Made to Stick could help turn that around and make us effective advocates for our libraries and other causes in our lives.

There can hardly be a more basic government-documents question than one that asks you to identify a government agency. But recently, politics, secrecy, and corruption have made it difficult to determine even what should be obvious and unambiguous.

The most visible case of confusion, of course, is that offered by Vice President Dick Cheney in his resistance of routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information: He says that he need not disclose information to the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office because he is not part of the executive branch. (Agency Is Target in Cheney Fight on Secrecy Data, by Scott Shane, New York Times, June 22, 2007)

But this is not the only instance of confusing categorization and re-categorization of agencies. Two more than were in the press recently:

• The Bush administration is arguing that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) because it is not an "agency" as defined under FOIA even though the White House Web site (as of August 22) listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law. The Office of Administration responded to 65 FOIA requests last year and has its own FOIA officer. The Justice Department argues that past behavior is irrelevant. (White House Declares Office Off-Limits, by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, August 23, 2007; pA04)

• A U.S. District Judge overturned a jury award in a suit brought by a former whistleblowing FBI agent against a company accused of filing fake invoices in Iraq saying that the plaintifs failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government. (Iraq Corruption Whistleblowers Face Penalties, The Associated Press, Aug 25, 2007)

No, The FEC isn't doing this; MAPLight.org is. But, the FEC is providing the data in an an open format with detailed documentation which makes this all possible (see Files by Election Cycle at the FEC site).

MAPLight.org is providing access to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data through an API (application programming interface) that makes it easy for any Web developer to build their own site or software program that displays or shares up-to-date campaign contributions from the FEC (www.maplight.org/widgets/apis) and through widgets (www.maplight.org/widgets) that allow anyone to track presidential fundraising on their own blogs, social media sites, and personal Web sites.

Both services, the widgets and the API, are free and open source, so anyone can use or modify them as they see fit.

Here is an example of a widget (but you can customize for your own site, of course!).

The MAPLight.org presidential widget is the first of several more widgets that the organization will release. By September 15, MAPLight.org will release a widget for U.S. Congress, showing total campaign contributions for each candidate for Congress. By September 30, MAPLight.org will release its "Money and Votes" widget, revealing correlations between campaign contributions and votes for any bill in U.S. Congress. To be notified when MAPLight.org releases these widgets, visit www.maplight.org/participate/signup. MAPLight.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Berkeley, California. Its search engine at MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics (MAP) via an unprecedented database of campaign contributions and legislative outcomes.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has published its "priorities and schedules for making National Archives information available and accessible on our public internet."

• Public Internet Web Site Publication Priorities and Schedules

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Patrice McDermott.

One of things that libraries bring to the world of government information is the ability to take preexisting materials, make them user-friendly and offer them to the world at large for no charge. This is particularly true in the world of public domain federal government information, at least when it comes to digitizing.

A project I'd like to highlight today is a searchable version of the Foreign Relations of the United States done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries.

For those not familar, here is a description of Foreign Relations of the United States from the State Department:

The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.

Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy.  In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution.  Volumes published over the past few years have expanded the scope of the series in two important ways:  first by including documents from a wider range of government agencies, particularly those involved with intelligence activity and covert actions, and second by including transcripts prepared from Presidential tape recordings.

In short, it's a good place to get declassifed materials and context for most US foreign policy decisions. The two University libraries and Federal Depository Library Program members digitized the paper volumes so that the text would be searchable, but researchers can see the actual pages of reproduced telegrams and the like.

I think this resource will be of great value to researchers. When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior paper on Turkey's accession to NATO. I wound up having to use FRUS a lot because that's where NATO meetings got recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, not as you'd expect in NATO publications. I remember checking out a dozen volumes at a time, stacking them on my apartment floor and carefully going through the index for "Turkey" and looking up pages and bookmarking them for later xeroxing. How I wished I had this product then. If made widely known, it could help people better understand historical foreign policy and contribute to today's policy debates.

A private company could have done this. But then it would be a subscription product and the average citizen or undergrad student couldn't be bothered with it. Now our declassified foreign policy heritage, both good and bad is out there for the whole world to see. And that's a good thing. Now if the CIA would stop trying to block new releases.

Is there some product at your library that you can add value to and show the world? Tell us!

Sarah Gewirtz of College of St. Benedicts/St. John's University has done it again! Watch here brillant video of federal documents issued to warn us of the horrors of communism back in the 1950s. The presentation is made more compelling by the fact it is set to a speech by Joe McCarthy.

Thanks Sarah! Her video joins the links list on our videos page. If you've made a video promoting government documents or depository libraries, send it to us and we'll add yours to our list.

• Senate Acts, Bureaucrats Stall on FOIA Requests by Mike Mitchell and JR Santo, ABC News The Blotter, August 20, 2007.
• Still Waiting After All These Years Part I An in-depth analysis of FOIA performance from 1998 to 2006, by the Coalition of Journalists for an Open Government, August 8, 2007
• Still Waiting After All These Years Part II

Ari Schwartz reports on the Open House Project mailing list some good news from OpenCRS.com about CRS reports and an opportunity to help.

He says that OpenCRS has gotten 76 of 100 new reports from the past 6 weeks.

Follow the link below to the complete email that has a list of the fugitives, pick a report that sounds interesting, call up one of your representatives offices in DC, ask them to email you a pdf of the report, and post it at http://www.opencrs.com/addreport.php

Fugitive CRS Reports by Ari Schwartz, Open House Project mailing list Aug 21, 2007

Carl Malamud (a hero of public access to public information!), who has taken on the SEC, Patents, and Congress and C-Span, is now tackling the 5 million or so pages of federal case law.

• Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw, by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar (08.19.07)
• In Re: State and Federal Cases and Codes Released by Public.Resource.Org as Test Data README FILE (Aug 17, 2007)
• A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free By John Markoff New York Times (August 20, 2007)

Carl's short-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of the Federal Reporter, the Federal Supplement, and the Federal Appendix. The medium-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of all state and federal cases and codes.

As everyone knows, wikipedia has been in the news recently because several large corporations got caught scrubbing their wikipedia entries -- Wired is keeping track of the most shameful wikipedia spin jobs. Well now it's been shown that the CIA and FBI has gotten in on the act. Anyone got the time to use Wikiscanner to see what other government agencies are scrubbing their wiki images?

The Department of Homeland Security will begin to share spy satellite data with domestic law enforcement agencies next year.  The theory is that satellite images will assist in border security. The most interesting news resport I've read on this topic came from Fox News. While all the news reports pointed out concerns about oversight and the effect on privacy, only this article mentioned that *getting* data isn't the end of the story - to be meaningful, someone somewhere has to analyze it and that this kind of data would be likely be of low priority:

Analysts across the intelligence community are already swamped with incoming data from foreign surveillance, and they may have little time for lower-priority work.

In light of recent expansions on wiretapping, this is, well, unnerving.

Just for fun, take a break from government information and think about book covers today!

The UK Telegraph has an article about book covers (What's behind the cover (and we don't mean the book) (August 18, 2007)

This month Seven Hundred Penguins, a collection of paperback covers from the publisher's birth in 1935 up to the millennium, is published. It's a sort of Heat magazine for bibliophiles, an opportunity to gawp at what our favourite books were wearing in 1945, 1987 or 1992, as well as a chance to look at some oddities, some fleeting one-hit wonders, some "do you remember whens?"

And the August 19, 2007 edition of the New York Times Book Review has a tribute to Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Viking has just published a new edition, ON THE ROAD: The Original Scroll By Jack Kerouac. Edited by Howard Cunnell) that features Foreign editions of "On the Road" (link is to a web slide show of the same which in turn is based on Jack Kerouac Book Covers).

And, of course, you can always browse the Gov Docs Best Titles Ever to see if those covers help the "book's physical form to convey something more than mere 'information'" (as the historian Alan Powers said in his book Front Cover).

Enjoy!

I've checked a few of my links to individual documents, topic search, and RSS feeds and they all worked, but you might want to verify your own.  Sometimes site re-designs can make links break badly.  They do have short and long versions of RSS feeds and they are available in RSS and ATOM format.  That is very nice! Thanks GAO!

GAO Launches Web Site Improvements To Enhance Visibility, Impact

WASHINGTON (August 20, 2007) -- The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today unveiled its newly redesigned Web site, www.gao.gov. The updated site makes the agency’s work easier to find, and it better explains what GAO is and what it does. New features on the homepage include a prominent dynamic display of GAO’s latest products, a streamlined “In the Spotlight” section, and a new “Key References” section with links for site visitors....

GAO anticipates further improvements to the site based on comments from its users and evolving technology tools. Furthermore, GAO products, including reports and testimonies, will continue to be posted daily, usually by early afternoon of the day they are released.

In Part One we examined how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and proprietary software allowed Google to make it impossible for users to watch videos that they had bought from Google even though they had downloaded the video files onto their own computers. In this part we examine why this story is important for government information specialists and Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) librarians.

There are two connections between this story about commercial content -- like TV shows being sold for profit -- and non-copyrighted government information that is supposed to be freely available:

First, the government may want to restrict access to information and may welcome tools that make this easier. Certainly with the removal of government information from the web, the re-classification of previously declassified information, and the removal of information that was once available in the National Archives, government agencies have demonstrated an increasing willingness to control access to information -- even after its release to the public. (See "More Information" below for links to stories about these events.)

We are seeing the evolution of this most publicly with the Foreign Relations of the United States series. In 2001, the CIA wanted to cease distribution of a volume that was already printed and sent to depository libraries but, in the end, the volumes were distributed because "Destroying them would be a huge public relations disaster for the U.S. government.... Book burning is definitely not a politically correct thing to do." (State Dept Mulls "Book Burning", Secrecy News, September 21, 2001). By 2006, we saw an example of the next stage in this evolutionary process of control of public information: long delays in the release of documents as an attempt to avoid the embarrassing situation of recalling documents. A volume had been nearly ready for publication for over seven years, but intelligence screeners would not permit the release because of a handful of documents (Controversial FRUS volume release -- with a caveat...). This leads us to ask how long it will be before the government starts "releasing" documents that they can "recall" technologically without the embarrassing problem of gathering books and burning them -- without even having to notify FDLP librarians and asking them to withdraw something. And, in the Google Video premium service story, we can see a real-life example of existing technology that allows this to be done.

Second, whether the government intends to restrict access to its information or not, policies change, budgets constrict, and intentions evolve. As Daniel pointed out "...Google didn't start up the service with the intention of shutting it down..." Nevertheless, in the end, they did shut it down. In addition, when the government relies on commercial tools for digital information distribution, those tools can impose the rules for distribution and use of information that the government cannot change. We have seen how government cannot always afford to do things in an open way and is forced by costs to do things that restrict access (e.g., FEMA requires Internet Explorer and What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information and GPO's Budget and Priorities). Lawrence Lessig has documented the process of how technology can all too easily supersede good intentions and even the law in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

How hypothetical is this? So far, we have been pretty lucky that the government has not explicitly implemented these kinds of technological information control. But we have seen precursors. In 2004, The Government Printing Office (GPO) released its own annual report using a proprietary reader that requires registration, includes DRM, and has built in "audit controls" (Annual Report 2004 Zinio Interactive Version (Registration Required) -> Get the GPO 2004 Annual Report in digital form now!). Most recently, we have seen GPO use proprietary software with the "call home" feature to authenticate documents in its Authenticated Public and Private Laws, Beta Release. With this system "Users must be connected to the Internet in order to have the ability to validate a digital signature on a PDF document." While the document is still readable if a user is not connected to the Internet, the user cannot validate the document. While the document is readable using software other than Adobe Acrobat or Reader version 7 or later, validation does not work without this proprietary software.

In summary, Google video used proprietary software with phone-home DRM to deny access to files that users had legally paid for and downloaded. GPO has used and is using proprietary software for distribution of government information and it is using DRM "phone home" features in its attempt to technologically "authenticate" government documents. While GPO certainly is not claiming that it wants to withdraw access to distributed publications, the technology is there for it to do so and it is experimenting with it.

Think of the Google Video premium service story as a useful cautionary tale -- a warning of how information can be withdrawn even if digital files were deposited with FDLP libraries or downloaded by conscientious librarians and digital preservation projects. This is something that government information specialists, FDLP librarians, and citizens should be watching closely. I urge you to write your Congressional delegation and the copyright office and suggest an explicit government document exemption to the DMCA. And write GPO and ask for an explicit, written policy rejecting the use of DRM and proprietary software and proprietary formats.

More information

• Homefront Confidential Prepared by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, SIXTH EDITION, September 2005, "How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public's Right to Know"
• Chronology of Disappearing Government Information (Data collected through May 8, 2002) Compiled by Barbara Miller for ALA/GODORT Education Committee With special assistance of Karrie Peterson
• Secret reclassification of US documents by Michele McGinnis, (2006-02-21)
• Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public by James R. Jacobs (2006-04-20)
• 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)

As Daniel pointed out on Tuesday (Another Example of Access Bad, Ownership Good), when Google shut down its premium video service on August 15, it was able to prevent customers who had bought and paid for videos from Google from ever watching those videos again. But there is a bit more to the story -- and it has implications for how government information is distributed.

In this, Part One of a two part look at the issues, we examine how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and proprietary software allowed Google to make it impossible for users to watch videos that they had bought from Google even though they had downloaded the video files onto their own computers. In Part Two we examine why this story is important for government information specialists and Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) librarians.

While it wasn't obvious from the initial news stories about this, Google used DRM and proprietary software to deny access to files users had paid for and downloaded. Although the Government Printing Office (GPO) has not used identical techniques, it has experimented with similar ones and has never explicitly rejected use of techniques that could provide government a way to deny access to information even if users have copies of files on their own computers. More on that below.

Google's premium video-purchase-and-download service overlapped with with Google's YouTube-like service, Google Video, which offers streaming video without charge and some free downloads. But in early 2006, Google announced a service as part of Google Video that would allow users to pay to rent or buy certain videos (such as NBA basketball games and TV shows such as CSI) and it is that service that changed this week and those videos that people purchased that they no longer can watch.

YouTube and Google Video use "streaming" video technology so that you watch the stream of video as it comes to you. It is also possible to download videos in some cases. But the Google premium video service allowed users to pay for videos, download them, keep the video files, and watch them without streaming or re-streaming the content. Customers had the files on their own computers and could copy them and put them on different machines as if they really did "own" them. But there was a catch.

Actually, there were three catches. First, users of this service had to download and install the proprietary "Google Player" software. (The software was originally downloadable from http://video.google.com/playerdownload but even the Google cache of that page disappeared this week.) It served a similar function to Windows Media Player or Quicktime or other media players, but it used its own proprietary format (".gvi"). Only the Google Player could play Google Videos.

Second, you could watch the proprietary format using the proprietary player only if you were connected to the internet and authenticated yourself as the purchaser.

Since the Google Player was the only player that could read the files one purchased, users were locked-in to the DRM of authentication-over-the-internet (sometimes called the "phone home" feature). So, even if you paid for a video and "owned" the file you downloaded, you couldn't watch it unless Google allowed you to do so -- every time you watched it. This week Google simply turned off the ability for users to authenticate. Presumably, this is the way the Google rental service operated from the start: after 24 hours, you no longer had permission to view the file you downloaded. It turned out that the "purchase" program was just a temporary service as well.

This is why The Guardian described the situation this way:

Google handed opponents of digital rights management (DRM) a huge weapon this week when it announced that DRM-protected videos bought from its online video store will no longer work, and that customers will not be reimbursed.
  -- Kiss goodbye to your DRM-protected Google Video clips, by Charles Arthur The Guardian, August 16 2007

And that brings us to the third catch: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Although there are hacks, work-arounds, and other technical tricks that allow one to circumvent the Google phone-home DRM, they are against the law. Again, The Guardian saw the implication of this for libraries:

But the fact that thousands of purchased files will cease working will give pause to organisations charged with creating public archives of published information - such as the British Library and, in the US, the Library of Congress. The latter in particular was anyway considering whether any redrafting is needed on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): the idea of offering a loophole to circumvent DRM on products that no longer work properly was rejected in its last consideration. Google's decision might lead to a reversal in thinking.

There is more about this story and its implications for FDLP libraries in Part Two.

More information:

• Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own", BoingBoing August 10, 2007
• Google Video service to go black by Dawn C. Chmielewski and Alex Pham Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2007
• Google's permanent video sales less-than-permanent by Cade Metz, The Register, August 11, 2007
• Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users? by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, February 14, 2006
• More On Google Copy Protection by Mike Masnick, TechDirt, Mon, Jan 9th 2006
• Google's Copy Protection: Supplying The Tools For Others To Be Evil by Mike Masnick, TechDirt, Fri, Jan 6th 2006
• Google Video (beta) by Troy Dreier, CNet, 2/7/06
• Google Video Player Terms and Conditions Google Video
• Good Uses for DRM Jimmy Palmer, DRM Blog (September 2. 2005) [good description of "phone home" DRM]

The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure
CTWatch Quarterly Volume 3 Number 3 August 2007

Introduction
Lee Dirks, Microsoft Corporation
Tony Hey, Microsoft Corporation

The Shape of the Scientific Article in The Developing Cyberinfrastructure
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

Next-Generation Implications of Open Access
Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University

Web 2.0 in Science
Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing

Reinventing Scholarly Communication for the Electronic Age
J. Lynn Fink, University of California, San Diego
Philip E. Bourne, University of California, San Diego

Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication
Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Carl Lagoze, Cornell University

Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web
Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics
Tim Brody, University of Southampton, UK
Les Carr, University of Southampton, UK
Yves Gingras, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Chawki Hajjem, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, UK; Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Alma Swan, University of Southampton, UK; Key Perspectives

The Law as Cyberinfrastructure
Brian Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Kylie Pappalardo, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing
John Wilbanks, Scientific Commons

Trends Favoring Open Access
Peter Suber, Earlham College

Now that I had some statistics it dawned on me I had no idea whether or not this was a lot documents.  So I was off to the FDLP desktop and the  Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

I looked around the desktop to see if GPO listed any statistics.  On the "about" page for the CGP, GPO says merely that there are more than 500,000 records in the database.  So I gave some thought to how I might get a better figure, and off I went to OCLC and the GPO database in FirstSearch.  On the database info page, OCLC lists 507,000+ as the number of records and that the database had its last monthly update on August 8, 2007.

So I went back to the CGP and its advance search page.  Searching for GPO in the publisher field is not terribly effective.  Of course, in this database everything is a government document so that is not a problem. 

But how to get a real number out of the database?  I tried using the most common of words--a and the-- but to no great effect.  A brings up 359,875 records and the brings up 411,493.  Neither result comes close enough to the supposed 507,000.

I had another realization that the CGP now includes records for electronic titles--titles that would not be fodder for the Google Book Project. Using the New Electronic Titles page is not really an option to count them as it only goes back to April of 2005 and since early 2006 the monthly lists are not numbered (leaving me to do a lot of counting).

So back to the advanced searching page in the CGP.  Happily here you can search for terms in the URL/PURL. I proceeded to search for every record that listed .gov, .mil, .us, .org, and .com. I came up with a total of 64,504 records.  So approximately 13% of the records in the CGP are electronic titles or are titles with an electronic counterpart.

Unfortunately I had another realization that these figures really only represent documents published from 1976 on. This is a really big problem in that most of the documents I found in Google Books dated to before 1923.  My only hope to get good numbers was to askGPO.  So late on August 8th I shot off a query to GPO asking for statistics on the number of documents GPO has distributed both before and after 1976.

Surprisingly enough, GPO called me first thing the next morning. askGPO is notoriously slow in providing answers to queries so I was very surprised!  I spoke with Nancy Faget at GPO and she was very pleasant though not exactly forthcoming with numbers.  It struck me that I got the quick call back as GPO viewed my query as the first step in getting out of the program.  As far as I know my director has no real intentions of doing that, but I don't think I convinced her on that point.  But aside from that she told me that GPO really didn't know how many documents went to depositories since the beginning.  Alas!!

I honestly don't know if would be fair to take the view that probably as much was distributed from 1813 to 1976 as was published after 1976.  But if you did, that would lead to believe that over one million documents have been produced.

So the bigger picture suggests that the 167,878 titles in Google Books is only about 17% of all the documents that could be digitized.  At a guess...

So I put a call out to everyone in GovDoc Land.  If you are a full depository and have been one since 1813 and have kept really good records, could you please send me the statistics?  Thank you very kindly in advance!

Having found no published statistics for numbers of digitized books in Google Books, and especially nothing about digitized government publications, I was left with coming up with them on my own.

So I went to the Advanced Book Search screen for Google Books.  Looking at the search options provided there I decided that the only way I could get reasonably useful statistics was to search for books published by GPO.  As you are all aware not all government documents are actually published by GPO. Many are merely distributed by them.  So I knew that my numbers would not be exact.  Another problem was that over the years GPO listed themselves as publishers using a variety of abbreviations and phrases.

My first try was to use GPO  in publisher and on August 8th I retrieved 141,600 hits. However just now when I ran it again, I only got 117,600. Hmmm.

Next search was for Government Printing Office, which retrieved both today and on the 8th, 43,600 hits.  This was followed by gov't, which on the 8th retrieved 2,322 titles but today only retrieved 2,258.

The grand total for using these three searches on August 8th was 187,522.

Today as I was double checking my results, I also tried gov. print. off. and got 4,420 hits.  So as of this morning the grand total is 167,878.  I find it rather disconcerting that the number as dropped so much in nine days!

I have a hard time trying to figure out where to begin this blog, so I have decided to start at the beginning even though I have written a bit about this in a message posted to GOVDOC-L on August 8th. So here goes...

I was asked to find out how much government information is available in the various Googles.  Over the past few months I had saved posts from GOVDOC-L that had Google in the subject line; so I thought this would be an easy assignment.  Turns out that the messages did not give statistics, instead they were questions about Google's practice of making the full text of all books published after 1923 unavailable.

Well I was a bit disappointed but I still thought that I would find the information on Google's website. I figured that Google would be tooting its own horn about the growth of this infamous project.  Not so.  There are no statistics anywhere, and there was very little that described the scope of the project.

Next I went into research mode.  I checked for articles in EBSCO's Academic Search Premier and Lexis-Nexis.  I found some interesting news articles on the project but again no statistics. I then tried to search the web pages of a few library partners I looked at the University  I had a little luck on Stanford's web site on Robotic Book Scanning.  There was a page a few statistics listed there but alas they dated from June2004.

I even Googled such keywords that I hoped would bring up statistics. But considering how many different way one might refer to statistical information, it was frustrating to do.  I didn't find any statistics this way but I did find some intersting Blog entries about the full-text copyright issue.

So I was on my own.

Stephen Abrams of OPAC vendor SirsiDynix  talks government documents and relates his pet peeves about how governments use PDFs to hide information. As Stephen is Canadian, I'm not sure what government he's talking about, but some of his complaints sound familar to me:

3. Worse, let's create a 10,000 page PDF and try to ask any citizen to download and print that! If your report is too short to make it too big, just append all your data into the appendices and make it HUGE.

5. Place your PDF on your website and don't link it to with an index, table of contents, press release or some other finding tool. Make sure there are no links for the seacrh engine crawlers to crawl! You have plausible deniabliity and can say with a straight face that it's available on the web!

6. And my favourite government opacity strategy? Only place a minimum of metadata on the PDF on the web. Say, just a number like 1237D-f but make sure it's not linked to any real number and just represents a non-sequential accession number for the web file. Then it will be nigh on impossible to find it.

His other tricks make a good read too, but then I'd be reproducing his entire posting. He ends his posting with thanks to librarians and catalogers. Stephen doesn't usually talk about docs, he's more of a Web 2.0/Library 2.0 sort of guy, but his Stephen's Lighthouse blog is always interesting reading.