"SSL" (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser to ensure that all data passed between the web server and the browser remains private.

The "geeks at Pingdom" describe a problem with the way Firefox version 3 handles "SSL certificates" (which the casual user does not even see under normal conditions):

• New SSL policy in Firefox hurting tens of thousands of sites, Pingdom, August 19, 2008.

If you visit a website with either an expired or a self-signed SSL certificate, Firefox 3 will not show that page at all. Instead it will display an error message, similar to any other browser error (for example a “page not found” 404 message).

...[T]his is not something that only affects smaller websites. For example, the SSL certificate for the official US Army website [https://www.us.army.mil/] is declared invalid by Firefox 3.

See also:
What is SSL? (ssl.com)
SSL (Webopedia)
SSL (Wikipedia)

We've played around before with tag cloud word analysis (using a tool called Tag Crowd), so I thought I'd do a cloud for Barack Obama's convention speech on thursday night. I'll post another cloud for John McCain's speech on Thursday.

One of the harder to find classes of government documents are declassified documents. In many cases these are not within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program, so there isn't a centralized place to find them. Sometimes they're not actual publications, but stuff like memos, celebrity FBI files and the like. If you're researching public policy, especially national security, stuff that might be helpful might be declassified or subject to declassification under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But before you start filing that FOIA request, check out today's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange, because what you want might already be out there:

Declassified Government Documents (UC-Berkeley, 2004) CC Last updated 9/15/2006

I really like how this guide starts out. Because the Berkeley librarians understand that declassified documents are a misty topic to most people, they start with an introduction:

About Declassified Documents

Documents may be classified for many reasons - issues of national security or privacy. A popular misconception is that when a document is declassified, it is somehow systematically made available to the public, for example, distributed to depository libraries. This is most often not the case. Exceptions to this might be

• a highly-publicized document is published as a part of an investigation. E.g. The Munson Report, a report from the fall of 1941 stemming from an intelligence gathering investigation on the loyalty of Japanese Americans is one of these exceptions. It was declassified and published as one of the many appendices in the Hearings held by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1946.
• a document series that is specifically published by the government for researchers (e.g. Foreign Relations of the U.S. or the Library of Congress Presidential Papers collections).

As there are no clear patterns of publication for most declassified documents, it falls to the researcher interested in a document that is declassified to research which agency created the document, who may have researched the document originally, and where it might be now. The guides and resources shown below are intended to assist the research in finding federal records that have been declassified as part of the routine declassification, as well as records that are declassified through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and other kinds of investigations.

After this intro, they have additional material about the declassification process and FOIA. Then they talk about resources including:

• The encyclopedia of American intelligence and espionage : from the Revolutionary War to the present. G.J.A. O'Toole. New York : Facts on File, c1988.
  UB271.U5 O85 1988 GREF
  References individuals, committees, and operations. Many of the entries have footnotes.

• Unlocking the files of the FBI : a guide to its records and classification system by Gerald K. Haines and David A. Langbart. Wilmington, Del. : Scholarly Resources, 1993. HV8144.F43 H35 1993 GREF
• OpenNet via Department of Energy
  OpenNet includes references to all documents declassified and made publicly available after October 1, 1994. New references are added periodically as they occur. These collections include citations to several types of documents. Some have been declassified in total, and are termed "declassified." Others have had classified or other restricted information removed to produce a "sanitized" copy. The term "redacted" is sometimes used to refer to these documents.

There are a lot more. See http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/doemoff/govinfo/federal/gov_decldoc.html for details. Then check out what other subject guides are available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!.

I have posted my "speaker notes" for the presentation I gave at the meeting of the Acquisitions and Appraisal Section of the Society of American Archivists Convention in San Francisco.

• Citizens in the Dark? Government Information in the Digital Age

My thanks go to SAA and the section for a inviting me and making me feel at home.

These are my speaker-notes for the presentation, "Citizens in the dark?
Government Information In the Digital Age," which I gave on Friday
Aug 29, 2008, at the meeting of the Acquisitions and Appraisal Section
of the Society of American Archivists Convention in San Francisco.
The theme of the convention was "Archival R/Evolution & Identities."

This is not a transcript of what I actually said, but an outline from which
I spoke. There are sentence fragments and inconsistent capitalization and
other less-than-final-draft editing. I hope that this is useful to you in
spite of these distractions.

I do include the points I tried to make and a bit of the verbiage and all
of the links I have.

- Jim Jacobs.

---
The title of this presentation is:

Citizens in the dark? Government Information In the Digital Age

We are seeing a fundamental change in the way governments communicate
with citizens. These changes are NOT caused by technology, although
they are enabled by technologies. They are driven and determined by
economic, political, and social issues.

The solutions are therefore, not technological either, although they
will be enabled by technology. The solutions are economic, social,
and political.

Abby Smith, Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information
Resources, in a CLIR report on "authenticity" in a digital age, summed
this up quite nicely:

Interestingly, the scholar-participants suggested that technological
solutions to the problem [of establishing the authenticity of a digital
object] will probably emerge that would obviate the need for trusted
third parties. Such solutions may include, for example, embedding
texts, documents, images, and the like with various warrants (e.g.,
time stamps, encryption, digital signatures, and watermarks). The
technologists replied with skepticism, saying that there is no
technological solution that does not itself involve the transfer of
trust to a third party. Encryption -- for example, public key
infrastructure (PKI) -- and digital signatures are simply means of
transferring risk to a trusted third party. Those technological
solutions are as weak or as strong as the trusted third party. To
devise technical solutions to what is, in their view, essentially a
social challenge is to engender an "arms race" among hackers and their
police.45

Abby Smith, "Digital Authenticity in Perspective." in "Authenticity in a
Digital Environment," Council on Library and Information Resources,
Publication 92. (May 2000).
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub92/smith.html

"Trust" is a social issue, not a technological one.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
As we look at the technological changes, the way governments are using
and not using, adopting and avoiding, and in general coping with these
technological changes, i think we all see trends.

The agenda of this conference reflects these trends and changes.
with its theme of Revolution and Evolution, with sessions on
everything from
- digital repositories
- born digital materials,
- digitization
- digital manuscripts
- e-mail
- e-records
- e-discovery
- the "e-tiger"

And of course, representatives from NARA, LC, and GPO are here to discuss
their projects

I assume that all of us are familiar at least in a general way with the
many of the difficulties of digital archiving. things like:

- format obsolescence
- media deterioration
- content that is tied to a particular operating system or application
- the need for new kinds of metadata

and

- emulation and migration strategies.

So, I will not cover those today.

What I do want to do is to give you a (perhaps) slightly different
perspective and some (possibly) different ideas and approaches to these
challenges and bring up some issues that i believe do not have enough
attention yet.

THE PAST
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1. In the past, government information archiving was straightforward

a) We knew and could fairly easily define and identify records

b) We could (again, in a fairly straightforward way) identify
responsibility for record creation, scheduling, retention, deposit,
preservation, access, etc.

c) We could establish procedures to get things done. predictable,
definable, etc.

So... in the past, we had a pretty clear path of preservation:

- of what we wanted to preserve and
- of how to preserve it and
- of who was responsible at each stage from record creation through
retention and disposition and preservation.

We could define and identify what we wanted to preserve and seek and
possibly fund the preservation.

We may not have always been 100% effective, there may have been failures,
gaps, short-funding, recalcitrant agencies, mistakes, etc. but we at least
knew what we were doing and where the gaps were...

THE PRESENT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
A lot has changed, perhaps everything. Here are four areas
of fundamental change that affect our ability to archive the
complete historical record of governments:

1) WHAT. While to some extent we can still define and identify records,
the job of doing so is much less clear. There may be some things that
we cannot get a hold on to define as records. there may be things that
are part of the record which the govt does not even possess. Or for
which it lacks licensing or copyright permission to possess or copy.

2) WHO. Even to the extent that we can identify (broadly) what we want
to preserve, it may be hard to identify who is responsible and
difficult to create adequate, implementable, schedules for
preservation.

3) HOW. Even if we can do all that, digital preservation itself is
difficult and it is very hard to move from a quick-moving,
service-oreinted, bureaucratic, day-to-day, digital environment, to an
environment of digital preservation.

4) ACCESS. While preservation without access is not preservation at all,
"access" is a very different process than preservation.

It seems to me that the very processes that make it *easier* for a
current end-user to find and use digital information make it *harder*
for the archivist to preserve that same information and ensure its
usability in the future.

EXAMPLES
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's look at some examples

EMAIL (1)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail certainly provides good examples of the "recalcitrant agency" problem.
But I want to emphasize some other issues that will plague us even if we
solve that one.

An article in Technology Review gave several good examples.

One related a story that Allen Weinstein tells about how he discovered
in his FBI files a newspaper clipping with a note hand-written on it by
J. Edgar Hoover.

If that same communication happened today, it would most likely happen
in an email with, perhaps an attachment of the article, or worse, a
link to the article.

Even if we had in place all the new laws and regulations that are being proposed
to ensure that we can actually save email, would we have complete record? Or
would we have a partial record with a key part missing. And would be able
to find or identify that part? Would we be permitted to archive it?

Talbot, David. "The Fading Memory of the State." Technology Review, July
2005.
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=14583&c....

EMAIL (2)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another problem with email is the difficulty in knowing what to preserve.
the simplest algorithm for preservation of email is to preserve everything, but
that means preserving so many trivial, unimportant messages that would not
normally be scheduled for retention in any rational universe.

RECORD OF INFORMATION USED IN DECISION MAKING
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another example from that same Technology Review article:

The mistaken bombing in 1999 of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
U.S. officials blamed the error on outdated maps used in targeting.

Today's planners would use GIS software to zoom and pan, and run
calculations about the topography to make a targeting decision.

Would the software preserve the decision making process?

There are layers of challenges here:
- the data used (spatial data, databases of locations, topography, etc.)
- the software used to analyze and use the spatial data
- the code behind that software that has its own algorithms for implementing
particular user-analyses
- the actual use by the end-users, the trail of how they used the software
to analyze the data

These are difficult things to archive!

When decisions are based on computer models working on dynamic databases,
will we be able to preserve for future historians the state of the database
and the algorithms built into the models?

PUBLIC DOCUMENTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When we think about the preservation of the historical record, we have to
include public documents as well as private communications and decision-making
records.

In the past, "public documents" meant "publications" that were widely distributed
to the public and depository libraries.

Today, it means web sites.

As you probably know the Library of Congress recently announced a big
project with several partners to crawl the .gov domain at the end of the
current presidential administration. This will harvest a lot of digital
content that might otherwise disappear with the change of administrations.

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2008/08-139.html

An article about this project discusses the software being used and some
of the issues.

Quint, Barbara. "Consortium--Minus NARA--Archiving Bush Administration
Websites." Information Today NewsBreaks, August 28, 2008.
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=50486.

See also a discussion about NARA's role at the ArchivesNext blog:

http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=137

And some more on NARA here:

http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/189

Web-harvesting is not a definitive solution, though,

When we compare web harvesting with active deposit by the government of
documents in depository libraries we can get a glimpse at the scope of
the preservation problem we face.

Web harvesting puts the onus on the harvesters.

It releases the government from the obligation of actively depositing information.

It is a step back in time. It means that archivists and librarians have
less control on their own selection and acquisition and that agencies have
less responsibility.

WHERE IS GOVINFO? (ON THE WEB...?)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A study by the Center for Democracy and Technology late last year
examined

"Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found Through
Commercial Search Engines"
http://www.cdt.org/righttoknow/search/

The reasons for the failure of search engines to adequately index
government web sites are the same reasons that make it difficult for
web harvesting to be successful. If we can't find the information,
we cannot harvest it.

We cannot preserve what we cannot save.

BEYOND .GOV AND .MIL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One problem (and a rapidly growing one) is that not all government information is
on the .GOV and .MIL domains.

Here are some examples:

- TWITTER.

twitter.com is the very popular "micro blogging" site, where people post
very short entries about what they are doing, where they are having lunch,
and so forth. did you know that many government agencies twitter?
among them:
- the white house Communications Office
- the Department of Health & Human Services: Office on Women's Health
- and more than 60 others.
- 20 or 30 members of congress

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/USGovernment
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Members_of_Congress_who_Twitt...

- YOUTUBE

The military is actively using YouTube to post videos

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/01/world/fg-cyberwar1
U.S. military offers up its side of the Iraq war on YouTube
la times By Alexandra Zavis May 01, 2007 in print edition A-4

One military youtube channel says that:

"Video clips document action as it appeared to personnel on the ground and
in the air as it was shot."
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MNFIRAQ

- NASA posts videos on YouTube and iTunes

- NOT JUST FEDERAL...

I'm mostly giving examples of the federal government today, but the trends
stretch across all levels of government.

for example:

the PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY SERVICE AUTHORITY IN VIRGINIA is posting
videos on YouTube.
http://www.fcw.com/print/22_25/technology/153418-1.html?type=pf

- the STATE OF CALIFORNIA has a youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/californiagovernment

and GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER posts to twitter.
http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger

HOUSE MEMBERS
- According to GovTech magazine, more than 100 House members have
multimedia pages and YouTube links on their Web sites
http://www.govtech.com/gt/241670

FLICKR / LC

- FLICKR. I'm sure you read about the success the library of congress
has had by posting photos on flickr.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

QIK.com

qik.com allows you to stream video live from their cell phones.

Congressman John Culberson of Texas is a big fan and has his own qik
channel where he streams and posts interviews, meetings and more.
http://qik.com/johnculberson

Is this official government information? or political? or both?

While these examples may strike you as "not official" or "non-governmental"
the point here is that the environment for distribution of information is
changing rapidly and we must keep up with the changes. If Culbertson's qik
site is not "official," for example, we need a way of appraising it as such
and a way of differentiating it from the next channel that appears that
that *is* official.

HYBRID SITES WITH MIXED MESSAGES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The military is providing us with lots of examples of archiving problems.
These issues of provenance, use-rights, copyright, and just plain finding
and getting information.

This is an extension of what I call the "copyright poison-pill" in which
copyrighted material appears in an otherwise non-copyrighted government
publication and creates confusion over the rights of libraries and archives
to save, reproduce, and display any or all of such materials. We see this
today in the way the Google book project has blocked access to most
government publications because they "might" be covered by copyright.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The the DOD "official website of Multi-National Force - Iraq" is a .com site,
not a .mil.

http://www.mnf-iraq.com/

There we find
- links to other commercial sites with streaming video without download
links

- web links designed to be clever (with javascript and hidden urls)
but which add an additional level of difficulty in identifying and
bookmarking links and downloading pages.

Another DOD site that provides video clips is .mil but a lot of the content
is actually hosted by .coms

DODvClips.mil

- While this is a .mil domain, it is actually operated by the Intel
Corporation and is hosted and maintained by a commercial organization
known as The FeedRoom or Globix Corporation

- While you can download video, you are bound by an END-USER LICENSE
AGREEMENT, in which Intel claims all proprietary rights to the content
and videos on the site.

- Those who try to harvest the content from this site will find
that the site instructs robots that should must not save copies of
videos or even web pages.

HORMUZ
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is another example of DOD video problems.

In January of 2008, the Pentagon broadcast a video of the "straights of
Hormuz incident" in which an unidentified voice says, apparently to a US
battleship "You will ... explode."

It was much in the news. (I found more than 1000 items on LexisNexis over
about a 4 week period.)

In January, two defense department web sites linked to a video of the
incident and one labeled it as "From Defense Department Video." One
of those pages still exists.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4116

But by June 2008, that url linked to a chef doing a promo for his show
called "Grill Seargent" and searches for "hormuz" turned up zero hits.

Last week, when I checked again, the link I got was to a 15 second ad for
"the pentagon channel" that said:
"Embrace accountability for all that you do -- for everything in your
area of responsibility."

A shorter version of the Hormuz video, complete with "you will explode" quote
is available here:
http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/briefingslide%5C320%5C080107-D-65...

Background information including why it is hard to know what goes missing here:
Documenting the Government -- Strait of Hormuz edition
http://freegovinfo.info/node/1567

But, this is more than the tale of a broken link.

- The link was not to a .mil site, but to a commercial site (FEEDROOM again).

- The video was provided only as a streaming video and no download was
available.

So, here we have a critical piece of the historical record, with no
indication of who filmed it or edited it or posted it or took it down.

And we have no easy way to preserve this video and no guarantee that any
one will or can taken the responsibility for doing so.

WHAT MAKES A WEBSITE OFFICIAL?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
How do we determine what makes a website official?

One document I found is explicit, but vague. It says that

an "official website" includes any website hosted on the .mil domain,
but also "any website PUBLISHED or SPONSORED by a military comand but
hosted on a commercial server."
http://www.mnf-iraq.com/images/stories/For_The_Troops/bloggers_policy.pd...

Unfortunately, this creates a cascade of problems.

- Will archivists overlook these sites because they are not .mil or
.gov sites?

- Upon finding them, can we identify who is actually responsible for
the content? (were they Published or Sponsored by the government?)

- If we find the site and identify it as something that is
government-generated, are we allowed to archive it?

STANDARDS BY ANY OTHER NAME
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the biggest problems digital archivists face is that of file
formats. When formats are tied to particular software or operating
systems or operating environments, it creates barriers to preservation.

"Standards" that work well for the end-user (and the service provider)
one year may be exactly the wrong standard for the archivist.

We can see an example of user-friendly, archive-unfriendly at the EPA.

EPA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The EPA has a nice site that has videos, audios, podcasts, and more.

But they have chosen the "Flash based" video format as a "standard"
this is indeed a common format for streaming video, but adds additional
layers of difficulty to anyone wanting to preserve the videos by
downloading them.

http://www.epa.gov/multimedia/

Feds set sights on small screen
By Wade-Hahn Chan FCW August 11, 2008
http://www.fcw.com/print/22_25/technology/153418-1.html?type=pf

DISAPPEARING PUBLICATIONS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There have not been any substantial, comprehensive studies of what gets
withdrawn from the web by government agencies.

(See "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, for an
example of one attempt.
http://www.library.okstate.edu/Govdocs/chronchart.doc )

We are left with anecdotes about things disappearing or being
withdrawn and random discoveries of something here today and gone
tomorrow.

Anyone who works with government agencies for very long will encounter,
as I have over the years, as many "policies" as their are individuals
who administer those policies.

So we sometimes see agencies that are very careful about keeping older
documents online and others that express that opinion that "No one wants
last year's (or last month's) report.

Here is a recent example:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AT: http://www.mnf-iraq.com/

We find links to a issue 6 of a "newspaper" but no links or indication of
earlier issues being available.
http://www.mnf-iraq.com/images/Unit_Newsletters/080826_aam_al-binaa_engl...

E-GOV
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have left for last the concept of "E-government" -- not because it is
less important, but because it is emerging and something to watch.

E-government is intended to transform the way government communicates with
citizens and business and itself.

To the extent that it creates communications that are faster, more
accurate, and more convenient, it is a Good Thing.

But, for us, it, again, fundamentally transforms the role of government.

In the past, the role of government in information dissemination ended at
the point of dissemination. Governments would collect and create and
assemble and edit and publish information products and distribute them to
the public and to libraries.

But today, the government is taking on a new, continuing role.

With e-government, governments are saying we must go them to get our
information today, and tomorrow, and forever.

As governments move to e-government, we are going to increasingly see
government information provided as "transactions" as opposed to
"instantiations."

Here is a simple example:

I can call 411 and get a phone number: that's a transaction and is a
big improvement over having to locate and use a bulky telephone book
which may not even be current.

Lots of kinds of government information lend themselves to this kind of
transaction delivery and make for better, more accurate, more timely
service.

But, if I am a journalist and I want to look at a directory of all
employees in a department, or if I'm an historian and want to see who
was in a particular office last year (or 10 or 50 years ago), or if I'm
a demographer and I want to do an surname or given-name analysis of an
agency's employees, then a current, up-to-date
one-transaction-at-a-time system won't help me at all. I need an
instantiation of the information from one or more time periods.

THE CENSUS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let me give you a concrete example: The Census

Every 10 years the federal government takes a population and housing census.

Through the government's American FactFinder web site, the Census bureau
delivers a transaction-based service where you can find census facts and
tables.
http://factfinder.census.gov/

But, in addition, the Bureau makes the raw, anonymized census data
available for downloading and has deposited the data in the largest social
science data archive in the U.S (ICPSR at the university of michigan).
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR/SERIES/00166.xml

What this means for us is that we can preserve the census. There is an
instantiation of the census in a format that we can preserve over time.
That instantiation is what is behind American FactFinder, but it is a
preservable form of that information.

This means that, we can preserve the data
- without crawling a web site
- even if the census bureau budget is cut and it takes data offline

it also means that the raw data are available for uses and re-uses
beyond the transactions that the bureau makes available.

This is a model for making government information available and preservable
and usable and re-usable for the long-term.

It is important to note that this model benefits users today, not just in
the future. Transaction-interfaces offer a limited number of possible uses
of the underlying information. When the raw data are available, users
can analyze use, and re-use the data in many ways not provided by the
transaction-interface.

Clifford Lynch has written eloquently about the need that scholars
have to get access to the raw information in the realm of scholarly
literature (Clifford A. Lynch, "Open Computation: Beyond
Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures," Open Access: Key
Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Neil Jacobs Ed., Oxford: Chandos
Publishing, 2006, pp. 185-193.).
http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/OpenComputation.htm

Governments may not like the idea of doing this, though. They may want to
keep control and may want to do so under the vise of "accuracy." (E.g.,
"Last year's phone book isn't accurate anymore. We don't want copies of it
out in the world confusing people.") Indeed, we hear that very argument
from some who still argue that the people should not have free open access
to Congressional Research Service reports. Local governments in particular
may also see information as an "asset" and wish to charge for access or
use of it.

And the private sector may not like the idea of raw information being
freely distributed because they want to control access so they can charge
for it. (Indeed we see something like that with CRS reports!)

It may be a challenge to get governments to understand this concept and,
once they do, to embrace distribution.

WHAT CAN WE DO?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no single solution. And we should not expect any single entity or
agency or archive to "solve" the problems.

We need a multifaceted approach to preserving the historical record.

Here are some general approaches that I hope will guide you in your
local environments.

1) Do you have influence over the creation of information? Then make
sure that the information is created with preservation in mind. Talk
to creators about providing an instantiation of information in addition
to transaction-based access. Advocate free and open access. Insist on
open formats (e.g., ODF http://opendocument.xml.org/) rather than
proprietary formats.

2) Identify your partners in your organization.
- IT depts. They may have tools that will help you do your job. They may
be able to do things differently that would enable preservation, but they
haven't thought of them.

- Managers who want information access in the near term. Managers may not
think of long-term access and usability, but they usually do understand the
benefits of having their own information usable in the near-term (1 to 5 years).
If you can *guarantee* something will be usable in 5 years, you can probably
guarantee that you are going to be able to preserve it for longer periods.

3) Identify other partners
- The Internet Archive is doing a lot right now to preserve information
on the web and you can work with them to have them do preservation for you.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
http://www.archive.org/create/
http://www.archive-it.org/

- Look for others locally and regionally with whom you can collaborate.
Universities may want to collaborate with governments and vice-versa, for
example.

4) Are you a partner?
Even if you are in an archive that has clearly no responsibility for
preservation of (say) the records of an agency, you may be in a
position, because of your own archival mandates (you have personal
records of a government official, soldier, elected offical) or because
of your constituency (users at a university who need the complete record for
historical analysis), you may have the opportunity (and obligation) to
collect information that is relevant to and even part of the complete
historical record.

The library model of having many copies dispersed over many institutions
has worked well for preserving and authenticating published materials, and
it may work in the archival environment as well when we are no longer tied
to a single copy of record. Software already exists to help with this:
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe
http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home
http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home
http://lockss-docs.stanford.edu/

i want to close with a quote from that same Technology Review article
that I quoted earlier.

In it, computer scientist Robert F. Sproull of Sun Microsystems
Laboratories, who chaired a a National Academy of Sciences panel that
advised NARA, said:

"If you become obsessed with getting the technical solution, you will
never build an archive."

The challenges we face are as much political, sociological, and
economic, as technological.

As we all know, the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) consists of libraries throughout the United States. While geographic separation is key to putting our Government’s information into the hands of the American people, Federal depository librarians have been at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to connecting to their colleagues.

All that is about to change! The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has developed an interactive community site that is available to Federal depository librarians.

Currently available in beta mode, I encourage the community to check out the site and provide feedback during the beta period. Located at http://community.fdlp.gov, the site offers the following features:

• Create an online profile that includes an avatar, contact information, biography, the ability to self-identify expertise, and more. Profiles are not publicly accessible for security purposes.
• Based on user profiles, members can search for other users. For example, you can search for all users from academic libraries in the state of Kansas who are members of ALA or all those that self-identify themselves as experts in Geography & Earth Science.
• Create buddy lists.
• Send private messages to users.
• Blog about issues that are important to you and the community. Blogs can include images, links, videos, and more.
• Comment on user blogs.
• Create photo albums and upload images.
• Add events to the community calendar.
• Add links to Web resources on a variety of topics.

As part of the beta launch, users can peruse the site and provide overall feedback, but will be unable to create accounts and populate/test the interactive features listed above. Users that would like to participate in a more hands-on test can sign-up to become a beta test user. We are limiting the closed beta test to the first 30 members of the Federal depository library community that sign up. Accounts for beta testers will be created and sent on or about September 3rd. Testing will be open for two weeks.

To sign up to be a beta tester, complete this form on the FDLP Desktop. To sign up to be a beta tester and to find out more information, complete this form on the FDLP Desktop: http://www.fdlp.gov/latest/betatesters.html

More features are coming to the FDLP Desktop in the coming weeks. As part of my last blog post here at FGI, here is a taste of what is coming:

• While blogs are great for expressing individual ideas and comments, it is not as conducive to discussion. Listservs, meanwhile, generate a lot of email in our already overwhelmed inboxes. Our next unveiling will be the FDLP Community Forum. Integrated into the FDLP Community site, thus creating a singular login, the forum will provide the community the ability to discuss a variety of issues/topics while also offering the ability to create sub-communities, search threads, bookmark threads/topics, share files, and much more!
• Also in the works is a redesign of the FDLP Desktop. We have learned a great deal since our initial redesign and are preparing to unveil the next generation. You may notice from the list above of the features of the FDLP Community site mirror several of those on the current FDLP Desktop. The upcoming re-release of the FDLP Desktop will be for library coordinators only and will be focused on disseminating FDL Program-specific content only. Most interactive features are moving to the FDLP Community site.

Stay tuned. We have more up our sleeves as well.

Once again, thank you for the opportunity to be FGI's guest blogger. I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and will share my thoughts here from time to time in the future.

Library Services and Content Management is continually working to improve the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications and the services it provides. One of the upcoming services that we are excited about is the creation of a login page for depository libraries that will enable them to take advantage of a range of authenticated services not otherwise available. These include:

• Selective dissemination of information. This will give depositories the ability to direct the system to send emails when resources in a particular area of interest are cataloged. Depository libraries will be able to set up notifications by item number or by SuDocs stem, for example;
• “Save records to local pc”. Currently the options are to email records to a defined email address up to twenty at a time, or to search, retrieve, and download up to one thousand records from the CGP per session.
• RSS feeds;
• Retained preferences that will persist across sessions;
• Links to FDLP-related pages including the FDLP Desktop and the Federal Depository Library Directory.

We are anticipating a demonstration of the FDLP login page at the Fall Conference and a subsequent December release of this functionality.

Also on the agenda is an enhanced Federal Depository Library Directory. We would like to ask for input from users for improvements we could make to the FDLD to enhance the user experience. Please submit suggestions through AskGPO at http://gpo.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/gpo.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php. Use the category Federal Depository Libraries, subcategory Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, then CGP Enhancements/Suggestions.

My previous post got me thinking about how other countries are handling e-Government and comparing it to our situation. Then I started reminiscing about my recent travels to London. While I was there, I paid a visit to the Parliament Bookstore and browsed their shelf of "Daily Parliament Publications". It made me smile to see how similar it was to the GPO Bookstore! So when I returned home, I did some investigating online to see how they handle printing of their official government publications and what e-Government initiatives they are working on.

According to the Brookings Institute study, Great Britain's e-Government status ranks 35 out of 197 which I find hard to believe. I would've ranked them much higher, but then again, I'm not an expert and didn't conduct the study. The study praises their government web portal, Direct Gov, which puts "public services all in one place" according to their logo. Their promotional video cracks me up but it makes some great points! In some ways it's quite similar to USA.gov.

I also enjoy looking at their Parliament homepage and the online Bills and Legislation section. To learn more about Great Britain's progress in e-Government, go to governmentontheweb.org and read the status reports by the National Audit Office. The report states that "The Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) should be more active in monitoring and reporting departments' progress in putting services online, their take-up by the public, and the quality and use made of departments' websites" and "Digital certificates are used by some organisations for authentication but they can be costly and time-consuming for citizens and business to obtain. The OeE should work with IT industry to ease this process". Surprisingly, there is little mention of digital preservation of government information but there is a whole page devoted to the issue at the UK National Archive's site.

Also, the nearest British equivalent to GPO would be the Office of Public Sector Information(formerly known as Her Majesty's Stationary Office) and The Stationary Office Not sure if they have a depository library system like we do though...but they mention that "all local authority funded public libraries are eligible to receive a subsidy on official publications. The subsidy is given to facilitate public access to legislation, Parliamentary and Government materials".

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting and wanted to pass the information along. Do you know of any other countries that have spectacular e-Government initiatives? I want to check out what the German government is doing online...thank goodness Ich spreche Deutsch!

As I am sure you know, we at GPO have been talking with the library community for several years now about our authentication efforts. This year, we were able to move beyond the discussion phase and implement authentication technology into some of our top GPO Access applications. In early 2008, we integrated an Automated PDF Signing system into our GPO Access workflows, and we successfully released the digitally signed and certified FY 09 Budget of the United States and 110th Congress Public and Private Laws documents on GPO Access. Digitally signing these publications was just the stepping stone for implementing our authentication initiative. Upon approval from publishing agencies, all publications ingested into the Federal Digital System (FDsys) will be digitally signed and certified in the future.

In addition, we will implement authentication technology at the granular level. Granular content, as described in relation to the FDsys, is content that is broken into smaller content units such as chapters, parts, or sections. Our next challenge is to identify at what level of granularity content should be authenticated and digitally certified for each content format. I am very interested in feedback on your thoughts on the level of granularity GPO should authenticate content to share with the team developing FDsys. I am also interested in learning more about your opinions and expectations for the future in relation to GPO’s authentication initiative. For more background on our authentication initiative, please visit http://www.gpoaccess.gov/authentication/.

Because I'm a fanatic CSI fan, I just had to highlight:

Government Documents in Forensic Science (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2002) Last updated 3/10/2008

for this week's Guide of the Week from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange. This guide brings us back to the hardworking and prolific Bert Chapman. Like most of his document guides, he opens his guide with an introductory paragraph.

Forensic science is used by government agencies for a variety of legal, investigative, and public policy purposes. These agencies are as diverse as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), other U.S. Dept. of Justice agencies, the Defense Department, and the U.S. Congress. Purdue Libraries serve as a depository of U.S. Government documents and Purdue's government documents collections are kept in many Purdue Libraries. Most government documents dealing with criminal justice are in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library.

Then he moves on to providing tangible and internet resources on this subject from the state, federal and international levels. A tiny selection of what he highlights includes:

• Handbook of Forensic Services
• Managing Death Investigation
  HSSE DOC J 1.14/2:D 39/2

• A Guide for Explosion and Bombing Scene Investigation
  HSSE DOC J 28.24/3:EX 7

• Indiana State Police Laboratory
• Israel Police-Investigations & Crime Fighting Division

The above resources are just a highlight of what's available in the guide. See it for yourself, then check out what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout of your own, link it to the wiki!.

Following up on Daniel's post this week (Using FOIA in book writing), here is a rather comprehensive review of the state information access: FOIA and beyond. The article is from a symposium on "Harnessing The Power Of Information For The Next Generation Of Environmental Law."

• Information Access—Surveying the Current Legal Landscape of Federal Right-to-Know Laws, by David C. Vladeck, Texas Law Review Volume 86, Number 7, June 2008 (reprinted at redOrbit).

In practice ... this net of government-information statutes provides what is at best a piecemeal and not entirely satisfactory pathway to needed environmental information and is at worst the illusion of a right of access where none exists.

It is not often you see a headline that is so documents-specific as this:

• Bush's Bureaucratic Dark Arts: Why the Federal Register Is the Most Important Publication in America Right Now, by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Posted on Alternet, August 23, 2008.

Since my first library job in a law library, I have been intrigued by the dryest of dry documents, the Federal Register, where, every working day, announcements, draft regulations, and invitations for public comment appear.

The headline above was added by Alternet when it was re-posted from the original posting in The Progressive on August 18, 2008, but it was drawn from the original text in which Rothschild says, "Today, the most important publication in America is the Federal Register." Yes, both publications have strong editorial positions and the article is an opinion piece. But these contexts make the headline and the comment no less true. As Rothschild says, you have to "look at proposed regulatory changes at the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, and the Justice Department you get a sense of" the vast, last minute changes that the current administration is trying to instantiate. "Unable to accomplish his goals legislatively, Bush is trying to get them done by fiat."

Regulations and regulatory law are the implementation of legislated law and make all the difference in how laws are enforced and how activities of all citizens are, well..., regulated. Whether or not you agree or disagree with Rothschild's comments or with what the Bush administration is doing, this is a text-book worthy case of studying how huge changes in our way of life can be implemented by the dryest of dry government documents.

See also: More Lame Ducks: shortened reviews for regulations.

I recently finished the book:



Theoharis, A. G. (2004). The FBI and American democracy: a brief critical history. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.



While I won't offer a full book review here, this is a well-documented, must-read book for anyone who still believes that needless governmental surveillance of innocent citizens unconnected to criminal activities is either non-existent, an aberration of the 1960s or a creation of the Bush Administration. This sort of clearly illegal activity has been documented as going on since the 1910s, through Presidents of both parties and up to the current day. The justifications have changed. But secrecy combined with a view of dissent as treason is a solid, bipartisan tradition. It's just more obvious now.



The reason I'm highlighting this book on FGI and not my personal blog is three-fold. First, Mr. Theoharis makes note of another book he wrote that should be valuable to people researching the FBI. It is called The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide ed Athan Theoharis with Tony G. Poveda, Susan Rosenfield, and Richard Gid Powers (Phoenix: Oryx, 1999). An annotated bibliography on pages 385-396 of that book lists articles, congressional hearings, books and microfilmed collections. Second, on pages 176-178 of "FBI and American Democracy", Theoharis has provided brief biographies of all the directors of the FBI through the present.



Thirdly, in his "Note on Sources" Theoharis offers extensive notes on his use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain materials for his history. Here is an excerpt that shows both the power and limitations of FOIA (p. 179-180):

First, researchers seeking FBI files must pay processing fees of ten cents per page. Given the volume of records created since the bureau's establishment in 1908, these costs effectively preclude any individual from being able to fund the acquisition of the millions of pages of relevant FBI records. Researching the history of the FBI requires a strategy of identifying the most important and representative files.



Second, while the FBI must release all records relating to a specific FOIA request, to make such records requests a researcher must know how FBI officials created and then maintained records. A requestor can identify the files of a named individual or organization but might not know the names of special code-named programs (COMPIC, COMRAP, ABSCAM). Furthermore all records pertaining to an identified individual or organization were not all filed and indexed under that individual's or organization's name. Some were maintained in the secret office files of senior FBI officials (and most of these office files have been destroyed). Others were maintained in other files, not all of which are cross-referenced in the FBI's index to its central file system. For example, the FBI's file on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) does not contain all records relating to the FBI-HUAC relationship. Some are extant in the FBI's files on Alger Hiss, others in the code-named COMPIC file -- and conceivably still others are included in the FBI's files on Richard Nixon, Robert Stripling, or other unknown code-named programs. Furthermore, in my effort to understand the relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department, I requested all FBI files on named attorney's general, but the released files offer limited insights. Conceivably this relationship can be understood by researching the files on both proposed and rejected prosecutions of major cases or otherwise unidentifiable files in the FBI's 66 (Administrative Matters) classification.

Another challenge identified by Theoharis is the apparent capriciousness in releasing materials:

"Having filed multiple FOIA requests, I have been struck by the variances in processing of the same report included in different files -- having information withheld in one case but not in another."

It seems like it shouldn't be this difficult and expensive for citizens to learn about their government's activities. But at least we're able to chip away at government abuses with FOIA.

Steven Aftergood (of the Federation of American Scientists and Secrecy News) has long been working on the issue of releasing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports out to the public. In fact, for many years, he's posted them on his site in spite of the fact that the federal government refuses to publish and distribute CRS reports to federal depository libraries and the public.

In a post a couple of weeks ago (yes I'm behind!) entitled, "CRS Reports Are Still Out of Bounds," Aftergood highlighted exactly why CRS reports are so important and why they need to be accessible (go to the story for live links to the reports mentioned):

When a military judge ruled last month that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could be tried for war crimes, the first footnote in his July 14 opinion (pdf) was to a Congressional Research Service report. (Hamdan was convicted yesterday for material support of terrorism.)

But Military Judge Keith J. Allred, lacking an official source for the CRS analysis by Jennifer K. Elsea (with which he ultimately differed), provided a link instead (see footnote 1 on page 3) to a copy of the document on the Federation of American Scientists web site.

By doing so, the Judge simultaneously highlighted the centrality of such CRS analyses to public discourse and the strange fact that these official documents are still not approved for direct release to the public.

Perhaps he also implicitly affirmed that FAS and other public interest publishers of CRS collections are helping to compensate for that continuing policy defect by providing the online access to CRS reports that Congress has denied.

Way to go Steven Aftergood and Secrecy News!!

And on the shameless plug side of things, I’ve begun harvesting sites that post digital CRS reports (including FAS) and making them searchable and accessible at the Internet Archive. Please check out the site and let me know if there are other sites that I’ve missed (jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu).

As one means of seeking input for the strategic plan on the FDLP's future, I am sending a letter to each Depository Library Director this week asking them to identify the value depository designation creates at the local level for the library, its staff, and users. The letter also actively seeks success stories and anecdotes about the value of the depository to feature on the FDLP Desktop.

What are the various ways your library derives value from the FDLP? How do your users benefit by using depository resources? Do you have success stories to share or anecdotes? What are ways GPO can improve the value of the FDLP? How can GPO assist in improving the value of the depository to you, your library and community?

What would it be like if we had true open access to large quantities of government text? We would be able to do much more than retrieve a page of the Congressional Record and read it. Researchers would be able to analyze the text and create new, innovative ways of discovering, browsing, searching, and reading text-based information.

Clifford Lynch has written eloquently about this in the realm of scholarly literature (Clifford A. Lynch, "Open Computation: Beyond Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures," Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Neil Jacobs Ed., Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006, pp. 185-193.).

I was reminded of these issues this morning when looking at Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents on Tim Showers Web Design Blog (August 20th, 2008). Tim lists more than a dozen examples of techniques and tools. One of my favorites is the visualization of the 2008 Democratic primary debates offered by the New York Times. You can hear the debate, search for keywords and see where they appear, browse a transcript, and more.

Shouldn't we have free, open, access to large bodies of all government texts (not just search-and-retrieve access to bits-and-pieces) so that we can easily create corpora that can be indexed, browsed, and analyzed?

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Tim Dennis!

...the U.S. is not the leader in e-Government...at least according to a study released last week by the Brookings Institution. However, we do rank third, but we are "falling behind other countries in broadband access, public-sector innovation and implementation of the latest interactive tools to federal Web sites".

Two other articles I read this morning also got me thinking about where we stand as a nation with digital government information: "Old-school Recordkeeping Meets the Digital Age" and "Government Data and the Invisible Hand". The first article made me feel quite frustrated with our lack of digital preservation progress, especially after reading this quote:

"...lacking a statutory prescription for maintaining electronic records, most agencies print and file [records] as they would paper documents, according to a recent investigation by the Government Accountability Office...Under current regulations, NARA does not require agencies to maintain records in their native formats. So for now, many agencies still print e-mail messages and file the paper versions.Although the filing process is relatively easy, the practice has a major weakness: It eliminates the searchability of digital documents". (Gee, ya think?!)

Envisioning all those emails being printed by government agency employees makes me think of Google's April Fool's joke: the "Google Paper" service!

I hope the next President and his administration will take the issue of e-government and digital preservation/authentication very seriously. Obama and McCain have touched on the issue a bit, including Obama's vague vision of online government transparency:

"I want people to be able to know, today, this issue is going on...Today, President Obama talked about his proposal for $4,000 student college-tuition credits. It’s going to be going to this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate who are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that support it, you should contact your congressman. The more that we can enlist the American people to stay involved, that’s the only way we can move an agenda forward."

The second article touches on this issue as well, and urges the next Presidential administration to "embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency [by reducing] the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens". A profound statement, but read the rest of their argument as stated in the abstract:

"Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large".

This makes sense if you think of it from the context of all the mashups, RSS feeds, and other interactivity with web content that exists. The rest of the article makes some other interesting points and counterarguments, such as

"A government data provider can provide a digital signature alongside each data item. A third party site that presents the data can offer a copy of the signature along with the data, allowing the user to verify the authenticity of the data item, by verifying the digital signature, without needing to visit the government site directly".

Easier said than done? Is the "digital signature" they talk about the same as GPO Digital Authentication?

We are making some progress in e-Government and digital preservation of government information but we need to do better. Like Obama said, we can start by contacting our congressmen to voice our concerns and suggestions for improvement on e-Gov initiatives and digital preservation...because I don't know about you, but I sure don't want the government to use "Google Paper".

The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new web site, Party Time!, which aims to document the political party circuit -- not "political parties" as in "GOP" and "Democratic," but parties as in champagne, food, golf... and money: "the social whirl surrounding politicians in their quests to raise cash to run their campaigns."

There is a searchable database that lets you track parties thrown at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions as well as fundraising activities by all lawmakers running for Congress that happen all year round going back to 2006.

SEC To Replace EDGAR With 'IDEA', by K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, Aug. 19, 2008.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intends to supplement its aging EDGAR system and eventually replace it with a new one called Interactive Data Electronic Applications (Idea). It hopes to make Internet searches about publicly held companies and mutual funds simpler and more comprehensive and make data easier to downloaded to spreadsheets, entered in databases, and compared.

The SEC said the move would allow it to transition from collecting forms and documents to making the information freely available to investors. The new system should also provide current information in a format that is easy to access, collate, sift through, and compile into new reports.

Most SEC filings have used the Edgar format, which has limited investors and others who want to examine information about public companies to viewing one form at a time.

The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Armed Services Committee issued a report on Presidential signing statements: Findings of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in Support of the Full Committee re: Presidential Signing Statements (PDF, 4 pages). It is also available here from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, which describes the report here: White House Signing Statements “Unsubstantiated,” Report Says, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, August 20, 2008.

The Subcommittee held hearings on signing statements ("Testimony on the impact of the Presidential signing statement on the Department of Defense’s implementation of the Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act) on March 11, 2008. Prepared statements and audio transcripts are available on the Committee's hearing information page. (Nothing is available from GPO Access yet, apparently.)

Also see: Essential Reading About Signing Statements (which includes links to audio files of the hearings from hascaudio.house.gov, but which I had no success in loading) and News About Signing Statements maintained by Joyce A. Green.

Just browsing around this important topic and trying to find a single, reliable link to all the information from the government is a good demonstration how far we have to go to get good access to government information.

GPO’s Library Services and Content Management (LSCM) unit is committed to carrying out our mission of "Keeping America Informed" by producing and distributing a vast array of Federal government information products and has been doing so for over 140 years. LSCM is making strides to, not only keep and strengthen this commitment, but to do so in an eco-friendly manner. LSCM has looked for ways to improve existing services and practices while doing its part to preserve the earth for generations to come.

Reducing paper usage has been one major area of focus within LSCM. As many GPO resources are making an electronic transition, GPO is doing its part to save on paper waste. Some of the important resources that have gone electronic are:

• The Federal Depository Library Directory (FDLD): Through a new, dynamic online interface The FDLD provides important information on every depository library, such as mailing address, Web site, Director, Depository number and more. Additionally, depositories can edit their own library’s information online.
• The Federal Depository Library Handbook: Now online as a living document, the Handbook contains legal requirements, program requirements, and guidance for depository operations. Each chapter also includes best practices, tips, and resources for library administrators.
• At the recommendation of the Depository Library Council to the Public Printer, GPO requested of the Joint Committee on Printing that there be a waiver of the requirement of Title 44, Section 1711 to print the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications and the Congressional Serial Set Catalog. This was approved and GPO has instituted an online replacement using the OPAC module of our Aleph Integrated Library System. The Catalog of U.S. Government Publications with the searchable subsets of serial set, periodicals, and serials records online has proven to be a successful new online resource.
• The List of Classes: Previously, this publication was published bi-monthly, and two copies were sent to each depository. In current practice, this publication is published twice per year and one copy is sent to each depository. Electronic files of data from the List of Classes are updated monthly and uploaded to GPO’s Federal Bulletin Board on the first Friday of each month.
• Administrative Notes: Now available in electronic form only.
• Item selection update cycle materials: Now online functions.

LSCM’s Depository Distribution business unit has undergone some eco-friendly changes as well. Process changes in invoice management have heavily minimized the number of photocopied pages that are produced in the packaging and preparing processes. Also, previous methods for preparing depository shipments formerly utilized upwards of 10 zone sheets per shipment. New processes utilize only one. In regard to box preparation, large boxes were formerly utilized, and filler was added if boxes were not at full capacity. Now, sma