If you have a question for President-Elect Obama on the subjects of transparency or government information, the next few days are your chance to ask him directly. Or support your favorite open-government organization.

Change.gov has opened Round Two of Open for Questions where registered users get to ask questions and/or rate the questions of others. The first round only lasted a few days and so might this round.

So get moving! And if you see good questions or ask some of your own on government information policy, please leave a comment so like-minded people can follow you.

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011, An IDC White Paper - sponsored by EMC, John F. Gantz, Project Director, March 2008.

This report estimates the dimensions of the digital information explosion. With figures like 281 billion gigabytes (the size of the "digital universe" in 2007, which is a million times the amount of digital data hosted by the Library of Congress in 2008 -- see Berman, Francine. Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age. Commun. ACM 51, no. 12 (2008): 50-56) and estimates like "By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006" the report has sobering implications for digital preservation. In fact, it notes that:

As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

GPO has a new version of its Comparison of Legislative Resources on GPO Access and Selected Government and Non-Government Web Sites (October 2008). It has separate files with tables showing the 34 GPO Access legislative
resources studied and the scope of each of eight Web sites examined. (Scope of GPO Access and Government Web Sites and Scope of GPO Access and Non-Government Web Sites.

The study compares legislative information available on GPO Access to House.gov, Senate.gov, THOMAS, Lexis-Nexis Congressional, Westlaw, CQ.com, and HeinOnline.

The study finds that GPO Access contains a unique mix of online legislative resources not duplicated in total at other sites. ("No Government or Non- Government Web site, other than GPO Access, contains Economic Indicators, Independent Counsel Investigations, State of the Union, United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), and the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual.")

But, "In terms of scope of the legislative resources it provides, GPO Access is behind the other Web sites evaluated. Many of the other sites either contain historical content on their service or link to external sites with historical information, whereas GPO Access possesses current information that generally begins in the mid-1990s."

The last study (2003) and previous studies are still available at http://fedbbs.access.gpo.gov/library/compare/.

The New York Times reports today on the problems the National Archives faces in acquiring, organizing, managing, preserving and making available the records of the Bush White House.

• Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives, By Robert Pear And Scott Shane, New York Times, December 27, 2008.

The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

Among the problems NARA faces? Volume: NARA anticipates getting 100 terabytes of data 50 times the what they got from the Clinton White House. This is the equivalent of five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress.

Cooperation: "Millions of White House e-mail messages created from 2003 to 2005 appear to be missing and may not be recoverable. And in September 2007, the top lawyer at the National Archives wrote in a memorandum that he had 'made almost zero progress' planning the transition because the White House had ignored repeated requests for information about the volume and formats of electronic records." In addition, Vice-President Cheney's lawyers claimed in a court filing that neither NARA nor the court "may supervise the vice president or his office" for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

Formats: NARA says that there are a large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.

Access: Paul Brachfeld, the archives' inspector general, said "The electronic records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records.... But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need."

In his continuing series about Government Information Liberation, John Shuler considers the role of collections in libraries. One particularly revealing moment in his discussion is his day 60 post in which he describes a series of questions that he poses to his graduate students to get at the "fundamental things we do."

The Question and Conclusions

Can doctor still be a doctor without a hospital? They usually answer -- of course. Can you be a lawyer with out a courthouse? Again -- affirmative. Now the money shot -- Can you be a librarian without a library? Dead silence.

One would hope that the questions prompt a discussion and don't just end in "dead silence." Although John doesn't tell us what the discussion, if any, was, he does give us his conclusions: possession of "material" might have once been central to the purpose of libraries but, in the digital age, possession is much less important part of what libraries do.

Even though John qualifies his conclusions to allow for some limited role of collections for some libraries, he overwhelms his caveats with assertions that collections begin and end with the physical ownership of "material" and that "we will not own (possess) much of the material." He even coins the phrase "Gutenberg Librarians" to deprecate "possession and/or control" (66) of information by libraries.

So, John's essential, bottom-line conclusion, regardless of his caveats, comes across clearly: The net, John says, has brought on "the beginning of the end" of library collections (35).

I think his conclusion is wrong and the question he asks is misleading. You can see how misleading the question is by turning it around and realizing that the professions/institutions he uses are not parallel:

• Do doctors build hospitals? (No)
• Do lawyers build courthouses? (No)
• Do librarians build libraries? (Yes)

But the real problem is that the question implies a shared understanding of what a library is -- a shared understanding that I think we need to articulate explicitly. I think that, before one asks "Can you be a librarian without a library?" one should ask "What is the role of the library is in the digital age?" John has been outlining what he thinks the role of librarians should be and he apparently wants to separate the role of librarians from the role of libraries. Very well: let's examine the roles of both with some discussion, not dead silence.

Librarianship

I think John is implying is his series of posts that librarianship in the digital age will be about helping people navigate a complex, networked maze of shifting, changing information. Librarians will help users "connect the dots" and find connections that are not otherwise explicit (47). While there is nothing wrong with this view, and there is much to recommend it, it doesn't go far enough and it misses a key role for libraries.

As John portrays it, this view accepts that libraries will be less about selecting and preserving information and building digital collections and more about providing services for information over which librarians have no control. Librarians, in this view, are valuable precisely because they have no control over information.

This view accepts that information will be tightly controlled by producers and distributors. What is available, who can use it, under what conditions it may be used, and when it becomes no longer available will all be controlled by government agencies, publishers, individuals, organizations, and other "content" producers.

John also proposes that "librarianship" will be more important than "libraries." To me, this sounds like librarians will be analogous to travel agents who, because they deal every day with the complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected systems, are better able than the traveller to navigate these systems and find the best flight at the best price. So librarians, in this view, will help casual information users navigate a variety of complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected, public-freely-available and proprietary-and-licensed information systems. Just as travel agents have no control over what flights or trips are available or what they cost or what restrictions are placed on them, so librarians will have no control over what information is available or what it costs or what restrictions are placed on its use.

In this view, librarians will not manage collections but will license the right to read from those who control information. Whether the license comes in the form of payment of dollars to a commercial vendor and a written contract that licenses access, or an FDLP designation, or a contractual "partnership" with GPO, or the anointing of permission by Google Books legal department, the result is the same. As a recent article in Library Hi Tech says, "In future, librarians will no longer manage media, they will manage rights" (Böhner, Dörte. Digital rights description as part of digital rights management: a challenge for libraries. Library Hi Tech 26, no. 4 (2008): 598-605). This view reshapes the role of librarians from information providers to information gatekeepers; from information curators to business-officers who sign contracts and pay bills.

Who would want to go into that field?

Libraries

John hasn't said much about the role of libraries except to assert that, for many people, the digital environment is now the "default library" [emphasis added] that supports broad access to a "collection" of government information (51).

But, shouldn't we be asking about the future, not just describing the present?

Shouldn't we be asking about the relationships between doctors and lawyers and information? Certainly doctors and lawyers need a body of literature to practice their professions. Instead of asserting that users have access today, shouldn't we be asking, "Who will build and manage and preserve those collections and ensure long-term, free access to them?"

Shouldn't we be asking what guarantees we have that the information we want today will be available if we want it tomorrow? Shouldn't we be asking who controls access to that information and what are their reasons for providing access? Shouldn't we be asking who will pay for long-term preservation and access?

Just because users who are not familiar with information policy, information economics, or information technologies are happy with current access to information does not mean that they will be happy with the access (or lack of it!) tomorrow or in ten years or a hundred years. Providing easy access at one point in time does not guarantee easy access at a future point in time and can actually mask problems of long-term access.

It is one of the roles of librarians to think beyond today and one of the roles of libraries to guarantee access for tomorrow. We need to think about the long-term. Using short-term convenience as a reason for avoiding that kind of thought is evading one of the key roles of librarianship. And assuming that producers and distributors will have the same values and ethics and practices as librarians is to confuse the role of producers with the role of currators.

Maybe the real questions we should be asking are:

• Can lawyers practice without libraries?
• Can doctors practice without libraries?
• Can libraries exist without librarians?

The word "library" does not mean "I have some information." If it did, bookstores would be libraries and publishers would be librarians. We need libraries in addition to publishers and bookstores (and government agencies that distribute information as a by-product of another, primary, mission).

It is all about control

Let's be clear, then. Even in the paper and ink world, libraries and their collections were about wresting control of information from producers and distributors and granting control to local communities and information users. A publisher could take a book out of print, but a library could keep it available. A user could purchase a book and pay for magazine subscriptions, but could use the information for free at the library. Libraries leveraged economies of scale for the benefit of the community, enabling every community member to have benefits of access to information that no individual could possibly afford.

The need for wresting control of information away from those who wish to control the access to and the use of information has not changed in the digital world. But the battle lines have shifted and we need librarians in the fight to keep free, open, usable access.

"Content providers" want to replace copyright with license agreements. Producers want to charge for every single use and dictate who can use information, under what conditions, and in what way. Governments want to be able to alter and even withdraw information after it has been released. And the proliferation of requirements to register to read or use information portends a world in which people will not have the right of privacy when reading.

It is ironic that, given technologies that enable almost unlimited use and re-use of information and that enable information to be distributed and used and re-used almost without cost, we face a horde of stakeholders who want to limit access, charge for every use, restrict re-use, and look over your shoulder to see what you're reading.

More inaccurate conclusions

As noted above, John hedges his conclusion a bit. His wording is that "possession is much less exclusive or destiny for any one institution" and preserving and organizing the information sources "will remain important -- but is no longer our exclusive responsibility" (66). He expands on that idea:

• [G]overnments are taking back their possession of information sources. (60)
• [M]any other web sites [are] capturing the lost or deleted pages. (60)

And from these, he draws conclusions:

• [Information will] remain with the producers or be delivered directly to the users by the producers. (50)
• [W]e will not own (possess) much of the material we mediate on behalf of our user communities. (51)
• Possession ... is no longer a social good that is dominated [by] the dominion of libraries. (60)

To me, these summarize one possible scenario out of many. And, IMHO, this scenario is not one librarians should be content to accept or embrace. Why? Because it almost certainly guarantees that a lot of bad things will happen: loss of access, loss of free access, licensing constraints, DRM constraints, loss of information, loss of usability of information, and more.

Different Questions, A Different Answers

In a separate post, I will examine those issues in more detail, but I'll close this post with some assumptions and a couple of final rhetorical questions as a way of addressing John's question, "Can you be a librarian without a library?" The assumptions:

Society needs: organizations that select that information that deserves preserving from the plethora of information that surrounds us; organizations that then acquire, organize, and preserve that information; organizations that provide trusted, free, private, secure access to and service for that information.

Society needs organizations that have the complete mix of all of these roles as their primary mission (not a secondary mission or a by-product of publishing, or dissemination, or making money). In the case of government information in a participatory democracy it is particularly important, even essential, that society has such organizations.

Reliance on those who have some, but not all, of these roles will ensure that some of these roles will go unfulfilled. Reliance on organizations that have some or all of these roles as a secondary mission or by-product of another mission will endanger free access to information, preservation and integrity of information, and the privacy of readers, and will increase the risk of the loss of information.

The rhetorical questions:

• What would you call an organization that fulfills all the roles listed above but "The Library"?
• Why would libraries want to abandon these roles to organizations that do not have these roles as their primary mission?
• If libraries do abandon these roles, what is the risk that society will lose free, open, access to its essential information?

I think those questions lead us to conclusions that are very different from the the ones John reaches. I will examine this in more detail in another post.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified Care for Service Members as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. The page on care for service members explains why this is an urgent issue:

As of October 2008, over 33,000 servicemembers have been wounded in action, resulting in serious injuries such as amputations, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We have identified a number of weaknesses with the health care returning servicemembers are receiving as well as the complex and cumbersome disability systems they must navigate.

Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

Although there is no guide currently on the wiki that focuses exclusively on Veterans Care, here are three guides that should provide helpful information to people studying this issue:

• Budget (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008
• Government Documents on Military History (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last updated 3/10/2008.
• Chemical and Biological Disarmament (Grace York, University of Michigan, 2000) Last updated 1/9/2005

Bert Chapman's Budget guide provides a link to the Veterans Affairs budget page as well as to resources about the federal budget process. His guide on military history provides links and catalog information regarding the House and Senate veterans affairs committees.

Finally, Grace York's guide provides resources on Gulf War Syndrome, the now officially documented disease and example of how difficult it can be to get appropriate care for our veterans.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "preparing for public health emergencies." So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.

I and I'm sure others would be grateful if you posted any current Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) guides you have laying about.

I joined FriendFeed on Christmas Day and I've already started wondering how it could be used to promote government resources.

One of the things that FriendFeed lets you do is to create "rooms" where items of interest can be shared in various ways, including imported RSS feeds.

So I have built a room I called Talk Back to Uncle Sam. The room takes feeds from Regulations.gov and gov't blogs that accept comments from citizens.

Please have a look at the room at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/talk-back-to-uncle-sam and share items that you find interesting. If you are a FriendFeed subscriber, please consider telling others about the room.

And if you're a fellow documents geek, please consider joining me at FriendFeed. I'm using the handle alaskanlibrarian there.

If you like Twitter, I think you'll enjoy FriendFeed.

Have you been puzzled by these three terms? Do you understand them, but need to explain them to non-technical colleagues? Here is a nice article that explains cloud computing, virtualization, and Torrents in easy to understand language. The article describes these as "Profound movements in computer and Internet use."

Trends for 2009: Cloud Computing, Virtualization and BitTorrent, by Jack Dunning, ComputorEdge Online, (12/26/08).

I particularly like the illustration of how BitTorrent works from Wikipedia.

Miller Center Offers Nixon/Deep Throat Tapes, Transcripts, Expert, NewsWise, University of Virginia, Press Release: Fri 19-Dec-2008.

The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia has a repository of presidential tapes and transcripts featuring Nixon and Haldeman discussing Mark Felt.

The Presidential Recordings Program (http://millercenter.org/academic/presidentialrecordings) at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs (http://www.millercenter.org) has a spectacular Watergate collection of Nixon tapes and transcripts online:

• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/transcript/nixon/watergate

In particular, there's this Oct. 19, 1972 conversation between Nixon and Robert Haldeman, in which Haldeman reports that he's heard from a confidential source that Mark Felt is leaking information to the news media about the FBI's investigation into the Watergate break-in:
• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/clips/1972_1019_felt/

Nixon also mentions Felt in the June 23, 1972 "Smoking Gun" conversation with Haldeman:
• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/transcript/nixon/smoking-gun

PRP scholar Ken Hughes puts the Nixon tapes in perspective in an online essay, Why Didn't Nixon Burn the Tapes? -- which also includes tapes and transcripts of Nixon-Haldeman conversations.

• http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/exhibit/why-didnt-nixon-burn-tape...

Also feel free to use these tapes and transcripts in your stories and online exhibits, and to link to the transcripts....

Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer, by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, December 21, 2008; A01.

Legal Battles, Technical Difficulties Delay Required Transfer to Archives...

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

...The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney's records. The coalition is contesting the administration's assertion in federal court this month that he "alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed," without outside challenge or judicial review.

...The National Archives and Records Administration is supposed to help monitor the completeness of the historical record but has no enforcement powers over White House records management practices.

Here is a nice visualization and explanation of U.S. government bailouts of U.S. corporations (and one city) from 1970 to now.

History of U.S. Gov't Bailouts, ProPublica, December 22, 2008.

ProPublica also has a page of What Happens After a U.S. Gov't Bailout? that covers 1970 through 2001.

LCSH.info, RIP, December 22, 2008, Tim, LibraryThing.

I am not as up on or enthusiastic about Ed's Semantic-Web intentions, but the open-data implications are clear: the Library of Congress just took down public data. I didn't think things could get much worse after the recent OCLC moves, but this is worse.

The time has come to get serious. The library world is headed in the wrong direction. It's wrong for patrons—and taxpayers. And it's wrong for libraries.

See also (if it is still there):

uncool uris,
Posted on December 19, 2008, 10:32 pm, by Ed Summers.

On December 18th I was asked to shut off lcsh.info by the Library of Congress. As an LC employee I really did not have much choice other than to comply.

The lcsh.info domain was registered by me in order to demonstrate how the Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application using SKOS....

LC is still considering running a service like lcsh.info at loc.gov, but it’s not there for me to link to yet.

SEC mandates open standard for financial records, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov.com, (12/19/2008).

The Securities and Exchange Commission passed a rule on Thursday requiring public companies and mutual funds to use a standard electronic format to publish financial information, bringing more transparency, and presumably oversight, to corporate balance sheets and earnings.

SEC commissioners voted 4-1 to require companies to use extensible business reporting language, or XBRL, when filing financial disclosures. The commission also required them to publish information on the SEC's Web site as well as their own.

XBRL is based on software programming called extensible mark-up language, or XML, which uses tags attached to documents so users can easily find and share electronic data....

Hacking The Hill, By Shane Harris, National Journal, 12/19/2008. Also available at: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20081220_6787.php.

It seems that it is "exceptionally difficult to protect congressional computers in a uniform fashion" and one panel has determined that Congress cannot manage cyber-security.

The American Historical Association blog has a nice, short writeup on Flickr: The Commons, where national and state government libraries (including the Library of Congress) are displaying photographs of historical interest.

• Snapshots of the Past: The Commons on Flickr, By Jessica Pritchard, December 22, 2008.

Unfortunately, there are reports of layoffs at Flickr, including the head of the Commons project.

The Foreign Relations of the US (FRUS), one of the most important and long-standing documents recording the "official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity," is in crisis due to mismanagement by the Office of the Historian. William Roger Louis, the esteemed historian who has chaired the Committee for the last five years, presented his views in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (pdf). According to Dr Louis, "15 historians or compilers in a staff of about 35 have left in the last three years." It's a sad state of affairs the such a venerable publication could succumb to petty politics.

November 28, 2008
The Honorable Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
Department of State
Washington, D.C.

Dear Secretary of State Rice:

Foreign Relations of the United States Documentary Series

Fully conscious of the serious nature of the issues raised in this letter, I must write to you about the future of the Foreign Relations series and of the related issues of plummeting morale and mismanagement within the Office of the Historian. I have served on the oversight body of the series, the Historical Advisory Committee, for nearly ten years, five of them as chairman. I am a past President of the American Historical Association. Along with all other members of the advisory committee, I am guided by the Congressional mandate to ensure that the Foreign Relations series represents a trustworthy, full, and honest documentary record. In our judgment, the prospective fate of the series has now become so grave that it would be a failure of responsibility on my part were I not to call it to your attention.

The significance of the Foreign Relations series can be summed up by stating that, as required by Congressional legislation (Public Law 102-138), it provides the public, both here and throughout the world, with a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary account of US foreign policy. Members of Congress, government officials, scholars, journalists, and interested citizens depend on the timely appearance of the series for an understanding of the course of American foreign affairs. This historic mission is now in danger, and, for reasons I shall explain at the end, there is a certain urgency to this letter.

My concern, along with that of all members of the committee, arises from mismanagement by the Historian himself, Dr. Marc Susser. So large are the numbers of staff members leaving, or contemplating departure, that the integrity of the Foreign Relations series is now in jeopardy. To give you a rough idea of the extent of the problem, 15 historians or compilers in a staff of about 35 have left in the last three years during Dr. Susser’s tenure.

[Thanks Secrecy news!]

Govtack.us has announced some major new features!

• Site Updates in September, December 2008, by Josh Tauberer, December 20, 2008

The enhancements include:

Bill text pages have hyperlinked tables of contents, highlighted and side-by-side view modes for viewing changes to the bill over time, permanent links to a particular paragraph within the bill, and more. You can now make a comparison of the voting records of two members of Congress. There are links from members of Congress to videos of floor speeches and some financial statistics. There are widgets and APIs. There is a lot more; follow the link above for the complete list. Lots to use and re-use!

Thanks Josh!!!

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified Finalizing plans for the 2010 Census as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. If you're not a docs librarian or a policy wonk (there are a few of you reading FGI, right?) you might not realize the importance of this issue. The GAO spells out why every American should care about this issue:

The results of the 2010 Census are central to apportionment, redistricting congressional boundaries, and distributing around $300 billion in federal aid to states and localities each year.

Translation - The results of the 2010 census will redraw the legislative districts in your state, possibly changing how you are represented. The results will spark the redrawing of your congressional district, unless you live in Alaska or Wyoming, which have statewide Representatives. This redrawing could make it easier or harder to unseat your current Member of Congress. In addition, the 2010 results will affect how much federal money each state will receive.

In terms of Census planning, I'm afraid that for the first time in considering these critical transistion issues, I can't find any guide from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that would help you understand planning for the next census. For that, you had best just read the GAO page on the subject.

On the other hand, if you're looking on how find and use census information once it's published, librarians can help. A lot. Check out these guides for a start.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "caring for service members." So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week. Hopefully next week I won't get caught flat-footed again.

Note: Below is the entry that should have appeared last Saturday. My apologies for the delay.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently identified Improving the US Image Abroad as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

There appear to be two librarian-produced guides that look helpful in this area:

• Government Publications on Islam (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
• Public Opinion Sources (Univ. of California--Berkeley, 1999) Last updated 5/9/2006

The Islam guide provides a few links to efforts in American "public diplomacy" as well as hearings and studies about current thinking and opinion in Islamic countries. UC Berkeley's guide on public opinion sources provides information on current and past public opinion trends at home and abroad. It has a mix of print and electronic resources.

Next time I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "finalizing plans for the 2010 Census."

2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization.

The 1990s represent some of the best and brightest efforts of advocacy, thinking and study about the future prospects of government information services in libraries -- here are some of the highlights (by no means complete; I will try to fill in more of the missing pieces in my subsequent posts)

Coming on the heels of OTA's Informing the Nation report, government information librarians were ready and willing to weigh in on the future of the federal depository library program in particular, and the role of libraries in the civic machinery of federal government information.

The decade began with a set of principles from the American Library Associations Governemnt Documents Roundtable -- published in Documents to the People, v.19:1 (March 1991):12, 14.

Soon after, a separate group of libraries came together around the issue and formed a coalition called the Dupont Circle Group, which issued its own set of principles, hosted a national conference, and made some specific recommendations on who the depository library program might change.

A year or so later, another loose affiliation of library groups came together with their own recommendations. The Coalition of Many Associations Framework debated many of the points rasied by the Dupont Circle effort, and issued its own report -- "Enhanced Library Access and Dissemination of Federal Government Information: A Framework for Future Discussion." Working Document endorsed by the American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Special Libraries Association, 1995. American Association of Law Libraries Newsletter 27, no. 1 (September 1995): 14-15.

Not to be left out of the picture, the Depository Library Council issued its own statement on the challenges ahead -- Depository Library Council to the Public Printer (U.S.). "Alternatives for Restructuring the Depository Library Program: A Report to the Superintendent of Documents and the Public Printer from the Depository Library Council." September 1993. Administrative Notes 16, no. 16 (December 5, 1995): 23-59.

But wait -- there's more. ALA devoted significant chunks of its 1995 midwinter and summer conference to the issues -- and issued a report: * "Model for 'New Universe' of Federal Information Access and Dissemination: Preliminary Results of Forum on Government Information Policy, July 20-21, 1995, Sponsored by American Library Association." ALAWON, ALA Washington Office Newsline 4, no. 77 (August 9, 1995).

But then, the National Commission on Library and Information Science considered the problem, and issued its own set of principles, following work they did back in 1990.

GPO weighed into the fray -- and issued its own considerations -- "Report to the Congress: Study to Identify Measures Necessary for a Successful Transition to a More Electronic Federal Depository Library Program as required by Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 1996. Public Law 104-53." Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. June 1996.

But wait there is more ...

In 1996-7, GPO issued to other strategic documents -- "Study to Identify Measures Necessary for a Successful Transition to a More Electronic Federal Depository Library Program" and THE ELECTRONIC FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARY PROGRAM: TRANSITION PLAN, FY 1996 - FY 1998

Finally, and again -- remember I am only touching on the highlights of ten years here -- NCLIS returned to the problem and issued its own massive report on the problem of public information in a digital age following on a large-scale national effort during 1999-2000: A COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION DISSEMINATION FINAL REPORT -- JANUARY 26, 2001

I am tired just thinking about how many brain cells we killed during these ten years trying to get a handle on the future of government information in a digital age. In reviewing this good work, I am reminded of the phrase -- those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Let's not close out this decade with another series of reports or studies -- lets do something about it.

I will get back to this exciting decade tomorrow -- after some rest.

See you Day 33

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access -- created to seek answers to some challenging questions about sustainability of long-term digital preservation -- released its iterim report yesterday -- "Sustaining the Digital Investment: Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation, December 2008."

This should add even more to the substance of the debates and consideration about the future directions of the digital depository library. I should point out Chris Greer served on the Task Force and is a member of the Federal Depository Library Council. Very interesting substance to add to our rhetoric about the civic purpose of depository libraries.

2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization.

Ah, the 1990s....the last decade of the 20th century began with the collapse of the cold war and closed with first hints of the next global struggle (i.e. the war on terrorism.) In between we had political revolutions at home and abroad; economic boom and bust; technological upheavals; and the beginning of the end of what I call Gutenberg Librarianship.

If there were just three themes that bound the decade's narrative together, they would have to be --

1. Political shifts: the last bastions of the Lyndon Johnson inspired "Great Society" finally disappeared after nearly fifteen years of "government is the problem, not the solution" drumbeat by conservative pundits and elected officials. By mid-decade, with the Republican take over of the congress, the last years of the Clinton administration would reinvent this mantra into something called "reinventing government" -- better technology will deliver public programs and services more efficiently and smaller government will be "ok". Librarians and their associations would spend much of this decade debating how their bibliographic institutions will fit into the rapidly evolving "national information infrastructure." Unlike the comparable discussions of the late 1970s which led to enactment of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (primarily fostered by the many reports of the Commission on Federal Paperwork) -- the government reform efforts of the 1990s had the technology readily at had to match their ambitions -- the early grid of what was called the "information superhighway".

2. Technological and regulatory shifts: for the first time in nearly a century the old public service monopoly that bound the telecommunications industry would be overturned by, first, technology and then by changes in public oversight. Just as reinventing government imagined a leaner and more agile public administration culture, so to did the possibilities of a more interactive and consumer-driven model of telecommunication began to take shape -- largely because of the growing world wide web, the rapidly falling prices of expensive computing power, and the interoperability of certain software tools that shifted the communication from textual to graphical interfaces. The late 1990's federal laws governing telecommunications were rewritten and the "public monopoly" granted the telephone and telegraph companies almost 90 years before was lifted. Note too, with two years of these major rewrites, Congress and the President rewrote the laws governing public welfare...

3. Social and economic shifts -- at some point during the decade everyone suddenly felt much less poor, and more able to access, if not demand, many material goods and services once only available to the most affluent just a few short decades ago. Less regulation and government oversight translated into more consumer choices -- in bigger cars, bigger homes, more opportunities to participate in the digital economy through a robust information infrastructure. Public institutions such as libraries, universities, transportation authorities, health care providers, etc. now "had" to compete with an organizational model that presumed the best approach was one that relied on two purposes: it must be driven by the user and must make money or it must be the most cost-effective approach.

Against this backdrop of larger social, political and economic developments government information librarians came out of the 1980s talking, debating, thinking, pontificating about how public electronic data products were going to change the way they do business. Rhetorical focus would shift from the culture wars fought over secrecy and privatization of government information to cybercommunities, digital democracy, "keeping the information superhighway free and open to all, and not digital toll roads." One of my favorite conference themes during this time was one that focused on how to keep libraries from being road kill on the information superhighway. Remember -- between the early and late 1990s digital problems for most libraries revolved around the capacity and speed of computers used in their institutions, the used of new fangled media such as CD-ROMs, and how to perform increasingly sophisticated mediated searches using expensive databases such as DIALOG. I many ways, government information librarians were at the bleeding edge of innovation when the Clinton administration decided to embrace the graphical interfaces of the world wide web in late 1995.

How the government information librarians reacted to all this change we will leave for tomorrow.

See you on Day 34.

Thanks to Amy West's tweet for the heads-up about this video, "Tech Agenda 2009: Open Government." John Wonderlich turns a nice phrase (@ 3:10) in response to the question about defining what is open government. John says, "the Federal Depository Library Program is like the internet of the '40s and '50s." Check this one out while nibbling on your cheese (yes that's for you Rebecca :-) ).

This is the second in a series of town halls, "Tech Agenda 2009: Creating New Opportunities for Open & Participatory Government" focused on how technology can help government become more accountable, transparent and participatory. Panelists for Panel II, "Changing Policy to Promote Open Government," include Chris Barkley, Meredith Fuchs, Karina Newton, and John Wonderlich. The discussion was moderated by Andrew McLaughlin of Google. This event took place on December 12, 2008 at Google's offices in Washington, D.C.

Washington Post is reporting a new rule that allows health care workers "the right" not to participate in health care practices that "that they believe violates their personal, moral or religious beliefs."

One wonders if this might extend to librarians who might refuse to give out information about subjects they feel run counter to their own personal set of beliefs? Would there be circumstances, given the precepts of our professional associations about the "neutrality" of our information services, where this kind of personal stand could be taken? It looks like the rule could stay on the books for awhile.

The Oak Ridge Associated Universities (Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the DOE's largest energy laboratory) has put together a Nuclear Slide Rule online exhibit (part of the Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Collection). Mr jalopy points out that it's "staggering to think of a world with nuclear bombs but no pocket calculators."

[Thanks Dinosaurs and Robots for the heads up!]