Free Government Information (FGI)

James R. Jacobs -- not to be confused with Jim Jacobs, one of the other cofounders! -- is one of the cofounders of Free Government Information. At the time of FGI's founding in November, 2004, James was the local, state and international documents librarian at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He has since moved from UCSD to the Bay Area and is currently the International Documents Librarian at Stanford University Library. He received his MSLIS in 2002 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a member of Beta Phi Mu.

James is very active in the library community. He is a member of the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of the American Library Association. He is former chair of GODORT's Government Information Technology Committee (GITCO) and has served on the State and Local Documents Taskforce (SLDTF) and the Publications Committee. He was named 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker with Shinjoung Yeo for his continuing work as founder of Radical Reference.

On p.109 of the report "Managing and Sustaining A State Government Publications Program in California: A Report on the Existing Situation and Recommendations for Action" (2004) there's a bar napkin kind of drawing that James did to map out what he thought the future CA state depository system *ought* to look like. This is basically the model he'd like to see for all government information. You get a picture of a distributed and collaborative model of storage, description, access and preservation, and *this* is what James is working toward with FGI.

Some of James' recent publications and presentations include:

• Delicious government documents or: how to become a social bookmarking fiend. (Forthcoming in DttP)
• "Open source on campus: The Stanford Open Source Lab."Ruth Suehle. Red Hat Magazine.
• "Information Commons: Rebirth or Siren Song?" panel discussion with Shinjoung Yeo, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Annalee Newitz and Bodo Balazs. Crisis of the California Commons Conference. April 27 - 29, 2007. Audio available here.
• Diversity matters? Rethinking diversity in libraries. With ShinJoung Yeo. Counterpoise 9(2) Spring, 2006. p. 5-8.
• "Government Information in the Digital Age: the Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program." James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo. Journal of Academic Librarianship. May, 2005
• "The Future of Government Information". James R. Jacobs, guest opinion piece, Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), May, 2005.
• "Radical Reference: an open-source organization." (PDF) Shinjoung Yeo and James R. Jacobs. Digital Letters: a newsletter of the UCSD libraries digital library program. Spring, 2005.
• "Radical Reference: taking information to the street." (PDF) With Shinjoung Yeo, Joel J. Rane, Lia Friedman, and Jenna Freedman. Information Outlook, Spring, 2005.
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) backgrounder, October 19, 2004. Given to the Librarians' Association of the University of California (LAUC) Executive Board for distribution to individual campus LAUC chapters.
• "RSS: It's Only XML But I Like It!" (Summer, 2004). DttP: A Quarterly Journal of Government Information Practice and Perspective, v.31 no.2, p10-11.
• Librarians' role and USA Patriot Act (Letter to the editor). The San Diego Union-Tribune. October 2, 2003, B-13. with Shinjoung Yeo. (Reprinted on Radical Reference)
• "Blogosphere : exploring the new killer app for librarians" (Summer, 2003). DttP: A Quarterly Journal of Government Information Practice and Perspective, v.31 no.2, p. 6-7.
• Rudasill, Lynne Marie, McNeill-Harmon, Katherine, and Jacobs, James R. (2002). "The Inexact Science of Informing Ourselves." IS2002 Proceedings of the Informing Science + IT Education Conference, 1367-1382. The paper was presented at the 2002 Informing Science & IT Education Joint Conference in Cork, Ireland in June, 2002.

James grew up in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. At one time or another he has called home the following places: NY City, Boston, Tokyo, Japan, Ithaca, NY, Eugene, OR, Urbana, IL, San Diego, CA and now San Francisco. James has always been a library rat and has called himself "librarian" since the age of 15 when he was "co-librarian" at a small public library in Homer, NY (yeah yeah, he's heard about the faux pas of calling oneself a librarian without having an MLS!). As evinced by the number of places he's lived, James took the road less travelled to being a librarian, with stints as an ESL teacher, social studies teacher, garlic farmer, beekeeper, and several technician jobs within various libraries. But, as Robert Frost wrote, that "has made all the difference."

James can be reached at radlib AT ucimc DOT org.