Jim Jacobs (James A. Jacobs) is Data Services Librarian Emeritus, University of California San Diego. He is one of the co-creators of FreeGovInfo.info. Jim is a librarian, teacher, trainer, researcher, writer, and consultant. He specializes in government information and providing data services in libraries. Jim received his Bachelors degree from Oberlin College and his MSLS from University of Southern California.

Jim served as data services librarian at the University of California San Diego for more than 20 years. In other libraries, he has worked as state government publications librarian, Librarian for Instruction and International Documents, and Documents Librarian. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Public Data Users and the Administrative Committee of the International Association for Social Science Services and Technology. Since 1990, he has co-taught the ICPSR summer workshop, "Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation."

Some recent publications include Preserving research data by James A. Jacobs and Charles Humphrey. Communications of the ACM. Volume 47, Number 9 (2004); Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program by James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, and Shinjoung Yeo, Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2005; Government Information in the Digital Era: Free Culture or Controlled Substance? by Karrie Peterson and James A. Jacobs, Symposium on Free Culture and the Digital Library 2005, Emory University, October 2005; and Government Documents at the Crossroads, Karrie Peterson, Elizabeth Cowell, and Jim Jacobs. American Libraries 32(8) (September 2001): 52-55.

Jim can be reached at jajacobs at ucsd.edu

Daniel Cornwall was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He lived in California and Texas before moving to Juneau, Alaska in 1998. Daniel graduated with a Masters of Library and Information Science from UT Austin. He works for the Alaska State Library, which is not associated in any way whatsover with Free Government Information. Daniel was recently promoted to Head of Information Services, the section of the library responsible for the Alaska State Publications Program, Alaska's state documents depository system. Many of the issues facing the Federal Depository Library system have their echoes in Alaska, except for a centralized solution for electronic document preservation. Daniel's resume is available on his personal web site. In addition to his role at Free Government Information, Daniel maintains a personal blog and is a sometime contributor at LISNews. He can also be found on Ning, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other web 2.0 spaces.

GovBudget.com

GovBudget.com is a publication of The Federal Budget Group LLC, led by Charles S. Konigsberg, veteran budget and fiscal policy advisor to three U.S. Senators and three White House Budget Directors.

We have designed GovBudget.com to provide you with a user-friendly web portal to the Federal Budget. We believe that every American should be able to access clear, accurate and nonpartisan information on how our government raises and spends nearly $3 trillion per year.

The information is not very detailed, but it is a quick, simple, easy to understand overview. See also: User-Friendly Federal Budget Web Site?, Government Technology, February 28, 2007 News Release

There have been a few stories recently about C-Span and whether or not its broadcasts are copyrighted. (See list at end of this post.) This started when Republicans claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi illegally posted C-Span video clips of House floor footage. Later, they withdrew that complaint after some clarification by C-Span of their policies. The clarifications led to more confusion, though. Now Nancy Scola has posted a very useful and clear article about the issue:

• Who Owns What C-Span Airs?, Nancy Scola, The OpenHouse Project, February 27th, 2007.

This kind of issue will undoubtedly continue to be important to the extent that privatization of government communication expands and private companies and politicians attempt to use "intellectual property" law to constrain access of public information to the public.

More:

• Congressional Video In Vogue, Tech Daily Dose, February 16, 2007.
• C-Span's IP Policies For Congress Called Inconsistent, by Andrew Noyes, National Journal's Technology Daily, Feb 16, 2007 PM edition, [subscription required]
• Which Videos Are Protected? Lawmakers Get a Lesson, by Noam Cohen, The New York Times, February 26, 2007.
• MetaVid (a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings.)
• Ripping (off) the Congressional video record by Carl Malamud.

This is an interesting article about Google increasing its business with the federal government. Yesterday, Google kicked off "a two-day sales meeting that attracted nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members eager to learn more about its technology offerings."

• Google Searches For Government Work, by Sara Kehaulani Goo and Alec Klein, Washington Post, February 28, 2007; D03.

An interesting tidbit in the article describes how government agencies use enhanced versions of Google Earth to display information for the military on the ground in Iraq and to track airplanes that fight forest fires across the country. The article says that the technology behind Google Earth "got its start in the intelligence community, in a CIA-backed firm called Keyhole. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004."

Yesterday, Google's partner, Lockheed Martin, demonstrated a Google Earth product that it helped design for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's work in Iraq. These included displays of key regions of the country and outlined Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as U.S. and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.

Congress killed the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program in 2003 and several new programs have been reported to take its place. (See Total Information Awareness just changed its name FGI, 2006-02-26.) A forthcoming GAO report looks at the use of the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) system.

• New Profiling Program Raises Privacy Concerns, by Ellen Nakashima and Alec Klein, Washington Post, February 28, 2007; D03.

The Department of Homeland Security is testing a data-mining program that would attempt to spot terrorists by combing vast amounts of information about average Americans, such as flight and hotel reservations. Similar to a Pentagon program killed by Congress in 2003 over concerns about civil liberties, the new program could take effect as soon as next year.

But researchers testing the system are likely to already have violated privacy laws by reviewing real information...

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.

Besides FGI and Radical Reference, James is on the board of Question Copyright, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that promotes a better public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages the development of alternatives to information monopolies. He has also helped to start the Stanford Open Source Lab.

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. Documents to the People (DttP), 36(2), Spring 2008, online supplement.
• "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 freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com.

There is a report on the Daily Kos that attempts to document removal of embarrassing materials from the White House website.

• (Updated) The White House website is getting scrubbed by smintheus, Daily Kos, (Sun Feb 25, 2007 at 12:39:00 PM PST)

Some of the post has "proven" facts and other bits are labeled "Speculation." I would be very interested if anyone in the library community can verify or disprove any of the facts or speculations in the article. Also, are there official print resources that document the information that smintheus finds missing at the White House web site? Please let us at FGI know what you find.

If we can't verify or disprove any of this, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we can't. What are we as depository libraries doing if we can't answer what should be a simple straightforward question about who said what, when?

My time as blogger of the month is almost through, so I'm going to end with a quote from a section of the EPA's Climate Change Kids Site called, "So What's the Big Deal?"

"It is important to understand that scientists don't know for sure what climate change will bring. Some changes brought about by climate change will be good. If you live in a very cool climate, warmer temperatures might be welcome. Days and nights could be more comfortable and people in the area may be able to grow different and better crops than they could before. But it is also true that changes in some places will not be very good at all."

One of my classmates pointed this gem out.

This new 22 page report by Nancy Kranich, KS Consultants, Past President of the American Library Association, formerly associate dean of libraries at New York University, discusses the Universal Service provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the role of libraries in providing internet access to the public.

• Libraries as Universal Service Providers, by Nancy Kranich, Universal Service Project, Benton Foundation, December 1, 2006 [abstract]. Full text at http://www.benton.org/benton_files/kranich.doc

She says that libraries are now the number one point of access for the public outside the home, school, and work, leveling the playing field for those left behind in the digital age. But universal service programs need increased funding, better coordination, policy changes, and service improvements if every American is to have the opportunity to participate in the 21st century information society.

A live webcast of a discussion on the impact of government suppression and manipulation of scientific information on public health, safety, and accountability at national, state, and local levels, entitled “Closed Doors; Open Democracies?”, will be hosted by New York University Libraries’ Business and Government Documents Center and the Coles Science Salon on Monday, March 12, from 1-2:30 p.m. The webcast will be shown at 19 W. 4th Street, room 101 in New York City.

The event features Ira Flatow, host and executive producer of NPR’s “Science Friday” and two panels of experts in a national dialogue addressing issues of access to government information. The webcast is free and open to the public. Visit OpenTheGovernment.org for a list of venues, registration information, and more.

The first panel will focus on national issues and will feature such speakers as Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, presenting an overview on “how secrecy can make you sick”; Rick Piltz, whistleblower on the Bush administration’s manipulation of scientific reporting related to global warming; Susan Wood, former FDA official who quit over the delay of Plan B; and Jay Dyckman, director of The Knowledge Project.

Panel 2 focuses on state and local issues. Speakers include Dorothy Biggs, former EPA librarian; Bill Wolfe, director, NJ Chapter of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility; and Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner.

The program originates from the National Press Club in Washington D.C. and kicks off Sunshine Week 2007.

The website OpenCongress.org was launched today by the Participatory Politics Foundation with help from the Sunlight Foundation. As stated on the website: "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill" and also "OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement." The site incorporates:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

According to Govtrack creator Josh Tauberer, "OpenCongress is based (mostly) on the data set that GovTrack assembles and makes available for others to reuse, so I'm particularly happy that someone has finally reused it to make something new. As you can see from the front pages of the two sites, the focuses of the sites are fairly different, GovTrack being mostly reference and tracking, while OpenCongress is taking a stab at some analysis."

I'm sure every library in the country has a copy or three of the Iraq Study Group Report but here's a fascinating remix of the report by Lapham’s Quarterly in association with the Institute for the Future of the Book. The project brought together a "quorum of informed sources (historians, generals, politicians both foreign and domestic) to add marginal notes and brief commentaries at any point in the text seeming to require further clarification or forthright translation into plain English."

No this isn't a new FGI poll :-) In today's NY Times, there's an op-ed article entitled, "Op-Art: Who Do You Think We Are?" by Ben Schott (author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany” and “Schott’s Almanac,” a yearbook of American society, both must-have books for any serious trivia junky!). The article talks about the General Social Survey, which has been exploring the American psyche for 34 years. After the US Census, the GSS is the most frequently analyzed data source in the social sciences. The GSS is administered by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Don't forget to check out the multimedia component of the article to see some of the questions that have been asked over the years (link opens a new browser window).

FCW reports that "Sixteen agencies complied with the Office of Management and Budget's request to post their information technology business cases online."

• Agencies post business cases online by Jason Miller FCW (Feb. 23, 2007)

Unfortunately, there will, according to the OMB, be no central Web portal where the public can find links to the business cases. The articles says that "OMB and agencies have been reluctant to share business cases in the past and would issue them only when someone filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request." And an executive vice president at a market research firm is quoted as saying that this was a problem because "...every agency interprets FOIA laws differently."

Fortunately, Sabrina Pacifici has provided links to the buisiness plans for each agency!

• Redacted Versions of Agency Business Cases Posted Online by Sabrina I. Pacifici, beSpacific (February 23, 2007)

There is fascinating information in these plans on how agencies view their own e-government initiatives.

An article about the Navy's brig in Hanahan, South Carolina reveals details about "one of the most secretive installations in the government's anti-terrorism effort." Among other revelations is that the brig believes that "higher guidance" and "accepted prison practice" can supersede the Constitution:

"In detaining American citizens, full constitutional rights are afforded except where curtailed by higher guidance or accepted prison practice," the report said. [emphasis added]

• Navy' s secret brig by Tony Bartelme, Charleston Post and Courier (February 23, 2007)

The Navy developed elaborate plans to dodge public scrutiny of its operations to detain enemy combatants, plans that include destroying "critical info," and scrubbing public Web sites.

Being the chair of the Alaska Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable is a little like being the Maytag Repairman. There are about 20 registered members, but only about four or five of those folks are active in association activities. Our usual business meetings vary from two to four and last year I didn't get anybody.

Today I was pleasantly surprised. I got a special visit from Cam McIntosh, Seattle-based Information Specialist for the Census Bureau's Seattle field office. Cam is wonderful to work with and a great trainer. If you work anywhere in Cam's region, you should call her office and arrange a training. If you don't work in her five state area, find your nearest Census field office and see what training resources they can offer your organization.

In addition to Cam, three other RT members showed up. Lacking a formal agenda, I put Cam on the spot and she gave us a brief overview of the American Community Survey, which included these helpful tips:

By 2010, All communities in the United States will have THREE population estimates - one based on a one-year sample of population, one based on a three year rolling sample and one based on a five year rolling sample. This combined with the reporting of "margin of error" in populations may make for some interesting educational opportunities for library patrons who "just want to know what the exact population of ___ is."

It is best to report percentages or proportions in the American Community Survey rather than raw numbers. But be sure to say + or - x percent. Cam compared this to political polling as a way to get folks comfortable with the concept of sampling.

Nationwide, the American Community Survey surveys 1 in 464 addresses every month. This proportion is much higher in smaller areas, reaching at least as high as 35% in really small towns.

Data for the 2005 American Community Survey data DID NOT include any numbers for people housed in "group quarters." Group quarters are places like military bases, boarding schools, homeless shelters, prisons, etc.

State Ranking Tables are available for American Community Survey Data and they can be filtered by the criteria of "with statistical significance." This can be a real eye opener and halt some of the jockeying for position some people have for state ranking tables. If I'm right, the phrase "with statistical significance" should link you to a table of 2005 data ranking proportion of people 85 and over. Looks like Alaska is last by any measure.

Aside from Cam's courteous impromptu ACS presentation, I also got to meet a new librarian from Ketchikan and introduce my new federal documents librarian. All in all, it was a fun hour. If you've got a documents roundtable report to share, send it to me and I'll post it LISNews, Alaskan Librarian, and Free Government Information. If you've already posted your report to the web, feel free to send me a link.

The Office of Management and Budget continues to work toward putting all federal contract and grant spending in a database and online and this week announced a 10 month timeline.

• OMB sets timeline to launch federal spending database, By Jason Miller, GCN (02/19/07)

With about 10 months until the congressionally mandated deadline to put all federal contract and grant spending in a database and online, the Office of Management and Budget is asking for public comment on how best to implement the law."

...OMB launched a Web site, www.federalspending.gov, to collect these comments and set out an implementation timeline and the first set of frequently asked questions.

The new database will eventually include data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and the Federal Assistance Awards Data System (FAADS).

Meanwhile, the nonprofit organization OMBWatch has upgraded its own database of government spending, FedSpending.org, based on these same data.

• OMB Watch Launches Upgraded FedSpending.org Website, OMBWatch Press Release (February 22, 2007)

The updated version of OMBWatch's FedSpending.org has updated data and new summary views designed to provide a better overview of contractors, recipients, congressional districts, states, and agencies, as well as other data categories. In addition, it is more searchable and more easily discoverable through Google and Yahoo and MSN. Finally, it now has an Application Programming Interface (API) allowing programmers direct access to the data in XML format. This means more mashups and remixes.

Earlier coverage of this topic on FGI here: OMBWatch releases database of govt spending 2006-10-23

Humanity Lobotomy Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary

Excellent video features Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Moyers, Lawrence Lessig, Congressman Ed Markey, and more. It explains why net-neutrality is important for democracy.

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

With a number of Federal Depository Libraries celebrating important anniversaries, I was pleased to stumble across the Library Anniversary Celebrations wiki.

I was so happy to see a community generated resource like this, that I've created a page for this and similar projects. It's called the Library Community Projects page and will link to efforts that appear to well up from within the depository community, focus on either government information or depository libraries and are open to editing from outside the group that started the project.

Do you have such a project? Let us know in comments or an e-mail to dnlcornwall AT alaska.net. This weekend is the Alaska Library Association conference, so sites suggested before Monday won't be up until next week unless my fellow volunteers take pity on me and post links before then!

With so many libraries having important anniversaries, someone has created an anniversary Wiki to get and share ideas!

While it is not clear who drew up this wiki, information is plainly sourced and looks useful.

The wiki can be found at:
http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Library_anniversary_celebrations and is currently divided into these areas:

1 PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS
1.1 Press Releases
1.2 Publications
1.3 Materials to Obtain, Adopt, or Create
1.4 Resources
2 AGENDAS, SPEAKERS
2.1 Ideas for an agenda promoting GovDocs
2.2 Speakers
3 DEPOSITORY LIBRARY EXCELLENT EVENTS

While some of this material can be dug out of the govdoc-l archives, isn't it better to have it all in one place? Whether or not you're celebrating the big 1-0-0, check out this site. It could give you event ideas for non-anniversary years.

My thanks to whomever was responsible for this great start. I say start, because like most wikis, it is freely editable. So anniversary libraries, start your engines and make this site even better for those of us who will be celebrating big anniversaries

This page will link to wikis, websites and other materials that are jointly produced by the community of Federal Depository Libraries and/or library association document roundtables.

Government's Global News Is Pulled From USA.gov, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily [subscription required] February 22, 2007 PM edition

The Internet home for government information has been stripped of Voice of America content and other international news after federal lawyers determined that the material should not be on a domestic news site....

"In light of the administration's other ventures into domestic propaganda," said Patrice McDermott, executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, "it was a matter of real concern that such information was on USA.gov, which is linked to by the states and by educational institutions around the country."

...Removing VOA stories from USA.gov will not prevent the American public from accessing VOA on the Internet, VOA spokesman Joe O'Connell said.

"VOA has had a Web site for many years, now," he said Wednesday. "In fact, all 45 of our broadcast languages have Web sites. The nature of the Web is that it doesn't respect boundaries."

Politico reporter John Bresnahan noted a brief item currently on the front page of CQ's PoliticalMoneyLine about the "minor changes" the Federal Election Commission wants to make to its System of Records.

"In a bland Federal Register Notice requesting public comment on a System of Records, the Federal Election Commission seeks to restrict access to the reports of the agency’s Inspector General unless the requestor has the permission of the individual involved."

Bresnahan explains that a former FEC official is being investigated for misappropriation of funds that were used to settle a sexual harassment complaint. According to PoliticalMoneyLine:

"For the FEC this means the Inspector General’s report on the activities of the last Staff Director and his supervision, or lack of supervision, by the Commissioners could not be made available to the White House or Congress unless the former staff director and other individuals involved granted approval."

The FEC is accepting public comments on the requested revisions until the end of the business day tomorrow. Here's how to submit a comment, from the Federal Register notice:

Comments should be addressed in writing to Thomasenia P. Duncan, Privacy Act Officer, Federal Election Commission, 999 E Street, NW., Washington, DC 20463, and must be received by close of business on February 23, 2007. Comments also may be sent via electronic mail to Privacy@fec.gov.

Here is bad news about public access to government information. In an article (Agencies Take Steps To Make Web Data Searchable by Daniel Pulliam, National Journal's Technology Daily, February 21, 2007 PM Edition. [subscription required]) about efforts by Google, MSN. and Yahoo to index government web pages using the Sitemaps tool, J.L. Needham, a strategic partner development manager at Google, criticizes government information access.

Despite months of meeting with nearly every government agency, Needham said there is a lack of understanding about search engines. He said most agency officials do not realize that about 80 percent of visitors to their sites come through search engines.

Most sites under the e-government initiative of the President's Management Agenda remain unsearchable, Needham said. "Literacy about search engines is lower in the federal government than in the private sector," he said.

Because about half of all government Web pages are not searchable, a substantial percentage of people conducting searches are missing information they would otherwise find, Needham said. Managers cite other priorities and a potential increase in bandwidth use, which could drive up costs, as their primary concerns about optimizing their sites for searches, he said.