Our friends Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy over at Full Text Reports have a handy reminder today:

...some of the papers and reports posted on FullTextReports.com are freely available online for just a limited time before they disappear behind a paywall (or go away entirely). If you see something you suspect might be useful to you (or a colleague) in the future, download it the day you see it because it may not be accessible later without a subscription (or it may have been moved or taken offline).

-- Note to FullTextReports followers — Grab It When You See It!, Full Text Reports (April 17, 2013).

Just another reason to remember that libraries should be collecting, not pointing. (See: When we depend on pointing instead of collecting.)

(By the way, in case you hadn't noticed: the left hand navigation pane here at FGI has a feed of the latest reports listed at Full Text Reports!)

If you provide public service for legal or government information, you have probably come across "private laws" and may have wondered what they are. These are not secret laws (which are laws that the public cannot even see!). These are private laws, which means that they usually deal with immigration issues or claims against the government. You might find this CRS report of interest:

• Procedural Analysis of Private Laws Enacted: 1986-2013, by Christopher M. Davis, Congressional Research Service, RS22450 (April 9, 2013)

Hat tip to Steven Aftergood!

Some libraries, library organizations, and library managements believe they can "manage" their collections better by first digitizing historic collections of books and other paper and ink information sources and then weeding their collections of these materials. Such projects will reduce the number of copies held in the aggregate by all libraries (Lavoie, Schonfeld, Schottlaender, Yano). One problem that these projects often overlook is the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between the legal standing of paper and digital objects with regard to access and use. Too often, creators of digital objects attempt to impose copyright restrictions on the digital objects even if the originals were in the public domain. Additionally, digital objects are often encumbered with licenses and technological restrictions that limit how they can be used and who can use them. The digital objects are often just not as accessible or as usable as the original print. How bad would it be if we threw away our print collections in favor of digital collections that are less accessible and less usable?

Randal C. Picker, who is Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law and Senior Fellow at the The Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory University of Chicago Law School, has written a paper and created a presentation on just this issue.

• Picker, Randal. 2013. Access and the Public Domain. Rochester, NY: University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics. Coase-Sandor Institute For Law And Economics Working Paper No. 631.
• Picker: Access and the Public Domain (Fordham IP Talk), YouTube (Apr 6, 2013).

  "This is a version of a talk that I gave at the Fordham IP Conference on April 5, 2013. It is based on my paper Access and the Public Domain, which was published in the San Diego Law Review."

  
  

In the paper, he considers how legal issues affect digitization projects such as The Internet Archive, JSTOR, Google Book Search, HathiTrust, and THOMAS.

His take-aways from the presentation are:

1. Access rights and use rights are different animals and operate in different legal settings.
2. Even though the public domain is coming online, the financing models for the projects will result in efforts to restrict use ina variety of ways.
3. Those efforts will be situated at the intersection of technology controls, contract, terms of use, copyright and the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).
4. Perhaps a truly public public domain, something like the DPLA perhaps, is required to avoid the path of non-copyright control over the public domain.

Hat Tip: ARL Policy Notes.

Endnotes

Lavoie, Brian F., Constance Malpas, and J.D. Shipengrover. 2012. Print Management at “Mega-scale”: a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-05.pdf (Accessed July 19, 2012).

Schonfeld, Roger C., and Ross Housewright. 2009. 28 What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Ithaka S+R. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/what-withdraw-print-colle....

Schottlaender, Brian E.C. et al. 2004. 82 Collection Management Strategies In A Digital Environment, A Project Of The Collection Management Initiative Of The University Of California Libraries, Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. University of California, Office of the President, Office of Systemwide Library Planning. http://www.ucop.edu/cmi/finalreport/index.html.

Yano, Candace Arai, Z.J. Max Shen, and Stephen Chan. 2008. Optimizing the Number of Copies for Print Preservation of Research Journals. Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research. http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~shen/webpapers/V.8.pdf.

The Digital Access to Legal Information Committee (DALIC) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has created a new website to host information about the status of online legal materials in every state with respect to authentication, official status, preservation, permanent public access, copyright, and universal citation.

• State Online Legal Information, American Association of Law Libraries.

  AALL and chapter volunteers researched primary legal materials in their states to determine if online legal materials are trustworthy and preserved for permanent public access. This website brings together information from AALL's National Inventory of Legal Materials and updates AALL's Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories, 2007 State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources and 2009-2010 State Summary Updates. Information is provided about the online Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court Opinions in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the following categories*:

  Official Status
  Authentication
  Preservation
  Permanent Public Access
  Copyright
  Universal Citation

  The state pages will be updated as information changes and as we learn more about developments in the states. AALL’s Digital Access to Legal Information Committee (DALIC) will monitor this site and periodically check in with AALL’s state working groups to ensure the accuracy of the information. DALIC also welcomes your additions or corrections.

• New Website for State Online Legal Information, By Elizabeth Holland, American Association of Law Libraries, Washington Blawg (April 9, 2013).

See also:
State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources (2007).

David Rosenthal gave another fascinating talk about the state of the web and whether or not we can expect to preserve it by harvesting it. This talk was at the 2013 Spring CNI Membership Meeting in San Antonio, TX. David presents an edited text of his talk with links to the sources on his blog:

• Talk at Spring 2013 CNI, David Rosenthal, DSHR's Blog (April 4, 2013).

David and co-presenter Kris Carpenter Negulescu note, among other things, that the days of a document-centered web are long over and that today, what most web pages do "is download and run programs in the current Web's primary language, Javascript. Javascript is a programming language, not a document description language. Your browser is only incidentally a document rendering engine, its primary function is as a virtual machine."

This presents problems for those wishing to preserve information. Among these problems:

• Database driven features & functions
• Complex/variable URI formats & inconsistent/variable link implementations
• Dynamically generated, ever changing, URIs
• Rich Media
• Scripted, incremental display & page loading mechanisms
• Scripted, HTML forms
• Multi-­sourced, embedded material
• Dynamic login/auth services: captchas, cross-­site/social authentication, & user-­sensitive embeds
• Alternate display based on user agent or other parameters
• Exclusions by convention
• Exclusions by design
• Server side scripts & remote procedure calls
• HTML5 "web sockets"
• Mobile publishing

For more about these problems, see also: IIPC Future of the Web Workshop -- Introduction & Overview, International Internet Preservation Consortium (May 17, 2012).

Read David's complete post for a rich discussion of the issues.

We love our gov-docs, don't we? Enjoy:

• Twenty Awesome Covers From The US Space Program, Space Kinja.

  
  The upcoming 2013 April 18 Space Exploration Signature Auction by Heritage Auctions brought us these fine document covers. Manuals, guidebooks, press kits, reports, brochures - all with cool artworks and typography. Enjoy!

NASA took its Technical Report Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/) offline this week, saying :

The NASA technical reports server will be unavailable for public access while the agency conducts a review of the site's content to ensure that it does not contain technical information that is subject to U.S. export control laws and regulations and that the appropriate reviews were performed. The site will return to service when the review is complete. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

As Steven Aftergood reported at Secrecy News [emphasis added]:

In other words, all NASA technical documents, no matter how voluminous and valuable they are, should cease to be publicly available in order to prevent the continued disclosure of any restricted documents, no matter how limited or insignificant they may be.

"There is a HUGE amount of material on NTRS," said space policy analyst Dwayne Day. "If NASA is forced to review it all, it will never go back online."

      -- "NASA Technical Reports Database Goes Dark" by Steven Aftergood (March 21st, 2013).

Michael L. Nelson of the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University investigated the availability of some of the NASA reports at other archives and reports his findings on his blog:

• NTRS, Web Archives, and Why We Should Build Collections, by Michael L. Nelson, Web Science and Digital Libraries (March 23, 2013).

Nelson found that some reports are available at http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ which is an archive of some NASA information that Nelson helped establish after NASA websites were taken down after September 11, 2001. He notes that the removal of information from NASA servers at that time "made it clear to me that NASA information was too important to be left on *.nasa.gov computers." He found more data at the Internet Archive's "NASA Technical Documents" collection: http://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs and in Mark Phillips NACA collection at http://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/NACA/ .

Nelson draws some conclusions from all this [emphasis added]:

...it is events like this that demonstrate the value of copying by-value and not just by-reference.

In other words, pointing to web sites is much less valuable and much more fragile than acquiring copies of digital information and building digital collections that you control. The OAIS reference model for long term preservation makes this a requirement, saying that an organization that intends to provide information to its user community for the long-term, must "Obtain sufficient control of the information provided to the level needed to ensure Long-Term Preservation." Pointing to a web page or PDF at nasa.gov is not obtaining any control.

He also makes a distinction between those things that are saved because of their popularity and things that will not be saved unless special care is taken to preserve them:

I'm not concerned about popular culture artifacts disappearing (e.g., see our TPDL 2011 paper about music redundancy in YouTube), but it is not clear that long tail content like NASA reports will enjoy that same level of uncoordinated refreshing and migration. The moral of the story: make copies of the content...

And he notes the importance of multiple copies:

...a 1994 NASA TM of mine is on at least six different hosts, none of which are *.nasa.gov.

...If NTRS was a LOCKSS participant then access would be uninterrupted...

And Aftergood concludes [emphasis added]:

The upshot is that the government is not an altogether reliable repository of official records. Members of the public who depend on access to such records should endeavor to make and preserve their own copies whenever possible.

Here at FGI, we have repeatedly argued that identifying important information that warrants explicit preservation is the age-old role of libraries in society and that it still is (or should be) the key value of libraries in the digital age. Many government agencies, including NASA and the Government Printing Office have good intentions and good programs for preservation and access, but those agencies cannot guarantee that they will always provide preservation and access. In the case of the NTRS web site, Aftergood and others speculate that the take down was a response to a demand by a single Congressman who said in a press conference on March 18 [emphasis added]:

NASA should immediately take down all publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to export control review have received such a review and all controlled documents are removed from the system.

-- http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365

The NTRS web site was taken offline on March 19.

Government agencies are subject to political activities like this and budgetary limitations. Very bad things can happen which, in cases like this can remove from access, "all NASA technical documents, no matter how voluminous and valuable they are" in a single moment.

Libraries should still be selecting, acquiring, organizing, and preserving information for their user-communities, and providing access to and services for those collections. Libraries do no one a long-term service by simply pointing to resources over which they have no control and which someone else can simply make unavailable literally at the flick of a switch.

FDLP libraries should demand digital deposit from GPO and should actively select and acquire that digital public government information that is of value to their user communities that GPO cannot deposit because it is outside the scope of Title 44.

Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks has responded to the letter by the group CASSANDRA about the recent report Rebooting the Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age by the National Association of Public Administration (NAPA). .

The report recommends that GPO should consider "cost recovery" for access to FDsys (See NAPA releases report on GPO).

The Response from Vance-Cooks says that GPO has "no intention of charging public users a fee to access content available through FDsys. GPO remains committed to no-fee access to FDsys for the public as part of our mission of Keeping America Informed."

This is, of course, good news, but we have to temper our enthusiasm with the realization that GPO's ability to meet its intentions will inevitably be dictated by Congress and its budget.

The complete response is attached below:

Link to pdf copy at Internet Archive.

James and I are happy to announce that our new article appears in the current edition of D-Lib Magazine:

• The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard. by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs. D-Lib Magazine, 2013, 19(3/4). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/march2013-jacobs

In the last few years, there have been a series of articles, reports and proposals that rely on the promises of digitization to address issues of physical space, cost control, access, and collection management for FDLP libraries. One of the reasons we created this Seal of Approval standard is to provide a clear, consistent way to help evaluate some of these promises of digitization.

There are those who continue to insist that we have too many copies of federal documents, that preserving those copies is too expensive, that GPO is being unreasonable when it does not allow libraries to discard materials, and so forth. Although proposals to digitize FDLP collections are often couched in terms of enhancing access, libraries can digitize and enhance access without discarding paper copies. The underlying motivation of such proposals is often explicitly to weed the paper collections and, when not explicit, it is always implied. These proposals raise many questions in our minds. For example:

• Will digitizations include digital text as well as images and will the text be accurate and complete and (re)usable?
• Will the digitizations be readable and usable on modern e-book devices?
• Will digitizations create digital objects that are as good as the originals, or worse, or better?
• Will digitizations be deposited into Trusted Digital Repositories to ensure their long-term preservation and access?
• Will the library that contributes the original be in control of the digital copy, or will control be ceded to large mega-libraries?
• Will the digitizations include adequate metadata for management, preservation, and discovery?
• Will libraries develop and maintain discovery and delivery mechanisms that address the special requirements of federal documents?
• Will libraries provide adequate digital services for the digital collections?
• Will any cost savings be applied to collection management and services for these collections or will the cost savings be redirected to other collections and services?
• Will there actually be cost savings if we adequately address the above questions?

But there is one other question that is more important than all of the above. The question we must ask first is: Are the digitizations accurate and complete? If they are not, the other questions become moot or irrelevant. The DS-SOA is intended to help us answer that question. The DS-SOA denotes that a digitization accurately and completely replicates the content and presentation of the original.

The standard is designed to be easily understood and usable, not just by digitization-specialists, but also by library administrators, collection managers, service providers, preservation officers, business managers, and others who are responsible for library collections and services. It is also meant to help communicate clearly to end users the accuracy and completeness of the digitizations libraries provide to them.

We believe that libraries fulfill a unique role in society, one that is different from that of producers, agencies, publishers, authors, and vendors. We believe that the value of libraries is dependent upon the collections we select, acquire, preserve, and maintain and the services that we provide for those collections. The FDLP collections are unique; they provide a primary-source, historical record of our democracy. The FDLP print collections are not "legacy collections" as they are often called by those who wish to discard them; (the use of the word "legacy" as an adjective means "outdated" and "unwanted"). They are, however, our legacy. The use of the word "legacy" as a noun means bequest, heritage, endowment, gift, and birthright. The DS-SOA is a simple tool that libraries can use to ensure the value of their digital collections and communicate that value to library users. We believe that failure to ensure completeness and accuracy of our digital collections will reduce the value of libraries. We believe that replacing paper-and-ink books with digital copies without first ensuring and documenting that those copies are complete and accurate representations of the original would be tantamount to redacting the historical record of our democracy.

A bill in the Minnesota legislature would allow government agencies to post official notices on their web sites instead of in newspapers and would require a "permanent record" of publications to be "maintained." Included would be publication of transportation projects, proceedings, official notices, and summaries of meetings. The bill apparently does not designate who will preserve the information nor does it specify how to preserve the information except for the caveat that the records must be in "a form accessible by the public."

• H.F. No. 1286, as introduced - 88th Legislative Session (2013-2014) Posted on Mar 05, 2013.

  Subd. 4. Record retention. A political subdivision that publishes notice on its Web site under this section must ensure that a permanent record of publication is maintained in a form accessible by the public.

We would, of course, like to see a bit more detail of the implementation, perhaps even including requirements for deposit of records in a Trusted Repository, provisions for discovery, access, use, and bulk download, and, ideally, a state-law-compliant deposit into libraries.

One section of the bill does specify that print copies of "documents" published on the web must be made available at all public libraries within the jurisdiction. This is not a bad requirement, but it does seem to us to be short-sighted to require deposit of paper copies and not require deposit of digital copies. Libraries could provide enhanced access and service over what the government could provide and could provide redundant digital preservation.

Subd. 5. Print copies. When a political subdivision publishes exclusively on the Web site, it must also make print copies of all published documents available at the main office of the political subdivision, any other government offices designated by the political subdivision, all public libraries within the jurisdiction, and by mail upon request.