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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

48 and 49 Days to Government Information Liberation

It’s been a rough couple days, sorry about not transmitting yesterday.

For the next three weeks I want to try and sum up what I believe are the critical issues the government/civic information librarian community must confront and resolve to remain viable in the evolving government information infrastructure.

For the past month we have talked about many of these, and other FGI bloggers opened the conversation in other directions.When the next 48 days are behind us, a new federal executive and legislative leadership assumes responsibility in late January, we will need to keep the pressure going. This will mean some consensus among the various interest groups who try to influence the library policy agenda. It means individual librarians will need to work at the institutional, regional, and state levels to assure some kind of coordinated and collaborative response to the challenges ahead of us for the next few years.

So, starting tomorrow, here are the eight points I am going to emphasize till the end of the year.

1. Recognize the importance of librarians and their institutions in the sustainability of a dynamic civic culture.
2. Seek to establish the most effective techniques individual bibliographic institutions can contribute to a national system of government information access, preservation and organization.
3. Create standards/protocols to inform best practices on how to integrate the impact of e-government services into our institutions.
4. Develop a model graduate curriculum/studies to prepare the next generation of government information librarians.
5. Build effective rhetoric of advocacy for open, free and permanent access to government information that binds the shared interests of our various professional associations. This shared rhetoric should come from consensus and not assent.
7. Deliver various programs of public education and outreach about government information policy structure that takes into account the cyclical nature of partisan election, but is not dependent on it.
8. Fashion new models of management and public service for government information resources in our institutions.

See you on Day 47.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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