Yesterday Library Journal published its annual list of notable government documents, "Looking Back, Moving On: 2008 Best Notable Government Documents" written by Jim Church and his team of selectors and judges on the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) Notable Documents Panel. Every year since 1983, the panel has pulled together and highlighted state/local, federal and international government documents in order to "promote awareness and acquisition of government publications by libraries and use by library patrons."

This year's list highlighted such publications as Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports as well as free statistical databases from the United Nations (UNdata), the European Union (Eurostat) and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAOStat). Plus there was a special shout out to Carl Malamud and his Yes We Scan! campaign for Public Printer of the Government Printing Office. Check out this year's list of notable documents. You'll be amazed at the depth and breadth of publications by the various levels of governments. And by all means, if you have a favorite government document that you'd like to highlight, the Panel is always interested in nominations!

(Full disclosure: I'm the chair this year of GODORT's Publications Committee, which oversees the work of the Notable Documents Panel.)

Reason #273 for why working at Stanford is pretty cool! YesWeScan!!

Letter from Michael A. Keller, Stanford Universiity Librarian

Technemag.com just published "Techné Interviews Public Printer Candidate Carl Malamud". The interview focuses on online access to government information, of course, but I found this portion of the interview enlightening:

Techné: It seems that many of your proposals for the GPO can be put together under the headings of ‘increasing transparency’ and ‘updating the system for the 21st century.’ A great deal of both of these will involve the use of the internet and other new media platforms. How much printing do you envision as part of the GPO in the middle to long term? Is the title of ‘Public Printer’ any longer an accurate one—or would Chief Information Officer be more fitting?

Malamud: Publisher would be better than CIO. I’m a strong believe that there is a role, and will continue to be a role, for print. You’ll note in some of my proposals I’ve suggested that moving towards the “high end” is a way to continue to maintain jobs at GPO, which has some of the best printers and craftsmen in the world. Some things, such as “commodity printing” may go online or may get distributed, but remember that of the $1 billion in print business GPO does, about $800 million of that is already farmed out to private industry.

On 02.24.2009, FGI "wholeheartedly and without reservation" endorsed the YES WE SCAN campaign of Carl Malamud for Public Printer of the United States. Mother Jones unequivocally endorsed Malamud one week later: "President Obama, Appoint Carl Malamud!" (Jonathan Stein | Mon March 2, 2009):

"Carl Malamud is a badass. If you are a techie or a transparency geek, you probably already know who he is. If you've never heard of him, he is an internet pioneer who has worked for decades, at times using renegade means, to make government information public. He fought to make the information in the SEC's "EDGAR" database free and public (which it now is) and is currently leading a similar fight over the court records database PACER. Today, Malamud has another campaign. He wants to become the Public Printer of the United States, i.e. the head of the Government Printing Office (GPO)..."

The Lede Blog, NYTimes.com, looks at Malamud's campaign in "Yes He Scan" (03.04.2009): "To show that he’s the people’s choice, Mr. Malamud is asking for support in the form of links to his site. So far he says he’s got more than 700 endorsements, like these tweets, and this blog post by Lawrence Lessig, which says, in part:

'I can’t imagine a more exciting appointment. Sometimes an agency needs STASIS. Sometimes it needs CHANGE. Gov’t tech is certainly in the second category, and no one I know of could more effectively deliver on the commitment to open government than he.'" [Lessig Blog | 02.27.2009]

Yes we scan! Carl Malamud, great good friend to govt documents librarians and to the public domain, wants to be the next Public Printer of the United States. He takes as his guides in this pursuit former public printers Augustus E. "Gus" Giegengack and Ben Franklin. His inspiration to public service and his stated plan (below) will have a great and prolonged positive effect on libraries, the Government Printing Office (GPO), government transparency, and access to and preservation of govt information. It is for these reasons that FGI wholeheartedly and without reservation endorses Carl Malamud for Public Printer of the United States.

Yes we scan!

Please allow me to highlight a few of the items that I think we all need to pay attention to, and I invite you to contact me so we can continue to talk about these issues. Publication is a two-way street, and I hope this is the beginning of a long-term dialogue about the public domain and how the United States of America presents itself to the world:

1. America's Operating System. The Government Printing Office serves all 3 branches of government and prints the Official Journals of Government. GPO should lead the effort to make all primary legal materials produced by the U.S. readily available.

2. Librarians. Librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge. GPO should work even more closely with our libraries and reform the Federal Depository Library Program to support them better.

3. Jobs. As commodity printing goes the way of the PDF file and the copy machine, GPO must retrain and refocus its workforce, working with the unions and the employees so we may face the challenges of the future. If nominated and confirmed, I would work to establish a United States Publishing Academy, reviving the grand tradition of GPO being in the lead for workforce development, vocational training for students, and educating the rest of the U.S. government on how to print and publish effectively.

4. Security. GPO produces passports and other secure documents. The current design for passports uses an RFID chip, which means that an American can be picked out of a crowd merely by having a passport in their pocket. If nominated and confirmed, I would ask security expert Bruce Schneier to form a Blue-Ribbon Commission to reexamine the design of passports and other secure documents so we can better protect the privacy and security of all Americans.

5. Jobs. The GPO workforce includes some of the best master printers, bookbinders, and other professionals of the publishing profession. With our cultural institutions, writers and other artists, and using the historical archives of the United States, the GPO should create more materials for the public domain, both as fully produced books as well as freely available master files for others to use and remix.

6. Rebooting .Gov. There is no reason why the U.S. Government should not be one of the top 10 destinations on the Internet! GPO should work with the rest of the U.S. Government to radically change how we present information on the Internet. Some of the initiatives would include installing a cloud for .gov to use, enshrining principles of bulk data distribution into legislation, and a massive upgrade in the government's video capabilities.

7. Full Transparency. GPO serves all 3 branches of government. As the nation's service bureau, GPO must be fully transparent in its own financial affairs and should be a forceful and effective advocate for the public domain. Most importantly, the GPO must be fully transparent to its clients—the Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary. If nominated and confirmed, I would pledge to serve on the front lines of customer service, working to understand the needs of our clients and the public.

Yes we scan!

Since Daniel mentioned yesterday about LOCKSS and digital deposit as recession insurance (which BTW is a GREAT oogly hook for open govt!!) I thought I'd mention a hot new article that Daniel and I wrote for the February 2009 issue of Against the Grain about the new U.S. Government Documents Private LOCKSS Network (citation below). The issue has not officially been released, but we got permission to post to FGI as a preprint.

The article describes the LOCKSS model of digital preservation and why that model is beneficial to apply to the realm of digital government information. We describe Carl Malamud's herculean efforts toward better access to government information; Then talk more specifically about the new USDOCS Private LOCKSS Network (USDocsPLN) using those documents harvested by Malamud. The paper concludes with a call to action.

Let us know what you think. and by all means, help us move forward with the USDocs network by participating. LOCKSS is great recession insurance and SO much more!

Citation: Distributed Globally, Collected Locally: LOCKSS for Digital Government Information. Daniel Cornwall and James R. Jacobs. Against the Grain, 21(1) February, 2009. p.42-44 (p.5-7 of the PDF)

The preservation of federal documents is too important to be left to the federal government alone; we have the makings of a viable system to preserve digital government publications. There are several ways you can help.

Join our private LOCKSS Network. Join the LOCKSS alliance, get a server for under $1,000, and contact us. The more servers in the USDocsPLN, the merrier.

Notify us of collections of electronic federal documents. LOCKSS staff can show you how easy it is to allow LOCKSS to ingest and preserve your materials.

Attack the root problem. Demanding your Members of Congress legislate and FUND a system that will ensure that GPO proactively deposits publications and data through the FDLP and other interested partners. While the USDocsPLN project is a good start and an excellent ad-hoc effort, it should be the government's responsibility to put information in the hands of taxpayers. We should not have to be prying it out of the government’s hands. A distributed digital FDLP benefits everyone.

Tapping back into the "raw power" theme, I just read the New York Times article on Carl Malamud mentioned here by Jim Jacobs. I found the article curious for the simple reason that it equates "free" access to massive amounts of court records with power, and a good form of power, or what he calls the "operating system for democracy." Though this kind of rhetoric sparks the necessary energy to get people to leave their couches and join the open government brigade at the barricade, I think it also paints a too simplistic picture of the complex arrangement of constitutional and legal traditions that favor a highly evolved civic engagement.

Missing from the newspaper article's description of what happened to the PACER pilot project and its sudden suspension is the more messy aspects of democracy that try to balance privacy with open access, free access with the necessary infrastructure (that requires money and personnel to function) to sustain long-term availability of "raw data." This balancing act depends on a series of relationships between the courts, users, the GPO and its depository libraries. Simply downloading millions of pages, as one person did in California is not a relationship, it is simply a power surge that may or may not be made useful by people on the information grid.

However, as the article points out, Malamud does demand some level of privacy protection in these court documents, he puts that responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of the courts by pointing out that is the court's duty, and heavy lifting, to make sure this private information is not made publicly available.

What I would expect to see, if indeed Malamud is interested in becoming a future Public Printer is less focus on the power aspects of the information grid, and more focus on the redistribution stations necessary to make government information understandable, accessible, and sustainable over long periods of time. Libraries have done this for several millennium, and they will continue to do so with the different technologies now being deployed. It isn't a race to see who can make the most government information available. It should be a long engaged relationship between those in power and those the power serves to assure that the knowledge, information and necessary data are understood and usable by the citizen. Power without breakers or distribution centers only overwhelms, it does not inform.

An article in the New York Times adds a little more to the story of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) saga. The article also says of Carl Malamud: "Mr. Malamud said his years of activism had led him to set a long-shot goal: serving in the Obama administration, perhaps even as head of the Government Printing Office."

• An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy,
  By JOHN SCHWARTZ, New York Times, February 13, 2009.

Those courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, had opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them.

Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur who read Mr. Malamud's appeal, managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text.

Then on Sept. 29, all of the free servers stopped serving. The government, it turns out, was not pleased.

A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, "pending an evaluation." A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation."

...At the administrative office of the courts, a spokeswoman, Karen Redmond, said she could not comment on the fate of the free trial of Pacer, or whether there had been a criminal investigation into the mass download.

The free program "is not terminated," Ms. Redmond said. "We'll just have to see what happens after the evaluation."

See also Why was PACER suspended? and More on PACER.

Thanks to Carl Malamud for the heads-up about this new article by Fred Kaplan at Slate entitled "PowerPoint to the People: The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies." Basically, according to Kaplan, the National Archives (NARA) are a mess. "Electronic records ... are generally not disposed of in accordance with federal regulations," and NARA is "still unable to accept M$ Word docs and PowerPoint slides." This endemic problem has been known for a long time. Kaplan links to a 2003 NARA study titled "Records Maintenance and Disposition in Headquarters Air Force Offices," (report written in January 2005) that had been FOIA'd -- oddly all of the recommendations were blacked out?! This shows that government agencies are not following protocols for digital records management and the agencies charged with preservation are not doing enough to either build solid preservation systems or work with agencies to help them get into the 21st century. Is this really the "end of history?"

["retweeted" from Carl malamud!]

There is a great article about Carl Malamud and PACER over at Wired Magazine:

"Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free" by Ryan Singel.

Malamud says he's looking forward to the day he doesn't have to game the system. "If I had $10 million, I'd make a copy of all the documents and be done."

I hear ya, Carl. I hear ya.

Carl Malamud is at it again, this time shaking things up with the Obama transition team over at change.gov. He's submitted a letter to the "Department of Transparency" with 5 proposals for making government information more accessible to the public, thereby making government processes and workings more transparent. His proposals can be boiled down to: 1) make GPO "products" like the Congressional Record, Federal Register, US Code, etc immediately available online in bulk and with historical coverage; 2) create a .gov cloud; 3) wire for video all US Government hearing rooms; 4) train people in the art of both traditional and digital publishing and 5) get rural America access to broadband aka "internetification."

That takes care of the creation of and access to digital government information -- the bulk of the issues with which FGI is concerned. There's just one piece missing in Malamud's ingenious plan: preservation. The Library of the USA needs to include actual libraries in the process.

I'm not faulting the plan, because I really think it's far-reaching and radically elegant in its simplicity -- not to mention that malamud's M.O. has always been about access, "open sourcing America's operating system." And since the Obama transition team is increasingly talking about a "21st century New Deal" that includes a call for a huge job training program combined with an agenda of ethical and transparent government, this is a plan with real legs.

For the plan to work though, libraries and librarians will need to step up to the challenge. We'll need to work closely with GPO and each other and collaborate on the building of digital infrastructures.

Stay tuned. This is getting interesting!

The Honorable Office of the President-Elect
Attn: Department of Transparency
Washington, D.C. 20270

Sirs:

Pre the procedures and policies propounded by the Office of the President-Elect, Public.Resource.Org is pleased to provide for publication and posting the following policy papers and proposals which we have previously shared with your staff:

REBOOTING .GOV. How the Government Printing Office can spearhead a revolution in governmental affairs.

FEDFLIX. Government videos are an essential national resource for vocational and safety training and can also help form a public domain stock footage library, a common resource for the YouTube and remix era.

THE LIBRARY OF THE U.S.A. A book series and public works job program to create an archival series of curated documents drawn from our cultural institutions, with full-quality masters of the books and research materials made available for other publishers to draw on. The program would employ the GPO master printers and would recruit writers, archivists, artists, and other creative workers through a national call for participation.

THE UNITED STATES PUBLISHING ACADEMY. GPO should expand current training programs such as the Institute for Federal Printing and combine them with current workforce development efforts to create a national academy similar to the National Mine Academy and the National Fire Academy, training its own workforce, the government, and the local schools in the art, craft, and science of publishing.

THE RURAL INTERNETIFICATION ADMINISTRATION. Repurposing the Amateur Radio League, modifying spectrum policy, and injecting capital into rural coops can bring high-speed broadband to 98% of rural Americans just as the Rural Electrification Administration did in the last century.

All submissions are in the public domain and you may feel free to remix or mashup the ideas as you so wish.

Respectfully yours,

Carl Malamud
President & CEO
Public.Resource.Org

[Thanks for the tweet John Wonderlich!]

[Update: HA! StanfordLawLibrarians cross-posted a similar story almost at the same exact moment on FGI and over at LegalResearchPlus. So I deleted their post and include this link to their story as well!]

Carl Malamud is itching for a copyfight, and when he wins(!), the American public will be better informed due to better access to state, county and federal regulations, building codes, plumbing standards, criminal laws etc.

Code city is now open and the readme file is a graphic novel (view it as a Flickr slideshow here!) explaining the travesty of state and local codes being copyrighted rather than in the public domain and freely available online. Code city included full-text scans of 43 state codes -- including the entire California Title 24 Safety Codes! -- and several city codes (Little Rock, Denver, Phoenix, Wilmington, Honolulu, St Louis, Las Vegas).

The goal of the project is to get as many city, county and state safety and building codes and regulations out on the open Web in a standardized digital format (YAY open standards!!) so that others can use the documents to design Web sites with more modern search and presentation features, "social Web sites where, for instance, plumbers could provide useful annotations to building codes -- perhaps blending Wikipedia with Facebook for a more useful law site." If/when he's successful, citizens (not to mention libraries!) will no longer be forced to shell out hundreds of dollars (CA code is $1,556 for a digital copy, or $2,315 for a printed version!). And that's a very good thing!!

California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online.

But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.

The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.

It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.

That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.

"When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court."

Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

--Nathan Halverson, Press Democrat, Wednesday, September 3, 2008

I am SOOO bummed that I can't be in Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday, but I hope there are some Chicago area librarians who can make it to the first "non-conference" of the Independent Government Observers Taskforce (IGOTF). Carl Malamud and his posse has pulled together a group of Govt observistas to...

• Encourage technical coordination
• Encourage training and outreach efforts
• Raise visibility of efforts by citizens to increase transparency of government
• Determine the need for and arrive a plan for the creation of support services, such as scanning of archives or hosting of content.

Doesn't that just sound like something in which libraries should be involved?!?!? To top it off, I just saw the agenda for the Municipal govt group (on google groups) and the first item is:

Cataloging and standardization*

How to make available data easier to find and work with (clearinghouses, indexes, formats, etc.)

So please, Please, PLEASE get yourself over to the Gleacher Conference Center at the University of Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday (Aug 4-5). If anyone DOES go, please drop updates in the comments or send notes to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info and we'll post to FGI!

LOGISTICS:

August 4-5, 2008
Gleacher Conference Center
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
Map

ORGANIZER: Public.Resource.Org

LOCALHOST: EveryBlock

SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS:

Omidyar Network
Sunlight Foundation
Google
Yahoo!

As a documents librarian, it's always been a particular frustration to me that I could give access to the CA Codes to all who asked *except* for Title 24, the CA Building Standards Codes which are under copyright by and must be purchased from various organizations -- for @ $890!

Well, no more. Carl Malamud and his public domain avengers have just liberated Title 24 (download the whole kit and caboodle here!). This is truly a great birthday present on Independence Day!!

As noted here before, Oregon has been going through a challenge to its copyrighted statutes. The battle appears to be over now and the the statutes are free! mmmm... we love free government information!

On June 19th the Legislative Counsel held a hearing with activist Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.org and others to discuss the issue.... In the end the Legislative Counsel voted to not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes.

This is a great victory for openness and democracy.