1. Good morning and welcome to the webinar on 

Community-Based Digital Collection Development of Born-Digital Government Information

I am James A. Jacobs, you can call me "JIM"

My colleague James R. Jacobs will be presenting in the second half of the webinar. You can call him "JAMES"

2. I will be introducing todays topics and ideas and giving some background and scope and even a little history.

James will be going into some of the technical details about how any library, large or small, even with limited resources can do actual digital collection development of fugitives.

Please note that we are putting our notes and slides and the links we mention all on the FGI website at this link:

freegovinfo.info/fugtivies

3. As an example:

Some of the information I will present today comes from a report I wrote for a Center for Research Libraries forum on Government Information in the Era of Big data.

You can find links to the forum, the report, my speaker notes, and more at freegovinfo.info/fugitives

4. Our topic today is "fugitive" government documents. 

I like to think that we called these publications "fugitives" because they were available only fleetingly and they disappeared quickly. (That is, after all, one of the dictionary definitions of "fugitive.")  

I never liked the term, though, because it has a connotation that implies that these documents "escaped" the system (the more common definition of the word). That analogy implies that the FDLP is like a prison.  

But The point is that these were documents that libraries would expect they should get by virtue of being an FDLP library, but do not.

5. [What is a fugitive document?]

Today we will use the shorthand term “document” today to refer to any government information whether it is a single PDF or an HTML page or a a video or audio file or a database or anything else.

So what is a fugitive document? 

Title 44 of the United States Code defines what “documents” go into the FDLP as  “Informational matter” published at Government expense or as required by law. (By the way, This terminology is from a law written 50 years ago.)

A Fugitive is anything that fits that definition, but does not go into the FDLP.

It is worth noting that the Title 44 definition of government publications [§1901] has some exemptions for things like classified documents and documents "for official use only."

6. So, what kinds of things become "fugitive"? 

Almost anything could be a fugitive. Here is an example of one that looks like everything else on your document shelves. 

It is a committee print  -- a category of document that, for many years, Congress considered as “internal documents." Until the 1970s Committee Prints were not well distributed to the public or FDLP.

7. Why are there fugitives? 

There are many reasons. Here are some that Public Printer Michael DiMario enumerated 17 years ago.

Notice that even then, 5 years after the first web browser, digital distribution by agencies was high on the list.

Also note:

GPO’s official purview is also limited by the Paperwork Reduction Act, and by Office of Management and Budget directives that allow executive agencies to avoid complying with even the limited scope of Title 44. 

8. Here are some specific examples of fugitives that DiMario gave in his 1997 testimony.

9. And here are some examples from a 1989 study by Cynthia Bower, published in Documents to the People.

Ms. Bower's paper is a really good one and I recommend it to you for its scope and scholarship, but also for the clear and insightful way she defines the problem.

The subjects are still relevant and sound current today. This should alert us to the fact that these are not ephemeral publications and that we need to capture and preserve documents like this because they provide the historical record of government actions and understandings over time.

10. I'm showing you some of these older examples to demonstrate that the "fugitive problem" is not a new problem. It has always been with us. 

And, as you might imagine, there have been a variety of strategies for dealing with the problem.

This slide shows some of the range of strategies that have been used or attempted over the years. As you can see, they include institutional and individual strategies; technical and legal strategies.

I want to highlight the DocEX project for you too and an excellent article on that project by Thomas Shaw in Library Trends. 

The project was librarian-driven. It was created and sponsored by ALA, the Association of Research Libraries, the Special Libraries Association, and the American Association of Law Libraries. DocEx not only provided copies of fugitives to subscribing libraries, it also provided a copy to GPO for listing in the *Monthly Catalog*. Some of the important fugitive series that DocEx saved included Congressional "committee prints" and the *Daily Report* of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

11. In these next 3 slides, I want to move on to the scope of the fugitive problem.

Here are some of Cynthia Bower’s findings from the 1980s. She has some fascinating data that seems very familiar even though it is more than 20 years old. She began by saying that no one knows the scope of the problem.

She found that the fugitive problem varied by agency and type, so she dug into some of the specifics finding, for example, that 43% of documents indexed in American Statistics Index were fugitives.
 
And (as you see on the chart at the bottom of this slide) she found that EPA publications (the black bars) became less and less likely to be listed in the Monthly Catalog (grey bars) over the decade she studied.

12. Gil Baldwin, the Director of GPO's Library Programs Service, estimated in 2003 that about 50% of the universe of Federal printing was fugitive and that 78% of the publications of the National Institutes of Health's were fugitive.

13. This graph is from the paper I did for CRL on born-digital federal government information. 

Although the size of the fugitive problem is difficult to measure for a number of reasons, the scale can be illustrated by comparing these three values:

- the 10,200 items distributed by GPO to FDLP libraries in one year (GPO 2012)

- all 2.3 to 3 million items estimated to be held in the Federal Depository Library Program (Burger, Peterson)

-  and the 160 million URLs harvested in the 2008 End of Term Crawl (Hartman). 

14. Now, you may have a lot of questions about the 160 million figure and I want to address those questions. 

Your first question might be, "Isn't all that in GPO's FDsys?"

Well, we don't know because GPO does not provide statistics on the quantity of its holdings, but there are some things about the content of FDsys that we do know:

- we know that most of what is in FDsys is from a single branch of government. GPO lists "collections" that are in FDsys and more than half of those are explicitly Congressional.

- we also know that GPO has been getting more data from the judicial system into FDsys. Specifically, opinions of some, but not all, federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts, dating back to 2004 are now there.

- We also know the biggest gap in FDsys is information from executive agencies. GPO has a page listing "government authors" and (apparently) only 56 of the 181 authors listed are executive department agencies. The 2013 U.S. government manual lists 246 agencies.

15. To summarize this brief overview:

- The “Fugitive problem” is not new.

- No matter what the exact number of fugitives is, the number is very, very large.

- The information content of fugitives is important and should be available to our users and preserved for future users.

- There is no fool-proof strategy/solution to the fugitive problem, yet.

16. Given this knowledge of the fugitive problem, how might we act?

I suggest to you  that, in absence of a **universal** solution, we should each do what we can by focusing on the needs of our own communities of users. 

This means that **every** library can contribute.

and we can create a universal strategy by developing  
a loosely-coupled, 
decentralized
strategy.

**James and I are suggesting that individual libraries can attack the problem of born-digital fugitive documents by selecting, acquiring, and preserving them.**

James will go into how we might do that next.

17. But before I turn it over to James, I want to give you, very briefly, a bit of technical context to selecting born-digital government information.  I have 3 "technical notes" for you. 

Don't worry, they are not very technical. :-)

The first technical notes is about terminology. 

We might want to talk about selecting a “Page” or a “Title” or even a “File”. But what do those words mean and how do they relate to our selecting information?

I use the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement of the Keystone XL Pipeline Project as an example. Here is its web page.

18. Now, if we wanted to preserve this “Page,” we would need to preserve 13 "Files" (with 13 unique URLs).

That includes:

The HTML file that is this page at its URL, plus the other files that comprise the contents of this page:
7 images files
3 javascript files 
2 css style sheet files

19. But, to preserve this “Title” (the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement of the Keystone XL Pipeline Project), we would need to preserve;

All 94 PDF files that comprise all the 11 volumes and all the parts of the Environmental Impact Statement.

And, we could do that without preserving a single HTML or javascript or style sheet file.

20. Here is the second technical note: the issue of Which version, edition, or copy do we select?

The example I have chosen is a single Executive Order: Number 13662.

One obvious first choice for selecting this EO would be the 
GPO Authenticated version in FDsys (as is pictured on this slide).

21. But what about all those other versions on the web? I found ten different URLs that (apparently) have the same executive order (or metadata about it). 

This raises the questions! 
Are all these really the same? 
How do we decide which to select and preserve?
Or should we preserve them all?

And what about the links to the different versions? Should we preserve those links? Will individuals have linked to the different versions? Should we preserve what was actually linked-to so that a user in the future can find what they linked to and cited in the past?

Some of the other copies I found include  the White House copy, the Federal Register site copy, the Federal Register printer-friendly copy, the GPO Federal Regsiter PDF version, the GPO Federal Register html, GPO's html version, 

James will go into more detail in a moment, but as a preview to a possible answer to all these questions: It depends(!) on what and how you select. One library might have a collection of all EOs and use one strategy to select and acquire them. Another might be selecting the Federal Register and another crawling the White House web site. Still another library might not select any of these publications or document-types or web-sites, but be selecting on the topic of the Ukraine, or Foreign Policy, or Russian Foreign Policy and want this particular EO as part of that collection. Each library could have different selection criteria and procedures and be equally "correct" in their choices.

22. Here is tech note number 3. dot-gov and dot-mil? or Beyond?

To illustrate this issue, I have chosen a web page on the White House web site that lists social media sites that the White House uses to post information. 

It lists 92 accounts on 26 non-dot-gov, social media websites.

This raises many questions: 
How much information is duplicated? How much is unique? Do these sites simply point back to .gov websites? Would it be of value to preserve how the White House presents itself differently to different communities?

Again, you can imagine different libraries making different choices for their different communities. 

The strength of a loosely-coupled, decentralized, user-focused strategy is that all decisions are equally correct and they all serendipitously reinforce and complement each other.

I'll turn it over to James now.