Reaction to Digital Distribution to Depository Libraries: Exploring the issues
On October 17, 2006, the FDLP-L listserv announced the availability of a briefing paper to be used for discussion at the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting. The paper is called "Digital Distribution to Federal Depository Libraries." (PDF). According to the FDLP posting, this document will be used in a discussion at DLC next Wednesday, October 25, 2006. We at FGI strongly encourage you to read the two page document before then. We would also like to commend Council and GPO for having this discussion and asking what seem to be good questions for a system of digital deposit. The bulk of briefing paper is a listing of general assumptions and questions for discussion in seven different areas. As you might imagine, we have have some thoughts both about the assumptions and the discussion questions. Below you will find links to FGI commentary on the different sections of the briefing paper. We're hoping to start a discussion here, so if you have comments of your own, or wish to challenge our assumptions, facts, biases, etc, please either use the comments form or send an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo dot info. When discussion appears to have drawn to a close, we will send our commentary plus your comments to GPO. Continue reading
Act today to ask Bruce and Mike!
Update 10/18/2006, the archived session and the Q&A has been posted to the GCN web site. ------------------------ Tomorrow, Wednesday October 18, 2006, Government Computer News is hosting:
Online forum | Bruce James and Mike Wash Join us on October 18, 2006 1:00 PM through October 18, 2006 2:00 PM Guest: Bruce James, Government Printing Office chief executive officer and public printer Guest: Mike Wash, Government Printing Office chief technical officer Bruce James, Government Printing Office CEO and U.S. public printer; GCN's 2006 civilian executive of the year Government Printing Office chief executive officer and public printer Bruce James and chief technical officer Mike Wash will answer questions about how they moved the agency into the digital age. James, the GCN 2006 Civilian Executive of the Year, and Walsh will be available online on Oct. 18 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. ET.Looks interesting, please join if you can. I'd like to point out that people can submit questions ahead of time to Mr. James and Mr. Wash and I strongly encourage you to do so. You can submit questions at http://www.gcn.com/forum/qna_forum/42282-3.html. You will need to give your name and State OR your City and State. You can give your e-mail address if you want the host and/or guest to contact you directly. The Q&A will be archived, so even if you can't attend the online forum, submitting a question would be a constructive act. I'd suggest that any questions follow these guidelines: - Be brief. - Ask a question rather than being a statement phrased as a question. - Be on a topic under GPO's control. - If you refer to a document, try to include the URL. That will help people accessing the Q&A later and show Mr. James and Mr. Wash that you are familiar with GPO documentation. That will make it harder for them to simply refer to material you may have already read. - Be polite. I believe that we should take this opportunity to ask questions about GPO's current and future practices, not to imply that one political party or the other has destroyed gov't information as we know it. One of the reasons that I hope there will be many intelligent and articulate questions from the documents community is that Government Computer News is read by many government IT types in federal, state and local government. If they see document users and specialists in constructive dialog asking questions that might not have occurred to them, it can only help us all. Good luck and good questioning to us all! Continue reading
New Feature! News Aggregator brings docs and tech news to FGI
This week FGI volunteers started a new feature, a news aggregator. We have loaded up a lot of news feeds from online magazines, blogs and a few from the Government Printing Office and brought them together in one place for you to read them. Just look for the "news aggregator" link on the left hand side of the home page. (Note from Jim: you can also access the aggregator by clicking on "In other news..." in the top toolbar!) The news aggregator gives you the option of reading all the sources we at FGI find useful, or reading just ones from these four catagories:
- Government Documents Blogs
- Government Technology
- Information focused government blog
- Organizations of interest to FGI
Part 19: Nonlawyer’s journey through Title 44: Use of Documents by Public Printer
This post, all earlier postings in this series, and my “not a lawyer†disclaimer can be found at http://freegovinfo.info/title44 or through our library under Nonlawyer's Journey through Title 44.
TITLE 44--PUBLIC PRINTING AND DOCUMENTS
CHAPTER 17--DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS
Sec. 1712. Documents for use of the Public Printer
The Public Printer may retain out of all documents, bills, and resolutions printed the number of copies absolutely needful for the official use of the Government Printing Office, not exceeding five of each.
(Pub. L. 90-620, Oct. 22, 1968, 82 Stat. 1281.)
Historical and Revision Notes
Based on 44 U.S. Code, 1964 ed., Sec. 81 (Jan. 12, 1895, ch. 23, Sec. 73, 28 Stat. 618).
This portion of the law makes it clear that the Government Printing Office (GPO) can retain documents for its own internal use. This portion of the law will come in handy has GPO digitizes materials still issued in paper and as it builds its National Collection.
I have to admit that I'm unsure of the history of the usage of this provision, which has been around since 1895, I imagine it was to have file copies available in case GPO was asked to provide a reprint. If someone else has better knowledge, I hope they will add something in comments.
Open Educational Resources holds lessons for documents users
While not squarely on the topic of government information, I think this new article on Open Educational Resources will be of interest to FGI readers and government policymakers: Title: THE PROMISE OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES. Authors: Smith, Marshall S. and Casserly, Catherine M. Source: Change; Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 38 Issue 5, p8-17, 10p If you have a subscription to the service, you can access the completed article on EBSCOhost. If you don't have a subscription to EBSCOhost, you can read a Creative Commons licensed preprint produced by the authors. All quotes from the article will be from the preprint. The main thing that struck me about this article was its discussion of the market for educational materials (lectures, syllabyi, etc) and how similar it sounded to the situation for government information:
Many prestigious American universities originally applied a capitalist model to the Web, imagining that they would make a great deal of money by selling some part of their knowledge through Internet-based delivery systems. By 2001 this idea had foundered in the face of market realities. With the specter of riches growing dim, there emerged substantial support among academics for using the Web to provide open access to educational materials. After all, most published professors know that they are not going to become rich on their royalties, that their books and articles will probably be out of print within five years, and that academic progress is nourished by the free flow of information. And most faculty, proud of their work and wanting to share it, provide links to their scholarship on their own Websites. So MIT boldly changed the model: in late 2001, it announced its OpenCourseWare initiative, an ambitious project to share with the world the content of its courses. Access to knowledge and the capacity to use it are critical to both individual and collective prosperity in a world of knowledge economies and global interdependence. In The Future of Ideas Larry Lessig argues that if some have access to the wealth of information on the Web while others do not, creativity will be constrained and inequalities heightened. And that argument does not simply apply to the widening economic gap between the developing and developed world. We only have to compare the resources of the libraries and laboratories of the top twenty universities in the United States with the thousands of colleges and universities that are among them to see such inequalities here at home.Doesn't the first paragraph remind you of the Government Printing Office's first attempt to sell electronic information back in the early 1990s? And perhaps the second paragraph reminds of the differing levels of access that people have to information produced by their government? The article also contains examples of the benefits of full open access. In its most dramatic example:
Finally, we hear stories about people and organizations that are in the business of selling content but who also place their content on the Web for open access. Then, instead of destroying their market, the free access increases their sales and revenue. In one example, after the South African Human Sciences Research Council Press (HRSC) embraced open content publishing and made many product freely available online, print sales increased over 300 percent. Other less dramatic examples abound.This article is a good example of what we document librarians can learn by seeing what people in other fields are doing. Its something we should do more often. It is also an example of how progress isn't always served by a strictly free-market model. That is something that GPO and Congress should consider in providing future access to government information. People wishing to know more about Open Educational Resources in general should visit the researcher's web site. Continue reading
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