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Future of CRS on CSPAN
Updated It looks like CSPAN will be broadcasting and webcasting today's meeting to discuss the future of the Congressional Research Service, May 9, from 2-3:30 pm (EDT). streaming live link: http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN/ link to archived version after the event is over (including a transcript): http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ResearchS
Steve Aftergood -- senior research analyst, the Federation of American Scientists, and director, FAS Project on Government Secrecy. Stan Brand -- founder, the Brand Law Group; General Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives (1976-1983) Robyn Russell -- legislative assistant, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) Nye Stevens -- deputy director, Government and Finance Division, Congressional Research Service (2000-2006); director, Federal Management and Workforce Issues, U.S. Government Accountability Office (1982-2000); director, Organization and Special Projects Division, U.S. Office of Management and Budget (1977-1982) Moderator: Daniel Schuman -- policy counsel and director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, Sunlight Foundation; attorney, American Law Division, Congressional Research Service (2006-2007)Hat tip to Gary for updated information! Continue reading
FDsys Court Opinions Project and PACER
GPO has announced that it is partnering with the Federal Judiciary to create a one-year pilot program providing free public access to court opinions through GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys).
This seems to be a laudable project, but it is important to note that this is not free access to PACER. PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is a fee-based service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
Document Coverage. The GPO pilot project will only provide access to court opinions. PACER provides access to court opinions and more:
- a Case Locator service (a national index for U.S. district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts)
- listings of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys and trustees
- compilations of case related information such as cause of action, nature of suit and dollar demand
- chronologies of dates of case events entered in the case record
- A claims registry
- A listing of new cases each day in all courts
- Judgments or case status
Court Coverage.The GPO project will begin by providing access to 12 courts and expand to 42 when fully implemented. PACER provides access to 216 federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.
Fees. The GPO project will provide free access to opinions from selected courts. PACER provides only limited free access. Although the GPO announcement says, "Free access to opinions in all Federal courts is currently available via the Judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records service (PACER)," this is not strictly true. PACER charges for each search and for each page of documents retrieved and then "waives" the first $10 of charges in each quarterly billing cycle. (Expanded PACER Fee Waiver.) The PACER fee schedule includes price caps and exceptions making it is hard for any particular user to accurately predict whether any particular information need can be met for free or if a large fee will be imposed. As noted here and here, and here, fees can mount up quickly, restrict use, and limit access.
Document Formats. Although the GPO announcement is not explicit about the formats of documents that it will make a available, FDsys typically makes documents available in PDF and plain text. PACER makes information available in PDF, HTML, and (apparently) plain text output from databases. (See FAQ 'How do you determine what a "page" is for billing purposes?') As noted here, formats matter and neither GPO nor PACER have committed to providing structured, tagged, machine-actionable formats.
The future.
Court decisions are a vital part of public information. One recent survey listed PACER access as third in a list of the "Most Wanted Federal Documents." (Show Us the Data: Most Wanted Federal Documents, By Center for Democracy & Technology & OpenTheGovernment.org, March 2009.) If the GPO pilot project is successful, I would hope that it could expand to include more courts and more of the content that is now available through PACER.
It is my understanding, however, that there was a PACER presentation at the spring Depository Library Council meeting and the Council is working on a recommendation to expand a PACER fee waiver in depository libraries. Although I do not have the details of that proposal, it certainly sounds like an attempt to re-intermediate libraries in an age of disintermediation. Such attempts usually fail. (See FGI response to Ithaka draft values proposition for the FDLP and Public comments on Ithaka FDLP Modeling Project draft documents (II) for more on the disintermediation issue.)
A previous PACER free pilot project was stopped abruptly when officials got upset that their system was being used too much. (Is PACER a portent of things to come?.) A similar attempt by GPO to provide a service for free inside depository library buildings and charging a fee for that same service outside those buildings failed. (This was the early days of the FDsys predecessor, GPO Access; see Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program.) The attempt by the Library of Congress to produce a restricted access "e-LCSH" was apparently abandoned.
The current PACER FAQ says that "information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission" but also warns that "misuse" (which "includes, but is not limited to, using an automated process to repeatedly access those portions of the PACER application that do not assess a fee") "is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution or civil action." It seems clear that the courts continue to resist true free access to this information. We can only hope that the current GPO/FDsys project will help turn that attitude around.
Continue readingNew ESRI site offers free mashups of LANDSAT data
Interior to offer new mashup capability for its extensive satellite data library, By Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (05/03/2011).
Interior Department contractor Esri, a map software developer, is expected Tuesday to launch a commercial tool that will enable programmers and non-techies alike to manipulate Interior's library of Earth surface images and data captured by satellite over the past four decades, federal and company officials said. On the new, free website, users can generate mashups showing, for example, how regional property values or Southern crop production have changed throughout the years.The ESRI website is esri.com/landsat-imagery All USGS Landsat data acquired since the program's inception in 1972 also is available at no charge through the federal site Earth Explorer. Continue reading
Congressional Secrecy
Steven Aftergood calls the current state of access to Congressional Research Service reports "Congressional Secrecy." And so it is.
- Wanted: Better Access to CRS Reports, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (May 5, 2011). [T]he New York Times cited a Congressional Research Service report that was performed "in February" concerning the impact of the debt limit. But that report has been updated and superseded, though one might not know it due to congressional secrecy policy, which precludes direct public access to CRS publications.
Disintermediation
May 8, 2011 / Leave a comment
Joseph J. Esposito, an independent management consultant to for-profit and not-for-profit clients, has written a nice post at the Scholarly Kitchen about disintermediation:
- Disintermediation and Its Discontents: Publishers, Libraries, and the Value Chain, by Joseph Esposito, Scholarly Kitchen (April 18, 2011).
In this piece, Joe describes the "value chain" in scholarly publishing in which each link in the value chain adds something to the process: the author creates value by originating an idea and content; the publisher adds value through editorial selection, refinement, production, and marketing; and so forth. Libraries, too, contribute to the value chain: Disintermediation occurs when one link in the chain is bypassed. This can be caused by the link losing value, but it can happen for other reasons and can result in destroying the value provided by that link. How does this relate to the FDLP and government information? As we've noted here and here and elsewhere before, users of government information no longer need to go through FDLP libraries to get government information. And, as many others (including Ithaka S+R) have noted, FDLP libraries no longer have a monopoly on free government information, have no "purchasing power" advantage, and so do not save readers money. That particular value of libraries in the information value chain no longer exists and that results in government information users bypassing libraries for their government information needs. Some (including Ithaka S+R) have concluded from this that libraries can rely on online access to government information stored on government-controlled web servers and create a service-only model of libraries without collections. But this view overlooks the other important values that libraries add to the value chain. These include libraries' selection of materials of interest to particular user communities, their tools for organizing information to make it easier to discover, their tools for making information easier to use, and their commitments to freedom to read, user privacy, and long-term free public access to information. It also overlooks the ability that libraries have (but which government agencies for the most part do not have) to build collections that combine government information with non-government information. In short, it overlooks the importance of digital library collections. Joe makes another good point that is equally relevant to FDLP libraries: that, when we see a link in the value chain being bypassed, we should be asking what effect management decisions had in making that link lose its value. Thus, shouldn't we be asking, If users are bypassing libraries for their government information needs, what decisions are libraries making that make the library of less value to the user? In some cases users may not be aware of value lost. If governments fail to preserve all the information that users need, users will not be aware of this until they find information missing -- at which point it will be too late. In other cases, users may find that getting some information easily (e.g., using google to search the web and find some possibly-relevant government information) is better than using primitive hard-to-use library tools to find some possibly-more-relevant government information. Librarians may say that users "should" use libraries and they'd find "better" information if they did; but making that argument will not attract users. Providing better services will. If we look at what services users do use, we will see that they tend to be services built on top of digital collections. ProQuest, for example, does not build indexes that point to government web servers; it collects digital information and builds services on top of that. In short, libraries could create new value in the government information life-cycle by building robust services on top of rich digital collections (FDLP: Services and Collections ). Or, as Joe says, Continue reading →Continue Reading →