Home » Articles posted by James A Jacobs (Page 162)
Author Archives: James A Jacobs
Malamud on Public Information
There is a good interview with Carl Malamud in Library Journal. Carl sees the intersection of legally public domain government information with orphan works, all legal information, and information we are losing because of lack of curation and control by the private sector.
- Public Information for All: An Interview with Carl Malamud, By Debbie Rabina, Library Journal (Nov 1, 2010). Do you see a role for libraries? The availability of materials and the parceling out in the public domain is a huge issue for libraries, not only for government documents generally and legal material specifically but everything from the letters of Ben Franklin to all this wonderful corpus of materials that has been issued but is no longer available, the problem of orphan and fallow works, for example, the problem of official vendors of materials that don’t allow knowledge to be spread. Librarians should and must be jumping up and down and pounding the table and saying, “This is a huge issue.”
Ithaka process examining FDLP
Ross Housewright has a post on the fdlpmodeling blog that explains in a bit more detail how Ithaka S+R will proceed in its contract with GPO to "develop sustainable models for the FDLP in the 21st century."
- Project structure & process, by Ross Housewright, FDLP: Modeling for the Future, October 27, 2010.
Thanks for this outline of your work plan. Your description of how you are interpreting GPO's requirement to produce a "Value Proposition" raises some more questions. You say that you will analyze "how the roles and incentives associated with the overall recommended direction, as well as the individual model or models, match with library needs" and how your recommendations would help in the "articulation of the benefits associated with participation." To me, these definitions sound like you will limit the "value proposition" to benefits to libraries and, more specifically, to libraries that "participate" in FDLP (by which, I presume you mean FDLP libraries). Do you intend to leave out of your value proposition benefits to information users and the communities (not necessarily geographically-based in the digital age) that FDLP libraries serve? I would hope that in identifying the "value" of any recommendations you make, you would take the time to identify value accrued (or lost) to current and future users of government information including citizens in general as well as economists, historians, journalists, political scientists, physicians, geographers, lawyers, students, and others (just to name a few who we know rely on government information). I would hope that you would look at the value to GPO and other government agencies of having a network of congressionally-mandated (but non-government) libraries participating in the preservation of government information. I would also hope that you would consider the value to non-FDLP libraries of having, as part of the larger library community, a community of libraries that specialize in government information. In an earlier comment (http://fdlpmodeling.net/?p=1#comment-81597121), I asked if you will be using a traditional commercial/marketing approach to developing a value proposition and how you anticipate specifying or quantifying a value and costs. Have you made decisions about this? To repeat my earlier questions: Will you include costs assumed by FDLP libraries and government information users or only costs assumed by GPO? How will you quantify the value and benefits of permanent, free public access to all government information (including non-current information such as old censuses and old annual reports)? Will you also consider what risks your recommendations create for the loss of free access to government information and the costs associated with any such losses? Finally, I believe that Ithaka S+R's Roger Schonfeld was a contributor to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. Will your current work use a similar understanding when your develop a value proposition? Here is the BRTF definition (page 24 of http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf): "2.1.1 Value and Benefits" "When speaking about value, economists like to ask "Who benefits?" or "Who cares?" because well-articulated demand starts with a clear and compelling value proposition about the benefits to be gained by having, in our case, access to information at some point in the future. The value of information is not to be confused with its monetary or financial value per se, although it can often be denominated in currency. The value of digital assets is best understood as what digital materials are good for, and that is usually understood as the ways that the materials are used -- to advance knowledge, entertain or bring pleasure, help solve problems, or inform public policy." "Each user community will identify its own set of values and benefits in the digital materials they demand. For example, in scholarly discourse there is a clear community consensus about the value of e-journals over time." Thanks for your time in considering these issues.Continue reading
Committees in the U.S. Congress 1993-2010
A nice article about Garrison Nelson's work piecing together information from "committee records [that] were scattered and incomplete."
When he suggested that he might try to find and organize the documents back to 1789, the librarians said that would be impossible.
- A Political Scientist's Trivial Pursuit, By Kevin Kiley, The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 24, 2010). [subscription required] [Garrison Nelson, University of Vermont political scientist and a co-author Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology] just completed Committees in the U.S. Congress 1993-2010 (CQ Press, 2010), a comprehensive account of who served where during the past 17 years. It is the latest book -- and maybe the last -- in a seven-volume history of U.S. Congressional committees. Thirty-five years in the making, Mr. Nelson's collection lists every committee assignment ever made—about 140,000 of them.
National Archives and The University of Virginia Press to Put the Founders Online
National Archives to Put the Founders Online, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Press Release (October 12, 2010).
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grantmaking arm of the National Archives, is pleased to announce a cooperative agreement with The University of Virginia (UVA) Press to make freely available online the historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America. The NHPRC and UVA Press will create a new web site which provides access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation’s Founding era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. A prototype web site including the contents of 154 volumes drawn from print editions of the papers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison will be prepared by October 2011. The fully public version will be launched by June 2012.Continue reading
GPO and FDLP Must Not Go
October 18, 2010 / 2 Comments on GPO and FDLP Must Not Go
[UPDATED: Seavey's article is attached below since it's not yet available online. It's only fair that readers should have the opportunity to read Seavey's words as well as our analysis. We do so to further academic discussion and debate.] In his article in American Libraries,"GPO must go," Charles Seavey accurately highlights an important problem -- how to enable 100,000 non-Federal Depository Libraries to better use government information to inform and empower their patrons. We agree with his point that widespread access to government information is a worthwhile goal for all libraries. However, his proposed solution -- the abolition of the Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) -- is many times worse than the problem it proposes to cure. We believe that Seavey conflates "printing" with "publishing" and "access" with "preservation" and in so doing diminishes the importance of GPO and the FDLP in the life-cycle of government information. But the biggest problem with Mr. Seavey's proposal is that, while accurately emphasizing the issue of access today, it completely ignores at least four key advantages that we would lose without the FDLP: 1) a more reliable preservation model that assures long term, free access; 2) a system that is tamper-resistant and tamper-evident; 3) a system that creates, uses and reuses metadata in a cost-effective fashion; and 4) multiple collections that combine Title-44 materials with non-Title 44 materials in collections that are user-focused and that provide user-centric services. The FDLP has been providing these advantages for printed publications for almost 200 years and, thanks to technological advances and initiatives like the LOCKSS-USDOCS project, it is increasingly capable of providing these advantages for digital information as well. In the world proposed by Mr. Seavey, all government information would be made accessible by a new "Government Information Access Agency" (GIAA). End users and libraries assisting patrons would access the information directly from government-controlled web servers. This would be fine as long as we could rely on the wisdom, funding, and non-political benevolence of the federal government. But we already know we can't. 1. Relying on a single organization (the federal government) to preserve all government-produced information is risky at best. It puts the information at risk of loss due to changing budgets, changing missions, and government interpretation of what information should be available to the public. By distributing digital files to Congressionally-mandated FDLP libraries, we will have multiple funding streams, multiple user-communities, multiple technologies, and multiple preservation-locations. Together, these eliminate the single-point-of-failure risk endemic to a single preservation system maintained by the federal government (This is not hypothetical; we all remember the nearly 1 month outage of the GPO purl server last summer right? [http://freegovinfo.info/node/2704] ). 2. The federal government has a long history of attempting to recall or delete information that puts the government in an unflattering light or out of -- often misplaced -- fears about national security. With custody of government information in the hands of government alone, digital information can be deleted or altered at will without any public input. For example, see Steven Aftergood's 2005 Slate Article, "The Age of Missing Information" and OMB Watch's "Information removed from agency websites." Distribution of digital information to FDLP libraries would provide the same guarantee of tamper-resistence that paper has in cases such as the attempted withholding of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XVI, and in proving evidence of tampering such as that provided by the recent censorship of the Afghanistan war memoir Operation Dark Heart. (See the end of this post for other articles of interest on this topic.) 3. Seavey overlooks the importance of metadata in digital publishing, preservation, and access. Adequate metadata that describes the provenance, authenticity, fixity, and usability of digital objects is essential. If anything, we need more standards -- and open standards -- to be enforced by government "publishers." Content creators rarely want to bother with this, nor are they equipped to do so. The role of a digital Government *Publishing* Office is essential. GPO is well-positioned to fulfill this role by establishing, enforcing, and using digital publishing standards for born digital content. Metadata also plays an essential role in organizing information in collections and making it findable and discoverable. Just having an unknown subset of government information in volatile, commerical, full-text indexes in enormous search engines or relying on the often-primitive search engines of agencies is not adequate and should not be acceptable to government information professionals. See for example, the CTD/OMB-Watch study, Hiding in Plain Sight. Or try this yourself: Search Google for BP Oil Spill [http://www.google.com/search?q=BP%20Oil%20Spill&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8] and notice that the first page of results doesn't list .gov sources at all, just news sources and the BP website. - Compare those results to the 17 reports and Congressional reports available via the same search in catalog.gpo.gov. Using Google to find government documents/information deletes the whole intellectual process of information organization from the government information lifecycle equation. 4. By eliminating the FDLP, Seavey would also destroy the strength of multiple collections that serve distinct user-communities, which, in the digital world, need no longer be geographically based. With a digital FDLP, libraries will be able to do what the government cannot do: build collections that include both government and non-government digital information combined in well-organized, easy-to-use collections that focus on topics, subjects, and disciplines rather than provenance. By distributing digital government information to FDLP libraries, GPO will facilitate many user-centric collections and services that it (or a GIAA) could never hope to provide or maintain. While we at FGI greatly sympathize with the idea of spreading awareness of, knowledge of, and skill in government information use to the nation's libraries, we are deeply skeptical this can be done without a core network of libraries with deep government information knowledge, experience, and expertise. Seavey may be right when he says that, traditionally, FDLP libraries have not much engaged non-depositories in dialog and training, but in the digital world, this is changing as more FDLs are reaching out to their communities. The explosion of Web 2.0 tools and greater bandwidth are creating opportunities to transfer knowledge and expertise through the GPO OPAL webinar program [http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm], online conferences like the Six State Virtual Conference, the 21st Century Government Information course materials on WebJunction, and groups open to all libraries on ALA Connect and Facebook. The list goes on. If there was no FDLP, the expertise that is driving this outreach might evaporate and these materials would not have a government information focused community to create them and make them available. The documents community has started teaching and engaging users and libraries from all walks of life. The digital world is already empowering just the change Seavey suggests we need. We should encourage this, not thwart it. The many issues surrounding access to and preservation of government information will not go away simply by playing semantics or changing the name of a government agency. The many people working within and serving the ideals of the FDLP maintain a critical role in the government information ecosystem. The FDLP shouldn't be tossed aside, it should be assisted and well-funded in its catalytic work of diffusing awareness and expertise in the use and stewardship of government information regardless of format. References: Seavey, Charles. GPO Must Go. American Libraries, October 2010, p. 33 Aftergood, Steven. "The Age of Missing Information," Slate, March 17, 2005. Accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2114963/ on October 11, 2010. Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), OMB Watch. Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found Through Commercial Search Engines (Dec. 11, 2007) http://www.ombwatch.org/files/info/searchability.pdf Heanue, Anne. and the Washington Office of the American Library Association (ALA). Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government. (1981 - 1998). Accessed at http://freegovinfo.info/library/lessaccess on October 12, 2010. Library Success Stories, IFC ALA Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 2004. Accessed at https://members.ala.org/nif/v53n6/success_stories.html on October 11, 2010 Nevelow Mart, Susan. "Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?" llrx.com. June 6, 2006. Accessed at http://www.llrx.com/features/reclaimed.htm on October 12, 2010. OMB Watch. "Information removed from agency websites." http://www.ombwatch.org/node/182#agency Ruffilo, Nick. "Metadata, Not E-Books, Can Save Publishing. O'Reilly Radar July 29, 2010 Accessed at http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/metadata-not-e-books-can-save.html on October 13, 2010. Continue reading →
Continue Reading →