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Who decides what is available and what is withdrawn?
Do you ever wonder why or how something gets on a federal government web site -- or why something suddenly disappears? Like much of the web, the federal government web sites have a history of a "grassroots legacy of letting a thousand flowers bloom" followed by attempts to keep tight control over what is on the web. According to a story in GCN (A tangled web we weaved by Trudy Walsh, GCN, 04/02/07), at the General Services Administration the chief information officer has every page reviewed every six months. The CIO gives the office responsible for the page's content multiple "warnings" before the expiration date.
"We give them a warning so they can review the page," said Susie Kampans, team leader of GSA's infrastructure applications team. If they don't, the content will go offline and won't be available to the public.The article describes different models of managing hundreds of millions of federal government web pages.
[Candi] Harrison [Web manager for the Housing and Urban Development Department] said she believes strongly in the need for a move toward centralized governance of federal Web sites. "But I think it's going to take an act of Congress." Harrison estimates the number of federal Web sites at more than 24,000, "which is ridiculous. And let's just say that unnamed sources at Commerce don't know how many Web sites they have." Federal Web sites are funded by taxpayers, and that's who they need to serve, Harrison said. "Some heads of agencies use the Web site as their own personal page, with a big photo of the secretary," she said. "Now we have 400 million government Web pages," Harrison said. "We can't keep that current or manage that. It's all sitting out there unattended." The overwhelming amount of data on federal Web sites doesn't even help most people. "The public can't use all this content," she said. "People make better decisions if they have fewer options."Continue reading
Two additions to Remix page
I've added two new items to our Remixes page.
- OpenCongress, which was covered before by Peggy Garvin (Congress Remix: OpenCongress.org Launched)
- An article about mashups and remixes, etc.: Mashups, Blogs, Wikis Go Federal, by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Searcher (March 2007) Vol. 15 Issue 3, p33-39. [subscription required] and its free list of links [no subscription required]. "The article focuses on the creation of mashups, blogs and wikis that deal with issues concerning the U.S. government. FedSpending.org is a resource maintained and operated by OMB Watch that enables anyone to see what fundings the U.S. Congress has appropriated in the form of contracts and grants. The Sunlight Foundation has established Sunlight Labs as a pilot project to develop technological ideas to improve government transparency and political influence discourse. The library at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh has put together a U.S. Congressional Committees Meeting Index."
Thanks to Peggy and her article! GovTrack and OpenCongress Go Beyond THOMAS, By Peggy Garvin, "The Government Domain," LLRX.com March 18, 2007.
Continue readingOMB Earmark database
The Office of Management and Budget is putting data on earmarks online, but not as quickly as originally announced.
- Earmarks data now set to go online in phases, by Aliya Sternstein, GlovExec.com, March 12, 2007
The White House Office of Management and Budget published some information on spending earmarks to the Internet late Monday -- a departure from the detailed disclosure that OMB outlined earlier this year.
The OMB website, Earmarks, says "This database is not designed, and cannot accurately be used, to identify the individual sponsors of congressional earmarks.... The information currently available is a work in progress and will be updated in the coming weeks (most recent update: March 25, 2007)."
Continue readingWhy is the EPA’s library being decimated?
A Hostile Environment for Documents, By Glenn McGee, The Scientist, (March 2007) Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 26.
You'd think that the agency responsible for, say, all clinical information on the effects of pesticides would do anything to keep those systems of information fully operational and to modernize. But in fact, the greatest environmental disaster of this decade may be the amnesia that the White House and EPA seem hell-bent on causing. In February of 2006, the White House proposed cutting $2 million of the $2.5 million budget for EPA libraries. It is a huge cut to the libraries, but a blip against the $8 billion EPA budget. Incredibly, EPA did not wait for the budget to be approved, but instead began decimating libraries and trashing materials including at three regional libraries, a library for research on the effects and properties of chemicals, and its headquarters.Continue reading
GPO’s Budget and Priorities
April 1, 2007 / Leave a comment
The news of the Government Printing Office's (GPO) funding for next year is not encouraging. After flat-funding in 2006 and 2007, Congress is now considering the GPO budget for 2008. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee's Legislative Branch Subcommittee, said that the focus has to be on GPO's mission of printing first and foremost, and the transformation aspects, while still important, are secondary. "What happens to the systems if we can't fund it?" she asked.
At a time when 92 percent of all documents are available online Mike Wash, GPO's chief technical officer, said that accessibility will not be hampered. We might amend that by saying "accessibility will not be hampered...yet." Wash did say that the plans to add capabilities could be affected.
Here at FGI, we've often argued that it is a bad idea to rely on a single government agency (i.e., GPO) to provide the "single authoritative source" for "permanent preservation for public access" to all Federal documents (A strategic vision for the 21st century). One reason for our concern is that inadequate funding of GPO could reduce or even eliminate access to information that is essential to citizens. Every agency must pick and choose and set priorities and Congress must set priorities among all government programs. That is simply the way things are. As we noted elsewhere:
If GPO can't get funding in 2008 for transformation and adding capabilities, will it be able to always keep online everything that citizens need or everything that is important to your library's users? Or will it "come down to priorities" for what is kept freely available and what is taken offline or what becomes available "on a cost recovery basis" (A strategic vision for the 21st century)? Will we find those pointers in our OPACs pointing to a message that says "not enough funding to keep this online" -- or pointing to the GPO bookstore?
We may find that one of GPO's original planning documents was prescient when it said that it would maintain information online for "as long as usage warrants" (Electronic Information Access and Dissemination Services of the Federal Depository Library Program). When it comes down to priorities (and it will -- it already is), if we only have one "authoritative source", it will be Congress and GPO that decide what is "warranted" and what is not.
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