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Comment on Government Information Liberation
John,
Thanks for this interesting thread about Government Information Liberation!
I hope I am not misreading your enthusiasm if I characterize it as part of a new optimism that so many of us are feeling after the election. I certainly feel more optimistic than I have for a long time!
I want to key in on two things you've mentioned in your first few posts in your thread. (I may be going off on a bit of a tangent from what you were saying, but I hope not.)
One is the idea of "weaving the political perspective with the policy perspective with the governmental structure perspective." The other is the "values" of libraries and librarians.
First: weaving.
A few of us at FGI had a conversation this week about the intersection of government information with non-government information. We discussed how the old model of separating government documents departments and collections in libraries was probably more of a library operational convenience than anything else. We certainly did the best we could with that model and the tools we had at the time to provide the best access we could to government information, but the model of separate collections was never ideal for users.
Now, in the digital age, the model of separate (ok, I'll even use the buzzword: "stovepipe") collections has become less necessary and even less fruitful than it was in the paper and ink world. Projects like govtrack.us and the many projects from the Sunlight Foundation and other remixes and Insanely Useful Web Sites demonstrate how technology can help us overcome a lot of limitations we faced in the past and create tools for civic engagement.
I would really like to see libraries creating similar projects and collaborating with projects like these! We have done it before when we created gateways to GPO Access and were so successful that GPO had to stop charging for access and start cooperating with this grass-roots effort.
We also really need to come to grips with the fact that government information is on YouTube, Twitter, Qik, Facebook, etc. We need to accept that the overlap is rapidly increasing between clearly-official government information, and unofficial-but-important information (think: Hormuz incident), and grey-area political information, and public-officials-in-the-public-arena information. We need to accept that more and more government agencies are going to have publicly accessible comments from the public as agencies attempt to engage the public directly with e-government initiatives. We need to face the fact that no algorithm or group of highly-trained bibliographers is going to always succeed is accurately parsing all this and coming up with a universally agreed upon set of information that we call "government information."
So we need ways of melding information that we get from different sources in ways that are useful and informative. And, we also need ways of selecting what to preserve and we need metadata so that users can understand provenance and make their own evaluations of authenticity, currency, and usefulness.
But I also think that libraries have a unique role to play in enabling mashups and remixes and that is the building of digital collections.
No other person or organization or group or institution is better positioned than libraries (and FDLP libraries in particular) to select, acquire, organize, and preserve digital information. No one is more committed than libraries to providing service and free access. And, let's face it, no one else will.
Values.
So that leads me to my second point: the values that librarians and libraries bring to the table. Whether we are talking about government information in the abstract, or civic engagement, or technological change, or long-term preservation and access, or "the future of libraries," libraries and librarians bring a unique combination of perspectives and values that transcend the interests of the many other valuable stakeholders of these issues.
Clifford Lynch made a similar point recently. Listen to his brief Summation and Closing Observations (Audio [MP3 19 min.]) at the Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information Fall Forum, October 16-17, 2008 in Arlington, Virginia (Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future, October 2008). At around the 13-14 minute mark he begins to talk about the Values that librarians bring to the conversation.
Perhaps even more importantly, when we look at the challenges we all face under the current economic crisis, it is libraries that are better positioned than anyone else to act on these values and get them funded.
A long time ago, a faculty member told me that the library was everyone's second priority. Everyone values the library, but everyone values their own department, grant, job, mission first. But right after their own mission, everyone wants (and needs!) some institution to take responsibility for long-term preservation and free access to information. And this requires an institution for whom this mission is a first priority -- not a second priority or a secondary benefit of another priority. And, yes, I'm thinking of government agencies, including GPO. One can claim, as GPO does that "There has been a paradigm shift in preservation of depository materials" but you will look in vain in the GPO Access Act, for the words "preservation" or "long-term" or "permanent." And, yes, I am also thinking of Google, and the entire private sector. As much as we love their products, their mission is to make money; access is a secondary by-product of that mission.
I believe that society needs someone to select, acquire, organize, and preserve information. I believe that we will lose information if we rely on information producers to preserve information for the long term and we will lose free, open access if we rely on those who see their "content" as an "asset." I believe that we need an organization that will not just provide long term preservation and free access, but that will fight for it: fight against proprietary formats, restrictive licensing agreements, and DRM restrictions, and fight for open access, open formats, and Fair Use.
I tend to look at libraries and the FDLP this way: if someone does all of these things, what would we call that entity but "a library"?
And who is in a better position to be "a library" than ... libraries?
As I said earlier:
We read so often of libraries trying to "redefine" themselves in the digital age and trying to justify their existence to people who think that google is a library, that ad-hoc solutions to preservation are good enough, and that the government will provide free access to all of its information forever for free.Continue readingFor those librarians who don't believe all those myths, here is a simple way to reinvent your library: insist on digital deposit by the government and establish your library as a digital Federal DEPOSITORY Library.
2008 Society of American Archivists Convention: “Citizens in the Dark? Government Information in the Digital Age”
These are my speaker-notes for the presentation, "Citizens in the dark? Government Information In the Digital Age," which I gave on Friday Aug 29, 2008, at the meeting of the Acquisitions and Appraisal Section of the Society of American Archivists Convention in San Francisco. The theme of the convention was "Archival R/Evolution & Identities." This is not a transcript of what I actually said, but an outline from which I spoke. There are sentence fragments and inconsistent capitalization and other less-than-final-draft editing. I hope that this is useful to you in spite of these distractions. I do include the points I tried to make and a bit of the verbiage and all of the links I have. - Jim Jacobs. --- The title of this presentation is: Citizens in the dark? Government Information In the Digital Age We are seeing a fundamental change in the way governments communicate with citizens. These changes are NOT caused by technology, although they are enabled by technologies. They are driven and determined by economic, political, and social issues. The solutions are therefore, not technological either, although they will be enabled by technology. The solutions are economic, social, and political. Abby Smith, Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources, in a CLIR report on "authenticity" in a digital age, summed this up quite nicely: Interestingly, the scholar-participants suggested that technological solutions to the problem [of establishing the authenticity of a digital object] will probably emerge that would obviate the need for trusted third parties. Such solutions may include, for example, embedding texts, documents, images, and the like with various warrants (e.g., time stamps, encryption, digital signatures, and watermarks). The technologists replied with skepticism, saying that there is no technological solution that does not itself involve the transfer of trust to a third party. Encryption -- for example, public key infrastructure (PKI) -- and digital signatures are simply means of transferring risk to a trusted third party. Those technological solutions are as weak or as strong as the trusted third party. To devise technical solutions to what is, in their view, essentially a social challenge is to engender an "arms race" among hackers and their police.45 Abby Smith, "Digital Authenticity in Perspective." in "Authenticity in a Digital Environment," Council on Library and Information Resources, Publication 92. (May 2000). http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub92/smith.html "Trust" is a social issue, not a technological one. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- As we look at the technological changes, the way governments are using and not using, adopting and avoiding, and in general coping with these technological changes, i think we all see trends. The agenda of this conference reflects these trends and changes. with its theme of Revolution and Evolution, with sessions on everything from - digital repositories - born digital materials, - digitization - digital manuscripts - e-mail - e-records - e-discovery - the "e-tiger" And of course, representatives from NARA, LC, and GPO are here to discuss their projects I assume that all of us are familiar at least in a general way with the many of the difficulties of digital archiving. things like: - format obsolescence - media deterioration - content that is tied to a particular operating system or application - the need for new kinds of metadata and - emulation and migration strategies. So, I will not cover those today. What I do want to do is to give you a (perhaps) slightly different perspective and some (possibly) different ideas and approaches to these challenges and bring up some issues that i believe do not have enough attention yet. THE PAST ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. In the past, government information archiving was straightforward a) We knew and could fairly easily define and identify records b) We could (again, in a fairly straightforward way) identify responsibility for record creation, scheduling, retention, deposit, preservation, access, etc. c) We could establish procedures to get things done. predictable, definable, etc. So... in the past, we had a pretty clear path of preservation: - of what we wanted to preserve and - of how to preserve it and - of who was responsible at each stage from record creation through retention and disposition and preservation. We could define and identify what we wanted to preserve and seek and possibly fund the preservation. We may not have always been 100% effective, there may have been failures, gaps, short-funding, recalcitrant agencies, mistakes, etc. but we at least knew what we were doing and where the gaps were... THE PRESENT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A lot has changed, perhaps everything. Here are four areas of fundamental change that affect our ability to archive the complete historical record of governments: 1) WHAT. While to some extent we can still define and identify records, the job of doing so is much less clear. There may be some things that we cannot get a hold on to define as records. there may be things that are part of the record which the govt does not even possess. Or for which it lacks licensing or copyright permission to possess or copy. 2) WHO. Even to the extent that we can identify (broadly) what we want to preserve, it may be hard to identify who is responsible and difficult to create adequate, implementable, schedules for preservation. 3) HOW. Even if we can do all that, digital preservation itself is difficult and it is very hard to move from a quick-moving, service-oriented, bureaucratic, day-to-day, digital environment, to an environment of digital preservation. 4) ACCESS. While preservation without access is not preservation at all, "access" is a very different process than preservation. It seems to me that the very processes that make it *easier* for a current end-user to find and use digital information make it *harder* for the archivist to preserve that same information and ensure its usability in the future. EXAMPLES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Let's look at some examples EMAIL (1) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ E-mail certainly provides good examples of the "recalcitrant agency" problem. But I want to emphasize some other issues that will plague us even if we solve that one. An article in Technology Review gave several good examples. One related a story that Allen Weinstein tells about how he discovered in his FBI files a newspaper clipping with a note hand-written on it by J. Edgar Hoover. If that same communication happened today, it would most likely happen in an email with, perhaps an attachment of the article, or worse, a link to the article. Even if we had in place all the new laws and regulations that are being proposed to ensure that we can actually save email, would we have complete record? Or would we have a partial record with a key part missing. And would be able to find or identify that part? Would we be permitted to archive it? Talbot, David. "The Fading Memory of the State." Technology Review, July 2005. http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=14583&channel=infotech§ion=. EMAIL (2) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Another problem with email is the difficulty in knowing what to preserve. the simplest algorithm for preservation of email is to preserve everything, but that means preserving so many trivial, unimportant messages that would not normally be scheduled for retention in any rational universe. RECORD OF INFORMATION USED IN DECISION MAKING ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Another example from that same Technology Review article: The mistaken bombing in 1999 of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. U.S. officials blamed the error on outdated maps used in targeting. Today's planners would use GIS software to zoom and pan, and run calculations about the topography to make a targeting decision. Would the software preserve the decision making process? There are layers of challenges here: - the data used (spatial data, databases of locations, topography, etc.) - the software used to analyze and use the spatial data - the code behind that software that has its own algorithms for implementing particular user-analyses - the actual use by the end-users, the trail of how they used the software to analyze the data These are difficult things to archive! When decisions are based on computer models working on dynamic databases, will we be able to preserve for future historians the state of the database and the algorithms built into the models? PUBLIC DOCUMENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ When we think about the preservation of the historical record, we have to include public documents as well as private communications and decision-making records. In the past, "public documents" meant "publications" that were widely distributed to the public and depository libraries. Today, it means web sites. As you probably know the Library of Congress recently announced a big project with several partners to crawl the .gov domain at the end of the current presidential administration. This will harvest a lot of digital content that might otherwise disappear with the change of administrations. http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2008/08-139.html An article about this project discusses the software being used and some of the issues. Quint, Barbara. "Consortium--Minus NARA--Archiving Bush Administration Websites." Information Today NewsBreaks, August 28, 2008. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=50486. See also a discussion about NARA's role at the ArchivesNext blog: http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=137 And some more on NARA here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/189 Web-harvesting is not a definitive solution, though, When we compare web harvesting with active deposit by the government of documents in depository libraries we can get a glimpse at the scope of the preservation problem we face. Web harvesting puts the onus on the harvesters. It releases the government from the obligation of actively depositing information. It is a step back in time. It means that archivists and librarians have less control on their own selection and acquisition and that agencies have less responsibility. WHERE IS GOVINFO? (ON THE WEB...?) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A study by the Center for Democracy and Technology late last year examined "Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found Through Commercial Search Engines" http://www.cdt.org/righttoknow/search/ The reasons for the failure of search engines to adequately index government web sites are the same reasons that make it difficult for web harvesting to be successful. If we can't find the information, we cannot harvest it. We cannot preserve what we cannot save. BEYOND .GOV AND .MIL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One problem (and a rapidly growing one) is that not all government information is on the .GOV and .MIL domains. Here are some examples: - TWITTER. twitter.com is the very popular "micro blogging" site, where people post very short entries about what they are doing, where they are having lunch, and so forth. did you know that many government agencies twitter? among them: - the white house Communications Office - the Department of Health & Human Services: Office on Women's Health - and more than 60 others. - 20 or 30 members of congress http://twitter.pbwiki.com/USGovernment http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Members_of_Congress_who_Twitter - YOUTUBE The military is actively using YouTube to post videos http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/01/world/fg-cyberwar1 U.S. military offers up its side of the Iraq war on YouTube la times By Alexandra Zavis May 01, 2007 in print edition A-4 One military youtube channel says that: "Video clips document action as it appeared to personnel on the ground and in the air as it was shot." http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MNFIRAQ - NASA posts videos on YouTube and iTunes - NOT JUST FEDERAL... I'm mostly giving examples of the federal government today, but the trends stretch across all levels of government. for example: the PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY SERVICE AUTHORITY IN VIRGINIA is posting videos on YouTube. http://www.fcw.com/print/22_25/technology/153418-1.html?type=pf - the STATE OF CALIFORNIA has a youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/californiagovernment and GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER posts to twitter. http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger HOUSE MEMBERS - According to GovTech magazine, more than 100 House members have multimedia pages and YouTube links on their Web sites http://www.govtech.com/gt/241670 FLICKR / LC - FLICKR. I'm sure you read about the success the library of congress has had by posting photos on flickr.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ QIK.com qik.com allows you to stream video live from their cell phones. Congressman John Culberson of Texas is a big fan and has his own qik channel where he streams and posts interviews, meetings and more. http://qik.com/johnculberson Is this official government information? or political? or both? While these examples may strike you as "not official" or "non-governmental" the point here is that the environment for distribution of information is changing rapidly and we must keep up with the changes. If Culbertson's qik site is not "official," for example, we need a way of appraising it as such and a way of differentiating it from the next channel that appears that that *is* official. HYBRID SITES WITH MIXED MESSAGES ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The military is providing us with lots of examples of archiving problems. These issues of provenance, use-rights, copyright, and just plain finding and getting information. This is an extension of what I call the "copyright poison-pill" in which copyrighted material appears in an otherwise non-copyrighted government publication and creates confusion over the rights of libraries and archives to save, reproduce, and display any or all of such materials. We see this today in the way the Google book project has blocked access to most government publications because they "might" be covered by copyright. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The the DOD "official website of Multi-National Force - Iraq" is a .com site, not a .mil. http://www.mnf-iraq.com/ There we find - links to other commercial sites with streaming video without download links - web links designed to be clever (with javascript and hidden urls) but which add an additional level of difficulty in identifying and bookmarking links and downloading pages. Another DOD site that provides video clips is .mil but a lot of the content is actually hosted by .coms DODvClips.mil - While this is a .mil domain, it is actually operated by the Intel Corporation and is hosted and maintained by a commercial organization known as The FeedRoom or Globix Corporation - While you can download video, you are bound by an END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT, in which Intel claims all proprietary rights to the content and videos on the site. - Those who try to harvest the content from this site will find that the site instructs robots that should must not save copies of videos or even web pages. HORMUZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is another example of DOD video problems. In January of 2008, the Pentagon broadcast a video of the "straights of Hormuz incident" in which an unidentified voice says, apparently to a US battleship "You will ... explode." It was much in the news. (I found more than 1000 items on LexisNexis over about a 4 week period.) In January, two defense department web sites linked to a video of the incident and one labeled it as "From Defense Department Video." One of those pages still exists. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4116 But by June 2008, that url linked to a chef doing a promo for his show called "Grill Seargent" and searches for "hormuz" turned up zero hits. Last week, when I checked again, the link I got was to a 15 second ad for "the pentagon channel" that said: "Embrace accountability for all that you do -- for everything in your area of responsibility." A shorter version of the Hormuz video, complete with "you will explode" quote is available here: http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/briefingslide%5C320%5C080107-D-6570C-001.wmv Background information including why it is hard to know what goes missing here: Documenting the Government -- Strait of Hormuz edition http://freegovinfo.info/node/1567 But, this is more than the tale of a broken link. - The link was not to a .mil site, but to a commercial site (FEEDROOM again). - The video was provided only as a streaming video and no download was available. So, here we have a critical piece of the historical record, with no indication of who filmed it or edited it or posted it or took it down. And we have no easy way to preserve this video and no guarantee that any one will or can taken the responsibility for doing so. WHAT MAKES A WEBSITE OFFICIAL? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How do we determine what makes a website official? One document I found is explicit, but vague. It says that an "official website" includes any website hosted on the .mil domain, but also "any website PUBLISHED or SPONSORED by a military comand but hosted on a commercial server." http://www.mnf-iraq.com/images/stories/For_The_Troops/bloggers_policy.pdf Unfortunately, this creates a cascade of problems. - Will archivists overlook these sites because they are not .mil or .gov sites? - Upon finding them, can we identify who is actually responsible for the content? (were they Published or Sponsored by the government?) - If we find the site and identify it as something that is government-generated, are we allowed to archive it? STANDARDS BY ANY OTHER NAME ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One of the biggest problems digital archivists face is that of file formats. When formats are tied to particular software or operating systems or operating environments, it creates barriers to preservation. "Standards" that work well for the end-user (and the service provider) one year may be exactly the wrong standard for the archivist. We can see an example of user-friendly, archive-unfriendly at the EPA. EPA ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The EPA has a nice site that has videos, audios, podcasts, and more. But they have chosen the "Flash based" video format as a "standard" this is indeed a common format for streaming video, but adds additional layers of difficulty to anyone wanting to preserve the videos by downloading them. http://www.epa.gov/multimedia/ Feds set sights on small screen By Wade-Hahn Chan FCW August 11, 2008 http://www.fcw.com/print/22_25/technology/153418-1.html?type=pf DISAPPEARING PUBLICATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There have not been any substantial, comprehensive studies of what gets withdrawn from the web by government agencies. (See "Chronology of Disappearing Government Information" Data collected through May 8, 2002, Compiled by Barbara Miller for ALA/GODORT Education Committee With special assistance of Karrie Peterson, for an example of one attempt. http://www.library.okstate.edu/Govdocs/chronchart.doc ) We are left with anecdotes about things disappearing or being withdrawn and random discoveries of something here today and gone tomorrow. Anyone who works with government agencies for very long will encounter, as I have over the years, as many "policies" as their are individuals who administer those policies. So we sometimes see agencies that are very careful about keeping older documents online and others that express that opinion that "No one wants last year's (or last month's) report. Here is a recent example: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AT: http://www.mnf-iraq.com/ We find links to a issue 6 of a "newspaper" but no links or indication of earlier issues being available. http://www.mnf-iraq.com/images/Unit_Newsletters/080826_aam_al-binaa_english.pdf E-GOV ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I have left for last the concept of "E-government" -- not because it is less important, but because it is emerging and something to watch. E-government is intended to transform the way government communicates with citizens and business and itself. To the extent that it creates communications that are faster, more accurate, and more convenient, it is a Good Thing. But, for us, it, again, fundamentally transforms the role of government. In the past, the role of government in information dissemination ended at the point of dissemination. Governments would collect and create and assemble and edit and publish information products and distribute them to the public and to libraries. But today, the government is taking on a new, continuing role. With e-government, governments are saying we must go them to get our information today, and tomorrow, and forever. As governments move to e-government, we are going to increasingly see government information provided as "transactions" as opposed to "instantiations." Here is a simple example: I can call 411 and get a phone number: that's a transaction and is a big improvement over having to locate and use a bulky telephone book which may not even be current. Lots of kinds of government information lend themselves to this kind of transaction delivery and make for better, more accurate, more timely service. But, if I am a journalist and I want to look at a directory of all employees in a department, or if I'm an historian and want to see who was in a particular office last year (or 10 or 50 years ago), or if I'm a demographer and I want to do an surname or given-name analysis of an agency's employees, then a current, up-to-date one-transaction-at-a-time system won't help me at all. I need an instantiation of the information from one or more time periods. THE CENSUS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let me give you a concrete example: The Census Every 10 years the federal government takes a population and housing census. Through the government's American FactFinder web site, the Census bureau delivers a transaction-based service where you can find census facts and tables. http://factfinder.census.gov/ But, in addition, the Bureau makes the raw, anonymized census data available for downloading and has deposited the data in the largest social science data archive in the U.S (ICPSR at the university of michigan). http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR/SERIES/00166.xml What this means for us is that we can preserve the census. There is an instantiation of the census in a format that we can preserve over time. That instantiation is what is behind American FactFinder, but it is a preservable form of that information. This means that, we can preserve the data - without crawling a web site - even if the census bureau budget is cut and it takes data offline it also means that the raw data are available for uses and re-uses beyond the transactions that the bureau makes available. This is a model for making government information available and preservable and usable and re-usable for the long-term. It is important to note that this model benefits users today, not just in the future. Transaction-interfaces offer a limited number of possible uses of the underlying information. When the raw data are available, users can analyze use, and re-use the data in many ways not provided by the transaction-interface. Clifford Lynch has written eloquently about the need that scholars have to get access to the raw information in the realm of scholarly literature (Clifford A. Lynch, "Open Computation: Beyond Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures," Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Neil Jacobs Ed., Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006, pp. 185-193.). http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/OpenComputation.htm Governments may not like the idea of doing this, though. They may want to keep control and may want to do so under the vise of "accuracy." (E.g., "Last year's phone book isn't accurate anymore. We don't want copies of it out in the world confusing people.") Indeed, we hear that very argument from some who still argue that the people should not have free open access to Congressional Research Service reports. Local governments in particular may also see information as an "asset" and wish to charge for access or use of it. And the private sector may not like the idea of raw information being freely distributed because they want to control access so they can charge for it. (Indeed we see something like that with CRS reports!) It may be a challenge to get governments to understand this concept and, once they do, to embrace distribution. WHAT CAN WE DO? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There is no single solution. And we should not expect any single entity or agency or archive to "solve" the problems. We need a multifaceted approach to preserving the historical record. Here are some general approaches that I hope will guide you in your local environments. 1) Do you have influence over the creation of information? Then make sure that the information is created with preservation in mind. Talk to creators about providing an instantiation of information in addition to transaction-based access. Advocate free and open access. Insist on open formats (e.g., ODF http://opendocument.xml.org/) rather than proprietary formats. 2) Identify your partners in your organization. - IT depts. They may have tools that will help you do your job. They may be able to do things differently that would enable preservation, but they haven't thought of them. - Managers who want information access in the near term. Managers may not think of long-term access and usability, but they usually do understand the benefits of having their own information usable in the near-term (1 to 5 years). If you can *guarantee* something will be usable in 5 years, you can probably guarantee that you are going to be able to preserve it for longer periods. 3) Identify other partners - The Internet Archive is doing a lot right now to preserve information on the web and you can work with them to have them do preservation for you. http://www.archive.org/index.php http://www.archive.org/create/ http://www.archive-it.org/ - Look for others locally and regionally with whom you can collaborate. Universities may want to collaborate with governments and vice-versa, for example. 4) Are you a partner? Even if you are in an archive that has clearly no responsibility for preservation of (say) the records of an agency, you may be in a position, because of your own archival mandates (you have personal records of a government official, soldier, elected offical) or because of your constituency (users at a university who need the complete record for historical analysis), you may have the opportunity (and obligation) to collect information that is relevant to and even part of the complete historical record. The library model of having many copies dispersed over many institutions has worked well for preserving and authenticating published materials, and it may work in the archival environment as well when we are no longer tied to a single copy of record. Software already exists to help with this: Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home http://lockss-docs.stanford.edu/ i want to close with a quote from that same Technology Review article that I quoted earlier. In it, computer scientist Robert F. Sproull of Sun Microsystems Laboratories, who chaired a a National Academy of Sciences panel that advised NARA, said: "If you become obsessed with getting the technical solution, you will never build an archive." The challenges we face are as much political, sociological, and economic, as technological. Continue reading
GPO’s draft regional libraries report and FGI comments
A few weeks ago, the Government Printing Office released their draft report entitled, Regional Depository Libraries in the 21st Century: A Time for Change? and asked for comments until June 30. I'm not sure how many comments they received, but wanted to publish comments we submitted. Lynne Bradley, Director American Library Association Washington Office, DID submit comments that were endorsed by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS), and the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT). GODORT republished Ms. Bradley's letter on their wiki. While we are in general agreement with ALA's letter calling for increased flexibility of Title 44 (*not* wholesale changes in the title) and increased appropriations for GPO initiatives and "regional depository libraries to help offset the costs of storing and preserving government property," our comments deal with the more philosophical issues embedded in the draft report. Please let us know what you think.
I. Delete from the report all uses of the adjective "legacy" when referring to collections. The use of the word "legacy" as an adjective comes from computer science and is used to indicate things that are "outdated" and "undesirable." When the report uses the phrase "legacy collections" it implies that it is referring to unwanted and outdated collections. (The report uses "legacy" as an adjective in only one other context: in its reference to sections 1911 and 1912 of Title 44 USC as "Legacy Sections" -- apparently in order to define these section as out of date and undesirable.) Thus, the use of the phrase "legacy collections" is either inaccurate and misleading, or imprecise. In its place GPO should use phrases that accurately describe the collections it wishes to discuss. For example, in place of "legacy collections" the report could uses phrases such as "collections without adequate bibliographic records" or "collections of print materials" or "collections without digital equivalents" or other phrases that accurately describe the collections GPO is referring to. If GPO does wish to refer to unwanted out of date materials it should describe them that way explicitly rather than use the term "legacy." II. The report should more explicitly and accurately address the difference between roles and responsibilities that are legally mandated and those that have been assumed without a legal mandate. Specifically, we object to the following sentences of the report (Section V.B. pages 16-17) that gloss over these differences. (These sentences refer to Public Law 103-40, The Government Printing Office Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act of 1993.)Continue readingThe implementation of the GPO Access Act ushered GPO into the online age and accelerated the paradigm shift in the FDLP that changed GPO’s relationship with depository libraries. Regional depositories have the responsibility for permanent public access in the tangible publication environment. In the online information environment GPO has assumed primary responsibility for ensuring content and permanent public access. [emphasis added]We suggest the following wording instead:While the GPO Access Act specifically required GPO to "provide a system of online access" and to "operate an electronic storage facility for Federal electronic information," it did not specify any change in the roles of the depository libraries. It added new roles for GPO, but did not reduce, alter, or delete the roles of depository libraries. Since 1993, Congress has consistently provided funds to GPO for the "distribution" of government publications to designated depository libraries. This wording was carefully chosen. In 2000 the House attempted to substitute the wording "on-line access" for "distribution," but that language was rejected. Nevertheless, GPO has chosen to implement this law in a way that is shifting the relationship between GPO and depository libraries. GPO has chosen to assume responsibility for permanent public access to digital materials and has chosen not to offer digital deposit as an option to FDLP libraries. This has resulted in a paradigm shift in access, preservation, and service within the FDLP. Instead of relying on FDLP libraries and their different locations, funding, and technological infrastructures, GPO has chosen to implement policies a) that do not "distribute" digital objects to FDLP libraries, b) that make it difficult for FDLP libraries to build local digital collections, and c) that create a preservation system that depends on a single centralized collection with a single funding source. While these choices seemed appropriate 15 years ago, much has changed over the years. Many libraries are developing institutional repositories and other digital collections. In a survey in August of 2005, 85% of responding FDLP libraries expressed "high" or "very high" interest in being able to "pull" content from GPO and 65% were equally interested in GPO "pushing" digital content to FDLP libraries. In the current survey of Regionals, 52% expressed a willingness to receive digital files on deposit. Commercial and open source software for managing digital collections is now widely available. As we look at new models and roles for FDLP libraries, we need to consider true digital deposit as a viable and important option. We need to look beyond the now-old model of relying solely on GPO having primary responsibility for ensuring content and permanent public access.
A comment on government contracts and harvesting
Over the past week, there have been some good conversations about government contracts to digitize government information and the National Archives decision to not conduct a web harvest or snapshot at the end of the current Administration. There is good news and bad news.
The good news
The good news is that NARA's decision was not nearly as bad as it appeared to be when it was first announced in a memo on March 27, 2008, which was circulated only to Federal records officers (see: The National Archives Is Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents). In a thoughtful post on its web site (National Archives and Records Administration Web Harvest Background Information, April 15, 2008, NARA; pdf version available), NARA outlines in detail the reasons why it would not conduct an end of administration web snapshot or harvest of Executive Branch websites nor require agencies to do so. The reasons, I think, are sound and in keeping with NARA's commitment to preserving information of historical value.
In addition, the NARA memo of April 15 makes explicit the fact that its decision and memo of March 27 do not apply to Presidential records or to records of the Congress. It says that "NARA will continue to conduct a web harvest of Congressional web sites" and that NARA "will also receive a snapshot of the White House website" noting that "Unlike Federal agencies governed by the Federal Records Act, the White House is governed by the Presidential Records Act, under which all Presidential records are treated as permanent and transferred to NARA for preservation at a Presidential Library."
The NARA "Background Information" document is also, I think, worth reading for its clear description of the shortcomings of web harvests in general. I think it is very useful for us to be reminded of these shortcomings to the extent that we believe we can rely on them as an adequate form of preservation.
In more good news, the NARA/TGN contract is not as bad as it could have been. I mentioned this in my earlier post here (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent) and similar comments have been made in the useful and interesting thread over at ArchivesNext (NARA latest digitization agreement: One archivist's perspective). Merrilee Proffitt, of RLG, says in a comment there that the NARA model for contracts with third parties "actually comes out looking pretty good" when compared to the criteria described in the RLG paper Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization (by Peter B. Kaufman and Jeff Ubois, D-Lib Magazine, November/December 2007, Volume 13 Number 11/12).
The bad news
The bad news, as James pointed out this morning, is that the GAO contract for digitizing is very bad indeed (GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West). Quoting Carl Malamud, James notes that GAO gets access to the digitized data but does not get a copy of its own; the rest of the government doesn't even get access to the data. The public is left with the option of going to GAO headquarters and paying 20 cents per page to copy paper! As Carl says, "This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off."
This morning there was more bad news. Kate at ArchivesNext reports that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has a new report Record Chaos: The Deplorable State of Electronic Record Keeping in the Federal Government, that concludes "that the federal government is severely mismanaging its electronic records." CREW also says that a House Committee proposal to amend federal record keeping laws "is anemic and fails to make the substantial changes necessary to bring the federal government into the 21st century."
And even the good news is tempered by the fact that we have less than we could and are a long way from an even an adequate system of permanent preservation of digital information or a long-term solution to digitizing non-digital information. We will have to hope that the White House will deliver a snapshot of the White House web site and that the snapshot will be accurate and complete. The behavior of the White House with regard to electronic records and email does not make us optimistic. The NARA/TGN deal is better than the GAO/Thomson deal, but still leaves much to be desired and, as pointed out even by defenders of the deal, it is unlikely that we will ever have free, open, networked access to the digital information that TGN digitizes. That means the real effect of the deal is to privatize the information.
Comment
For me, the biggest disappointment in these latest developments is that librarians and archivists seem to be too willing to accept "good enough" and not willing enough to argue harder for "better." There are lots of people who have good reason to argue for less access, more fees, less privacy, and more control of information, but librarians and archivists should not be among them. I believe that we should not spend time making the case for the private sector; it is fully capable of making its own case. We should spend our time fighting for free, full, open, public access, usability of information, and long term preservation.
The primary mission of private sector companies is to make money, not to serve the public. They may serve the public as a by-product of making money, but no for-profit company will go to its owners and say "we are going to do the best thing for public access" without the qualification "that will make us money." Unfortunately "making money" often conflicts with public access. Politicians (and some bureaucrats) will argue for greater control of government information; some will argue for secrecy of government information on the one hand and privacy-invading policies on the other. Most government agencies do not have information access or long term preservation of their information as a primary mission and the exceptions are notable (e.g. LOC, NARA).
In contrast, the primary mission of many libraries and archives is to provide free public open access with long term preservation and usability. While others may have some of those pieces as secondary goals, few if any have them all. For many libraries and archives these goals are not just their primary mission but their defining characteristic.
While digitization and digital preservation are neither easy nor inexpensive, that doesn't mean that we have to pay any and all costs for them. The digital era should be making it possible to provide better access without giving up free use and reuse, without giving up open access, without turning over control to those whose primary mission is something other than free, open, public access and long term preservation. But increasingly we see a combination of politics and economics leaving us with contracts that trump copyright and fair use, with "access" being negotiated at almost any cost (including loss of control), with DRM technologies that prohibit easy (or any) reuse, and with privacy protections being deprecated or even ignored. Even in the case of the NARA/TGN contract that is legally "better" than the GAO/Thomson contract, we are left with the effect of two-tiers of access and network access being essentially privatized and fee-based.
I believe that librarians and archivists should be pushing the boundaries and insisting for more and better, not accepting some benefits by negotiating away the big benefits we could be getting in the digital age. This is particularly important for government information that is in the public domain. If we can't make this work for public information that is not copyrighted, how will we be able to do so for information that is?
I'm not arguing for a perfect, ideal world that is impractical to achieve. I am suggesting that we should fight for everything we can get. We should celebrate when we make inroads with a contract (like NARA/TGN) that is better than the others (like GAO/Thomson) but we should do so by committing to doing better next time. We should not accept this as "good enough" -- because it is not and we can do better next time. In fact, every time we accept a less-than-perfect deal as "good enough," we make it a little harder to make a better deal next time. We lower the bar if we accept "good enough" and stop trying to achieve better. We should not take the time to convince ourselves or the public that this is as good as we can get; we should take that time to admit to the limitations and trade offs and to commit to doing better next time.
There is lots written these days about "the future of libraries" and "the role of libraries in the digital age" and many people openly wonder if there is a place for libraries at all. I think there are several places where libraries have a unique role to play in society and the areas of digitization and digital access and preservation are important ones.
We need to make the case for the public; for free, open, public access; for long-term preservation and usability; for public accountability in the control of information; for reader privacy. Librarians and archivists have a unique role in doing that. In doing so, we will face an uphill battle and trade offs, but we should never lose sight of our unique role in society. We should never cheapen our professions by making the case for less (there are plenty of people to do that). We should always make the case for more. We will not always succeed and we will have to make trade offs. But we should always do so in the context of staking out a territory that is different from the private sector and those who are willing to get less. We should stand up for rights that others are not willing to fight for. We must fight for it when there are so many forces aligned against free, open access.
I'd like to see us emulate Carl Malamud and CREW and Brewster Kahle more and do less of making excuses for TGN and Thomson.
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Librarians without Libraries?
December 27, 2008 / Leave a comment
In his continuing series about Government Information Liberation, John Shuler considers the role of collections in libraries. One particularly revealing moment in his discussion is his day 60 post in which he describes a series of questions that he poses to his graduate students to get at the "fundamental things we do."
The Question and Conclusions
One would hope that the questions prompt a discussion and don't just end in "dead silence." Although John doesn't tell us what the discussion, if any, was, he does give us his conclusions: possession of "material" might have once been central to the purpose of libraries but, in the digital age, possession is much less important part of what libraries do.
Even though John qualifies his conclusions to allow for some limited role of collections for some libraries, he overwhelms his caveats with assertions that collections begin and end with the physical ownership of "material" and that "we will not own (possess) much of the material." He even coins the phrase "Gutenberg Librarians" to deprecate "possession and/or control" (66) of information by libraries.
So, John's essential, bottom-line conclusion, regardless of his caveats, comes across clearly: The net, John says, has brought on "the beginning of the end" of library collections (35).
I think his conclusion is wrong and the question he asks is misleading. You can see how misleading the question is by turning it around and realizing that the professions/institutions he uses are not parallel:
But the real problem is that the question implies a shared understanding of what a library is -- a shared understanding that I think we need to articulate explicitly. I think that, before one asks "Can you be a librarian without a library?" one should ask "What is the role of the library is in the digital age?" John has been outlining what he thinks the role of librarians should be and he apparently wants to separate the role of librarians from the role of libraries. Very well: let's examine the roles of both with some discussion, not dead silence.
Librarianship
I think John is implying is his series of posts that librarianship in the digital age will be about helping people navigate a complex, networked maze of shifting, changing information. Librarians will help users "connect the dots" and find connections that are not otherwise explicit (47). While there is nothing wrong with this view, and there is much to recommend it, it doesn't go far enough and it misses a key role for libraries.
As John portrays it, this view accepts that libraries will be less about selecting and preserving information and building digital collections and more about providing services for information over which librarians have no control. Librarians, in this view, are valuable precisely because they have no control over information.
This view accepts that information will be tightly controlled by producers and distributors. What is available, who can use it, under what conditions it may be used, and when it becomes no longer available will all be controlled by government agencies, publishers, individuals, organizations, and other "content" producers.
John also proposes that "librarianship" will be more important than "libraries." To me, this sounds like librarians will be analogous to travel agents who, because they deal every day with the complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected systems, are better able than the traveller to navigate these systems and find the best flight at the best price. So librarians, in this view, will help casual information users navigate a variety of complex, difficult, disparate, unconnected, public-freely-available and proprietary-and-licensed information systems. Just as travel agents have no control over what flights or trips are available or what they cost or what restrictions are placed on them, so librarians will have no control over what information is available or what it costs or what restrictions are placed on its use.
In this view, librarians will not manage collections but will license the right to read from those who control information. Whether the license comes in the form of payment of dollars to a commercial vendor and a written contract that licenses access, or an FDLP designation, or a contractual "partnership" with GPO, or the anointing of permission by Google Books legal department, the result is the same. As a recent article in Library Hi Tech says, "In future, librarians will no longer manage media, they will manage rights" (Böhner, Dörte. Digital rights description as part of digital rights management: a challenge for libraries. Library Hi Tech 26, no. 4 (2008): 598-605). This view reshapes the role of librarians from information providers to information gatekeepers; from information curators to business-officers who sign contracts and pay bills.
Who would want to go into that field?
Libraries
John hasn't said much about the role of libraries except to assert that, for many people, the digital environment is now the "default library" [emphasis added] that supports broad access to a "collection" of government information (51).
But, shouldn't we be asking about the future, not just describing the present?
Shouldn't we be asking about the relationships between doctors and lawyers and information? Certainly doctors and lawyers need a body of literature to practice their professions. Instead of asserting that users have access today, shouldn't we be asking, "Who will build and manage and preserve those collections and ensure long-term, free access to them?"
Shouldn't we be asking what guarantees we have that the information we want today will be available if we want it tomorrow? Shouldn't we be asking who controls access to that information and what are their reasons for providing access? Shouldn't we be asking who will pay for long-term preservation and access?
Just because users who are not familiar with information policy, information economics, or information technologies are happy with current access to information does not mean that they will be happy with the access (or lack of it!) tomorrow or in ten years or a hundred years. Providing easy access at one point in time does not guarantee easy access at a future point in time and can actually mask problems of long-term access.
It is one of the roles of librarians to think beyond today and one of the roles of libraries to guarantee access for tomorrow. We need to think about the long-term. Using short-term convenience as a reason for avoiding that kind of thought is evading one of the key roles of librarianship. And assuming that producers and distributors will have the same values and ethics and practices as librarians is to confuse the role of producers with the role of currators.
Maybe the real questions we should be asking are:
The word "library" does not mean "I have some information." If it did, bookstores would be libraries and publishers would be librarians. We need libraries in addition to publishers and bookstores (and government agencies that distribute information as a by-product of another, primary, mission).
It is all about control
Let's be clear, then. Even in the paper and ink world, libraries and their collections were about wresting control of information from producers and distributors and granting control to local communities and information users. A publisher could take a book out of print, but a library could keep it available. A user could purchase a book and pay for magazine subscriptions, but could use the information for free at the library. Libraries leveraged economies of scale for the benefit of the community, enabling every community member to have benefits of access to information that no individual could possibly afford.
The need for wresting control of information away from those who wish to control the access to and the use of information has not changed in the digital world. But the battle lines have shifted and we need librarians in the fight to keep free, open, usable access.
"Content providers" want to replace copyright with license agreements. Producers want to charge for every single use and dictate who can use information, under what conditions, and in what way. Governments want to be able to alter and even withdraw information after it has been released. And the proliferation of requirements to register to read or use information portends a world in which people will not have the right of privacy when reading.
It is ironic that, given technologies that enable almost unlimited use and re-use of information and that enable information to be distributed and used and re-used almost without cost, we face a horde of stakeholders who want to limit access, charge for every use, restrict re-use, and look over your shoulder to see what you're reading.
More inaccurate conclusions
As noted above, John hedges his conclusion a bit. His wording is that "possession is much less exclusive or destiny for any one institution" and preserving and organizing the information sources "will remain important -- but is no longer our exclusive responsibility" (66). He expands on that idea:
And from these, he draws conclusions:
To me, these summarize one possible scenario out of many. And, IMHO, this scenario is not one librarians should be content to accept or embrace. Why? Because it almost certainly guarantees that a lot of bad things will happen: loss of access, loss of free access, licensing constraints, DRM constraints, loss of information, loss of usability of information, and more.
Different Questions, A Different Answers
In a separate post, I will examine those issues in more detail, but I'll close this post with some assumptions and a couple of final rhetorical questions as a way of addressing John's question, "Can you be a librarian without a library?" The assumptions:
The rhetorical questions:
I think those questions lead us to conclusions that are very different from the the ones John reaches. I will examine this in more detail in another post.
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