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“It can’t happen here”
Those who are not yet convinced that we need digital deposit of government information into Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries, should read this:
- Could the Smithsonian No Longer Be Free?, by Stephanie Condon, CBS News, (November 11, 2010). The draft proposal [of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commission], penned by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, suggests a number of ways to cut discretionary spending by more than $200 billion in 2015 -- including reducing federal funding for the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. The commission co-chairs suggest the Smithsonian Institution should charge admission fees at its 19 museums and the National Zoo, which are all currently free, to make up for the lost funding.
...The Smithsonian is the national museum and has been open--free of charge--for 164 years. In a sense, Americans already pay to visit the Smithsonian with their tax dollars, which provide about two-thirds of the Smithsonian's annual budget. The Commission's recommendation that the Smithsonian charge admission would create a barrier for many audiences--those who are underserved and who would most benefit from exposure to the Smithsonian's collections, exhibitions and research....Imagine that! An institution with a long history of free public access to our heritage being suddenly told, "Sorry, but we just can't afford to keep access free anymore -- even if the public has already paid for it." We have been told over and over that GPO has good intentions, and we fully believe that they do -- today. They don't want to charge for government information. They do want to make everything available freely for ever. But GPO does not set its budget. Good intentions are not sufficient to guarantee preservation and access in the digital age. None of this will be new to regular readers of FGI. What is new is that it is becoming increasingly hard for those who say we do not need digital deposit to justifiably claim the it-can't-happen-here argument. That is the argument that claims that a single repository or even a "a small number of dedicated preservation entities" will be sufficient to guarantee long-term, free, public access. My work over the last two years has concentrated on evaluating digital repositories using OAIS and TRAC and I have learned and re-learned a lot of lessons from this work. One lesson is that the one immutable, undeniable thing about digital information is that preservation will not happen by accident. It requires constant attention and intention. Another lesson is that there is too much important information to rely on a select few organizations to preserve it all. It's not just about keeping "lots of copies" (though that is an important piece of the puzzle). It is also about lots of communities and lots of decision makers and lots of budgets. The big mega-repositories, no matter how big or how well-intentioned, will not preserve (will not be able to afford to preserve) everything. And, inevitably, some of the things they weed, or choose not to select, or are forbidden by policy from collecting, will be valuable to someone. Those "someones" need their community libraries looking out for their needs. (And in the digital age, "community" no longer has to mean local, geographically-bound communities. In the digital age we can have world-wide communities of interest, discipline, subject, etc.) Another lesson is the importance of non-technological sustainability. When we look at long-term preservation, we have to look at risk of loss. Everyone knows that digital information is fragile and needs attention to ensure it remains usable. This fact is what drives the technological end of digital preservation projects. But there are also economic risks (not having enough money), organizational risks (changing priorities, changing missions), and social risks (being sure we select materials for preservation and do not withdraw that don't get "enough" use or generate "cost recovery"). Even GPO's first electronic transition plan explicitly guaranteed preservation only "as long as usage warrants." And every risk has an associated impact. If a failure happens, there is an impact. It could mean a new cost to recover or reformat or retrieve damaged or unreadable information. The worst impact is irretrievable loss of information. In between there are other impacts. In the world of government information these include privatization, imposition of fees, and imposition of restrictions on access or use or re-use. We see these every day (e.g., NTIS, STAT-USA, FBIS, PACER, Public Health Reports, the electronic LCSH, Current Industrial Reports, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and less access in general). A risk can be small or rare or unpredictable but the consequences or impact can be catastrophic. This is what happened with the financial industry. The financial 'quants' used (bad) data and (flawed) economic models to predict that a failure of the system was very, very unlikely. They decided that it was so unlikely that they didn't need to account for it. By failing to specify the impact of a failure and failing to have a plan for dealing with it, they gave us a recession, foreclosures, unemployment, record deficits, and near complete economic collapse. This was their version of "it can't happen here." Apart from the technical risks and impacts that are typically discussed in the digital preservation literature, the non-technological risks are at least as important, if not more so. "Surely, no one would privatize FDSys? Surely, Congress will always fund GPO adequately? Surely, the private sector won't challenge any special deals that Portico or other GPO 'partners' Surely, It Can't Happen Here?" With the attack on the Smithsonian, we know it is already happening here. David Rosenthal, who has written extensively about the technical aspects of digital preservation, has a excellent piece on related issues: The Anonymity of Crowds. Related FGI posts: Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program Government Documents at the Crossroads GPO's Budget and Priorities The State of FDsys and the Future of the FDLP Continue reading
North Carolina shares digital preservation tips
The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources' State Library and State Archives (Cultural Resources) have a new website designed to guide local and state government employees who are responsible for the preservation of North Carolina state public records. http://digitalpreservation.ncdcr.gov The site has resources that can help North Carolina government employees -- and those responsible for digital information in general -- learn how to ensure that today's digital information is saved so that it can become tomorrow's heritage. The site includes tutorials that explain what digital preservation is and why it is important; a checklist of key digital preservation practices; "quick tips," advanced tutorials, and more. While the site is directed toward North Carolina public servants, it is general enough to be useful to those considering, implementing, or teaching on the topic. Thanks and hat tip to Lisa A. Gregory, Digital Projects Liaison, Digital Information Management Program, State Library of North Carolina, NC Department of Cultural Resources, and the Bestpractices mailing list (Bestpractices@islemail.org). Continue reading
Please take this LC survey on digital preservation training needs
[Hi all. Barrett Jones from the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress asked that we post the following announcement. Please take a moment and take this survey so LC can develop course content for digital preservation education. Thanks! jrj] The Library of Congress launched the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative earlier this year. The mission of DPOE is to foster a national network of education programs for digital preservation. DPOE is conducting a survey of digital preservation training needs and would appreciate your input. The results of this survey will be used to develop course content and delivery options for digital preservation education. Continue reading
New GPO Preservation Librarian talks to WaPo
A few days ago, the Washington Post interviewed David Walls, GPO's new -- and first! -- preservation librarian. We're really excited to work with GPO and Mr Walls on building our public digital govt information preservation architecture.
David Walls is overseeing the transition at the GPO to digital archiving By Lisa Rein. Friday, July 30, 2010; B03 The U.S. Government Printing Office provides Americans with permanent access to government information, printing about 2 billion pages every year. As it celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, it has hired its first preservation librarian to oversee, among other things, the transition to digital archiving. David Walls comes to Washington from Yale University, where he worked as a preservation librarian for 12 years. Walls, 47, just finished his fourth month on the job. Q.How did you get interested in library preservation? I volunteered years ago in the rare-books collection at the Baylor University library in Texas. I got bitten by the bug then. It's a very small field and a young one. You could probably put every preservation person in the U.S. in one large hotel ballroom. Most people who do this work are in academic settings or private libraries, but there are government libraries, too, beyond the Library of Congress. You've got the National Library of Medicine, for example. Why did the office create a position for a preservationist? We're in an era of digital publications being produced all over government. We're continuing to supply printed copies of the Federal Register and other publications, but most every federal agency is producing things with only digital content. If you get on almost every federal Web site you'll click on things that, in a previous age, would have been produced in a report or a book. The GPO is updating a digital system we rolled out last year to disseminate and authenticate all of this government information. If you go to http://www.fdsys.gov, you'll see the Federal Register, the new health-care law, the financial reform law, congressional bills, the president's budget on there. And a lot more, of course. We're designing a new server that's more robust. The federal digital system is part of our mission. Where were government documents such as legislation and the federal budget preserved in the paper-only days? This is an organization that for 150 years has been distributing publications to various libraries across the country. It's called the Federal Depository Library Program. There are 1,220 of these libraries in the U.S. and Guam, usually departments or units within other libraries. Georgetown Law Library is one. They may specialize in saving Supreme Court briefs or statutes at large. A library in Missouri might preserve Small Business Administration publications or Fish and Wildlife documents. Some libraries accept everything the government puts out and keep it forever. Others select which stuff to keep. Right now, we're reaching out to this community to do a basic review of our operational plan, to look at our content and develop a set of preservation services to offer the libraries, digitally as well as on paper. Some publications the libraries carry are old enough to become brittle. If we're about permanent access to government information, what is our plan for reaching out to these libraries to make sure that happens? My job is to provide some leadership and act as a facilitator. What is digital security, and why is it important? We need to make sure the information that the printing office disseminates is secure. So right now, we're doing an internal audit project to make sure our digital repository is trusted. It'll be preserved according to modern standards. Think of it as a bank audit. A bank has to go through an audit to make sure it's a trusted repository of money. The same is true for us. What are the challenges of carrying out the agency's mission without paper? The paper publication had a physical form, so there was some intellectual control over what it was and where you could find it. You could sit there for quite a long time without worrying about it becoming obsolete. You weren't going to go into the library one day and find out that a publication was inaccessible because it was in a different file format. With digital, you have the whole issue of how do you know it's authentic? That all the information is there? The digital publication requires almost constant vigilance.Continue reading
A librarian reacts to “A librarian reacts to wikileaks”
February 13, 2011 / 12 Comments on A librarian reacts to “A librarian reacts to wikileaks”
[Update 2/18/11: The editor at the Center for Journalism Ethics has kindly agreed to reprint our response to Bill Sleeman on their site. The piece was slightly edited from the original. We greatly appreciate their efforts in providing wide ranging context to this critical issue.] Thanks to Bill Sleeman for his govdoc-l post and link to his op-ed piece "A Librarian Reacts to WikiLeaks." His parsing is thought-provoking, but incomplete. I'd like to add some context to Sleeman's op-ed because I think he conflates and ignores several issues surrounding Wikileaks the organization and the leaked US State Department cables themselves. Unfortunately, I can not submit a comment on the Center for Journalism Ethics site where he published his op-ed, but I post it here in the interest of open discussion. Sleeman ignores the information and focuses instead on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the actions of members of the American Library Association -- Al Kagan's American Libraries Magazine article as well as Larry Roman's comment/response offer a good review of the ALA Midwinter conference WikiLeaks dustup. Sleeman repeatedly suggests that we have only one choice: "embrace" WikiLeaks or reject it. This is a false choice and misdirection. In doing this, Sleeman has adopted the strategy being used by those who wish to suppress the information by distracting us from it and focusing instead on the messenger. Libraries should be focused on how to address the information needs of their users. Different libraries will have different answers to that question, which is as it should be. 1) Sleeman casts his piece as a minority opinion. However, if the preliminary data on my WikiLeaks survey hold true (and I hope those that haven't done so will take the survey ;-)), then Sleeman is not an "outlier" as he would have us believe. The documents community seems to be split 50/50 on whether or not it is important for libraries to collect and give access to the cables -- and only 3 libraries so far say that they've even cataloged the WikiLeaks cable site. When Sleeman says that the situation, "demands more careful parsing than the [liberal] library community has been willing to do," he is, in one stroke, mischaracterizing and demeaning his colleagues. 2) The cables are not a "dump" but are in fact being actively vetted and redacted by Wikileaks and the the news organizations with which WL is working (UK Guardian, der Spiegel, NY Times, El Pais, and Le Monde). Only a very small number have actually been released (3891 of 251,287 to date). Those cables, while technically classified, are now publicly available to anyone and analysis by journalists around the world continues to grow (see WikiRiver as well as the news organizations' sites linked to at the end of this piece). By ignoring the role of journalists and newspapers in the vetting and release of the cables, Sleeman tries to turn the issue into one of Assange vs. the world. I don't think Sleeman would suggest that we should ignore other leaked materials, but maybe he would? Does he object to any publication of leaked information in any newspaper, or is there something about this particular release that he finds objectionable? Does he oppose libraries containing any leaked information? He does not say. As Steven Aftergood wrote recently, "[T]he bulk of the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, never formally underwent declassification review.... This means that every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material." Would Sleeman say that we should remove all versions of the Pentagon Papers from our libraries -- including the 4,100 pages of the [w:Pentagon Papers] read into the record of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds by then Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK).? 3) There have always been leaks of government information, most often for political purposes or individual vendetta ([w:Pentagon Papers] and the [w:Plame affair] are but the most in/famous). There are (admittedly weak) laws on the books to protect whistle blowers but none really to protect military whistleblowers (hence PFC Bradley Manning, the alleged cable leaker, has been held without charge at Quantico Marine base since July, 2010). These cables are not "stolen" per se, but leaked information. Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous leaker of government secrets, has praised wikileaks and their work. 4) Researchers and the public are justly intrigued with this kind of information. The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series is one of libraries' most highly sought-after titles so it only makes sense that library users would want access to the cables and their cache of diplomatic information far in advance of any FRUS publication -- which is supposed to be "no more than 30 years after the event recorded" but which is currently far behind schedule in violation of the law (see Aftergood, "State Dept Series Falls Farther Behind Schedule"). These materials will certainly be sought-after by researchers and the public in the future. But who will ensure that they have that access if libraries do not? Sleeman uses the cliche of the information on the web being like "toothpaste from a tube," saying that, once information is "out there," it "isn't going back." But this cliche is only half of the story. While it is true that one cannot guarantee that information, once released, can be successfully erased, it is also true, and more importantly so, that one cannot guarantee the preservation or integrity of information without explicit effort. This has important ramifications for libraries as they address the needs of their users. In a year (or 10 years, or more...) when a researcher wants to see the WikiLeaks documents behind news stories and books, will the researcher have a place to go where those documents have been preserved and authenticated as unaltered from the WikiLeaks release of those documents? Or will documents have disappeared or become unreadable or altered over time because they lacked adequate curation? Will there be documents, but no way to know if they are the ones that were used by earlier researchers? When FRUS releases some of these cables, will researchers be able to compare them to the WikiLeaks versions to verify accuracy of earlier research? Libraries have a role to play in preserving information over time for their users. Sleeman would ignore these issues; he says, "I am not willing to embrace the many calls in the library community to harvest and preserve this material locally." To me that seems like a short-sighted response, inadequately justified with ad hominem rhetoric. 5) Wikileaks staff and volunteers are transparency activists.
We cannot, of course, *know* the motivations of Assange or other WikiLeaks staff or those who leaked the documents any more than we can know the motivations behind other leaks or even the motivations behind the official release of documents in FRUS. Journalists and librarians can, however, document what we do know and provide that as context to any document or publication. As librarians, we do not "embrace the WikiLeaks initiative" when we point to it or even when we add the documents themselves to our collections. Libraries have information on all points of view created for all kinds of reasons. Part of what we do is document the record of society for others to use and evaluate. Our role as librarians is to select what is significant and give it context. (Part of that context is the bibliographic metadata that describes information and its source; part of the context is the rest of our collections that we build by subject and discipline.) Isn't it self-evident that the WikiLeaks material has become significant regardless of the motivation of those who leaked it? Perhaps a close analogy here is to the collections of emails of scientists studying climate change (which *were* in fact stolen, not leaked). In both cases, I can see different libraries making different decisions about including WikiLeaks or those emails in their collections. I would hope that libraries that chose to collect the emails would include the several official reports that exonerated the scientists from the wrong-doing that the thieves attempted to impute. In the case of WikiLeaks, I would hope that a library would include news reports, State Department publications, and robust metadata etc., giving additional context to the cables. 6) Unintended Consequences: There was a fascinating debate hosted by DemocracyNow in December, 2010 between Steven Aftergood and Glenn Greenwald in which Aftergood laid out many of the same arguments that Sleeman does about agencies becoming more restrictive because of the cable leak. However, I think Greenwald's arguments countering this are equally feasible. Again, however, Sleeman is misdirecting us from the issues facing libraries. Now that the information is available and has been widely used and quoted, libraries need to deal with the existence of the information. While it is interesting to think about whether or not the information should have been leaked and what the consequences of the leaks might be, those issues are unrelated to the issue of preservation of and access to that information. 7) Quality, Provenance, Authenticity: Sleeman says, "Yet many in the library community seem eager to point to, to acquire, and to preserve this content without any of the usual assurances regarding quality or origin that we would otherwise require when making a collection development decision." The State Department has not claimed that any of these were invented, modified, falsified or otherwise not authentic. If anything, the official response has implied that the cables are indeed authentic. In the digital age, it is *particularly* important that libraries document the how and where and who of acquisitions so that users can evaluate them accurately. It would be wrong for libraries to say "here are cables released by the State Department" but it is right to say, "here are cables released by WikiLeaks and claimed to be leaked from the state department." That is an accurate description of their origin. Related to this, let's be clear: no librarian is suggesting that we should raid the State Department of all its cables. Instead, many librarians are saying that, given the prominence, public availability, and apparent authenticity of this material, and, given that reputable news organizations have published the cables as well as articles based on these materials, these are legitimate materials for us to consider providing to our users. One option that libraries have in a situation like this is to select and acquire digital files and preserve them without making them publicly available yet. Think of this as preserving with an embargo -- something that many libraries' special collections units do on a regular basis. This ensures that the materials are preserved, but allows the library to put off the decision to make them available until more information on their authenticity and provenance and legal status is available. Preservation does not happen by accident. Preserving the materials now for possible future release is both prudent and cautious. 8) Preservation: Sleeman does not address the preservation of these materials. Perhaps he hopes that, even though the toothpaste is out of the tube, it will slowly wither away and get lost. As noted above, I think it is important that the recently released WikiLeaks information be preserved for future scholars. The fact of the matter is that someone will have to preserve this information if it is to remain accessible. As noted above, preservation does not happen by accident. That means the key question we should be asking is: Who will preserve it? I am not suggesting that every library should collect these materials. Many libraries will find these materials out of scope for their collections. The strength of a community of libraries with many different collections is being able to make preservation decisions based on the needs of our users. If we rely on others (other organizations, other libraries, other individuals) to preserve material that is important to our users, we may find that we are losing important information (for a similar case in point see "While BBC Wants To Kill Off A Bunch Of Websites, Geeks Quickly Archive Them"). If we rely on a very small number of huge digital repositories, we may find ourselves without an adequate voice in their preservation decisions. By building our own digital infrastructure, we put ourselves in control of decisions that affect our user communities. That, in my opinion, is what we should be doing. With that infrastructure in place, we should make decisions about WikiLeaks based on the needs of our users -- not based on our like or dislike of Julian Assange. For readers who want an overview of the issues, I would recommend these additional links:- CQ Researcher has published an paper that covers the wikileaks issue:
Government Secrecy: Does greater openness threaten national security?. By Alex Kingsbury. February 11, 2011
- Nuanced response from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
- NY Times cable archive
- Guardian cable archive
- der Spiegel cable archive
- CableSearch search interface of cables as they're released. By the European Centre of Computer Assisted Research.
- WikiRebels - The Documentary: in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it.
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