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Three Cheers for GPO: Tangible Copies of US Budget
I was very happy to hear that the Government Printing Office will be producing paper copies of the annual US Budget despite a White House announcement to go electronic only. Here is the GPO message sent out to FDLP-L today:
From: Announcements from the Federal Depository Library Program [mailto:GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV] On Behalf Of FDLP Listserv
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:03 PM
To: GPO-FDLP-L@LISTSERV.ACCESS.GPO.GOV
Subject: Tangible Copies of the Budget of the United States Government
On January 9, 2008, Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle announced that the Budget of the United States Government would be released in a web-only format for Fiscal Year 2009 on February 4th, 2008. Mr. Nussle cited the cost savings of such a move as the reason for the discontinuance of paper copies of the Budget.
GPO wishes to assure the members of the Federal Depository Library Program that we are committed to keeping the various Budget publications in printed format. To this end, OMB has agreed to provide GPO with files of the Budget documents that will be put to press for the purpose of dissemination to the public through the FDLP and Publication & Information Sales Program. We intend to ship these tangible copies of the Budget in conjunction with the February 4th internet release.
The class numbers, titles, and item numbers involved in this announcement by OMB are:
PREX 2.8: Budget of the United States Government; 0853
PREX 2.8/1: Budget of the United States Government; 0853-C
PREX 2.8/5: Analytical Perspectives; 0855-B
PREX 2.8/7: Budget Revisions; 0853
PREX 2.8/8: Historical Tables, Budget of the United States
Government; 0853
If you have questions, please use the GPO online help service at:
<http://www.gpoaccess.gov/help>.
Why is this good news? For several reasons:
Preservation - At this point in time, tangible formats are the only absolutely proven way to ensure something will be readable 100 years from now. LOCKSS and other technologies may eventually change this, but certainly in digital preservation still belongs to the future. And folks in 2109 will want to know how our government spent its money in 2009.
Access - While electronic versions of documents like this are terrific for searching for a specific piece of information, they can be cumbersome to use. And for the 80,000,000+ Americans without internet access, a tangible format is the only access they'll have to the President's spending plans.
Privacy - With the United States called a pervasive surveillance society by Privacy International and other groups, the best way to avoid gov't and commercial scrutiny of your scrutiny of the US budget is by using the paper version. I still plan to use both print and electronic, but it's nice to have the choice in my hands.
I haven't asked GPO their reasons for continuing to print the US Budget in light of its migration to the Internet, but I am very glad they will be preserving this year's documents for future generations. Three Cheers!
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Happy 50th to Paul Meek Library at Univ of TN!
According to govdoc-l poster Ania Lasota, the Paul Meek Library had a terrific 50th anniversary as a Federal Depository Library:
This week we have celebrated 50th Anniversary of our depository status. We did great: we had coverage by a local radio station, and also Jackson, local and college paper. We ran information about the docs anniversary on the web, and the campus main electronic marquee. The staff put together a nice display of government documents and posters, and we had a great reception - which went really well! Our guests included Congressman and Mrs. John Tanner, Mayor, Chancellor, and others. As an extra enticement for students to attend our event, we had a bunch of door prizes which local businesses graciously donated to us.
Our hats are off to Ania and others at the Paul Meek Library who did such a terrific job ensuring visibilty for their event!
It looks like it impressed Rep. Tanner as well who is reportedly planning to return to the library to give a lecture.
Congrats to Jian Anna Xiong, Morris Library
The Morris library in the McLafferty Annex library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale celebrated 75 years as a Federal Depository Library this past week. The Southern Illinoisan newspaper celebrated this occaision with an article titled Morris Library Recognized for Participation in Federal Program. The article featured a photo of documents librarian Jian Anna Xiong.
What I liked was that Ms. Xiong was able to get the paper to mention a number of highlights of the collection:
There are correspondences from Abraham Lincoln, volumes from the U.S. Bureau of Entomology and CIA reports on the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to library officials, much of the history of the federal government from 1789 to present day is available for viewing.
Government Information Librarian Jian Anna Xiong said the depository offers information on almost every imaginable aspect of the federal government.
"There are 400,000 documents on paper and about 900,000 on microfiche," she said. "It's almost every area of American history: political science, race issues, slavery, taxes, health."
Happy Anniversary! And good work in getting your local media to notice the anniversary and to talk about your collection!
University Libraries Create Great Resource
One of things that libraries bring to the world of government information is the ability to take preexisting materials, make them user-friendly and offer them to the world at large for no charge. This is particularly true in the world of public domain federal government information, at least when it comes to digitizing.
A project I'd like to highlight today is a searchable version of the Foreign Relations of the United States done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries.
For those not familar, here is a description of Foreign Relations of the United States from the State Department:
The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.
Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy. In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution. Volumes published over the past few years have expanded the scope of the series in two important ways: first by including documents from a wider range of government agencies, particularly those involved with intelligence activity and covert actions, and second by including transcripts prepared from Presidential tape recordings.
In short, it's a good place to get declassifed materials and context for most US foreign policy decisions. The two University libraries and Federal Depository Library Program members digitized the paper volumes so that the text would be searchable, but researchers can see the actual pages of reproduced telegrams and the like.
I think this resource will be of great value to researchers. When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior paper on Turkey's accession to NATO. I wound up having to use FRUS a lot because that's where NATO meetings got recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, not as you'd expect in NATO publications. I remember checking out a dozen volumes at a time, stacking them on my apartment floor and carefully going through the index for "Turkey" and looking up pages and bookmarking them for later xeroxing. How I wished I had this product then. If made widely known, it could help people better understand historical foreign policy and contribute to today's policy debates.
A private company could have done this. But then it would be a subscription product and the average citizen or undergrad student couldn't be bothered with it. Now our declassified foreign policy heritage, both good and bad is out there for the whole world to see. And that's a good thing. Now if the CIA would stop trying to block new releases.
Is there some product at your library that you can add value to and show the world? Tell us!
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What really happened with Google Premium Video — Part Two: Why Google Video story should scare you
August 18, 2007 / Leave a comment
In Part One we examined how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and proprietary software allowed Google to make it impossible for users to watch videos that they had bought from Google even though they had downloaded the video files onto their own computers. In this part we examine why this story is important for government information specialists and Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) librarians.
There are two connections between this story about commercial content -- like TV shows being sold for profit -- and non-copyrighted government information that is supposed to be freely available:
First, the government may want to restrict access to information and may welcome tools that make this easier. Certainly with the removal of government information from the web, the re-classification of previously declassified information, and the removal of information that was once available in the National Archives, government agencies have demonstrated an increasing willingness to control access to information -- even after its release to the public. (See "More Information" below for links to stories about these events.)
We are seeing the evolution of this most publicly with the Foreign Relations of the United States series. In 2001, the CIA wanted to cease distribution of a volume that was already printed and sent to depository libraries but, in the end, the volumes were distributed because "Destroying them would be a huge public relations disaster for the U.S. government.... Book burning is definitely not a politically correct thing to do." (State Dept Mulls "Book Burning", Secrecy News, September 21, 2001). By 2006, we saw an example of the next stage in this evolutionary process of control of public information: long delays in the release of documents as an attempt to avoid the embarrassing situation of recalling documents. A volume had been nearly ready for publication for over seven years, but intelligence screeners would not permit the release because of a handful of documents (Controversial FRUS volume release -- with a caveat...). This leads us to ask how long it will be before the government starts "releasing" documents that they can "recall" technologically without the embarrassing problem of gathering books and burning them -- without even having to notify FDLP librarians and asking them to withdraw something. And, in the Google Video premium service story, we can see a real-life example of existing technology that allows this to be done.
Second, whether the government intends to restrict access to its information or not, policies change, budgets constrict, and intentions evolve. As Daniel pointed out "...Google didn't start up the service with the intention of shutting it down..." Nevertheless, in the end, they did shut it down. In addition, when the government relies on commercial tools for digital information distribution, those tools can impose the rules for distribution and use of information that the government cannot change. We have seen how government cannot always afford to do things in an open way and is forced by costs to do things that restrict access (e.g., FEMA requires Internet Explorer and What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information and GPO's Budget and Priorities). Lawrence Lessig has documented the process of how technology can all too easily supersede good intentions and even the law in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
How hypothetical is this? So far, we have been pretty lucky that the government has not explicitly implemented these kinds of technological information control. But we have seen precursors. In 2004, The Government Printing Office (GPO) released its own annual report using a proprietary reader that requires registration, includes DRM, and has built in "audit controls" (Annual Report 2004 Zinio Interactive Version (Registration Required) -> Get the GPO 2004 Annual Report in digital form now!). Most recently, we have seen GPO use proprietary software with the "call home" feature to authenticate documents in its Authenticated Public and Private Laws, Beta Release. With this system "Users must be connected to the Internet in order to have the ability to validate a digital signature on a PDF document." While the document is still readable if a user is not connected to the Internet, the user cannot validate the document. While the document is readable using software other than Adobe Acrobat or Reader version 7 or later, validation does not work without this proprietary software.
In summary, Google video used proprietary software with phone-home DRM to deny access to files that users had legally paid for and downloaded. GPO has used and is using proprietary software for distribution of government information and it is using DRM "phone home" features in its attempt to technologically "authenticate" government documents. While GPO certainly is not claiming that it wants to withdraw access to distributed publications, the technology is there for it to do so and it is experimenting with it.
Think of the Google Video premium service story as a useful cautionary tale -- a warning of how information can be withdrawn even if digital files were deposited with FDLP libraries or downloaded by conscientious librarians and digital preservation projects. This is something that government information specialists, FDLP librarians, and citizens should be watching closely. I urge you to write your Congressional delegation and the copyright office and suggest an explicit government document exemption to the DMCA. And write GPO and ask for an explicit, written policy rejecting the use of DRM and proprietary software and proprietary formats.
More information
- Homefront Confidential Prepared by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, SIXTH EDITION, September 2005, "How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public's Right to Know"
- 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
- Secret reclassification of US documents by Michele McGinnis, (2006-02-21)
- Secret Agreement Reveals Covert Program to Hide Reclassification from Public by James R. Jacobs (2006-04-20)
- The Technical is Political by James A. Jacobs and Karrie Peterson, Of Significance... 3(1) 2001, p.25-35. Association of Public Data Users. (Full text PDF file)
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