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Heads up: Preventing Additional Printing of Electronic Records Act of 2018 or the PAPER Act of 2018
[UPDATE 1:30pm 09122018: The bill going forward in the Senate is S. 2944, NOT 2673. And S.2944 includes reference to the depository library program! I’ve updated the link below to the correct Senate bill. JRJ]
Heads up! There’s a bill at the beginning of the legislative process called “Preventing Additional Printing of Electronic Records Act of 2018″ or the PAPER Act of 2018. Don’t you just love how Congress has to acronymize their bill titles?! This bill seeks to limit the printing of the Congressional Record, one of our most important Congressional publications, the official record of the proceedings and debates of the US Congress. It’s important to the Federal Depository Library Program to keep publishing the CR in paper for research utility and preservation purposes.
The House version mentions the FDLP, but the Senate version does not:
(d) Depository libraries
The Director of the Government Publishing Office shall furnish to the Superintendent of Documents as many daily and bound copies of the Congressional Record as may be required for distribution to depository libraries.
This bill is at the very beginning of the process, so it’s not time to get nervous. But the depository community ought to keep an eye on this bill in case it gathers momentum in the House and/or Senate.
Preserving What’s Gone — The Healthcare Guidelines Case
In a recent post on the blog of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, Shawn Jones reports on research that is vital to all those interested in long term access to government information.
- How well are the National Guideline Clearinghouse and the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse Archived? Shawn M. Jones, Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (July 15, 2018).
In the post, Jones reports on his research into how much of the content of two sites (more…)
Here’s what govt info *should* be but isn’t currently
Here’s a a thought-provoking tweet forwarded to me by Jonathan Petters. Random twitter user Kenny Jacoby found a giant 1,200 page document that he wanted to use — not read! So what did he do? He banged on it for 8 hours in order to extract all the data from the PDF and convert it to a structured dataset. Good on him for doing that, but how many people have the skills and time to be able to do that?
And this, kind readers, is a perfect example of what we’ve been writing about here at FGI for some time. In the age of near-ubiquitous online access, it’s not enough for governments to publish PDFs, they need to provide more and better access for both humans and machines.
Information must be:
not just preserved, but discoverable [2.2.2]
not just discoverable, but deliverable [2.3.3]
not just deliverable as bits, but readable [2.2.1]
not just readable, but understandable [2.2.1]
not just understandable, but usable [4.1.1.5]
(*numbers in brackets refer to sections of the OAIS standard.)
This is a nut that our friends at the Congressional Data Coalition are trying to crack. And some federal agencies are wading into this space as well — see for example Data.gov. But there are still far too many examples of this data/publication divide. It’s going to take a concerted effort by the public, watchdog groups like Sunlight Foundation and OpenTheGovernment along with librarians to push for this change in the way we think about government information.
Spent about 8 hours writing and debugging code to scrape a hideous 1,200-page PDF into a structured dataset because a public agency refused to give up its raw data.
Don’t mess with me. pic.twitter.com/Eiz1SZl3Xx
— Kenny Jacoby (@kennyjacoby) May 28, 2018
You’re invited to the PEGI May Webinar Monday May 14 @ 12pm EDT
Please join the PEGI Project for their May webinar. There’s a great list of speakers who will be talking about various efforts and projects to identify, collect, and preserve born-digital government information. and forward on to any of your colleagues and networks who may be interested. See you there!
Please join the PEGI project for a webinar on Monday, May 14th, 2018 at 12:00pm EDT to hear directly from trailblazing organizations about projects underway to identify, collect, and preserve born-digital government information. Leading figures from these organizations will be on hand to discuss the advocacy and coordination necessary to make an impact, and they can answer your questions about more ways to contribute to national efforts at a local level.
To hear about the current state of preservation efforts and contribute your ideas and priorities, please RSVP at the following link: .
Presenters:
Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC
Brandon Locke, Director of LEADR at Michigan State University & Founder & co-organizer of Endangered Data Week
Rachel Mattson, Curator of the Tretter Collection for GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota Libraries & Founder/co-leader of the Digital Library Federation’s interest group on Government Records Transparency & Accountability
Bernard F. Reilly, President, Center for Research Libraries
Justin Schell, Director, Shapiro Design Lab & Member of EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative)
Bethany Wiggin, Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH)
Moderator:
Shari Laster, PEGI Project Steering Committee
If you have any questions or comments, please direct them to info@pegiproject.org.
FGI at GovInfo Day 2018: how to build a sustainable govt information ecosystem
I had the distinct honor to be invited to give the keynote last week at the 20th anniversary of Canadian Govinfo Day held at Simon Fraser University in beautiful downtown Vancouver, BC. It was 2 days of a program chock full of a workshop, updates from Canadian and provincial government information providers, other presentations and roundtable discussions.
There were two presentations of note:
- Melissa Adams, a Librarian and Archivist at the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, gave a presentation on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report which included a good discussion on what libraries and archives were doing in response to the report; and
- Carla Graebner gave a heartfelt presentation honoring several Canadian leaders in improving access to government information:
- Percilla Groves (SFU Library, retired)
- Nancy Hannum (BC Legal Services Society, retired)
- Gay Lepkey (Depository Services Program Canada, retired)
It was so nice to hear about, and then hear from, these librarians and their tireless efforts at providing access to government information. Kudos to Percilla, Nancy, and Gay for professional lives well led!
My talk was entitled, If you click on the gear at the bottom or the slides, you can open the speaker notes. Alternatively — and for when google slides inevitably goes away! — you can download my slides and presenter notes (and just an aside, the cute baby seal was a last minute addition based on Carla Graebner’s offhand comment along the lines that “government information is not the cute baby seal of the library world” 🙂 ).
The long and short of my talk was that I argued that we need to build a government information ecosystem (see image below). This ecosystem needs to deal with the five petals of publishing output, collections/curation, preservation, metadata/description, and access and be publicly controlled and funded, collaborative, interoperable, and sustainable, and be built on open standards like OAIS, with version control and links resolving. Perhaps most importantly, it must be based on public policy which requires .gov entities to produce open, findable, collectible, re-usable information.
This ecosystem must include well-curated archives of interconnected, well-described, preservable govt content in re-usable formats, have a ubiquitous metadata layer that can be shared among and between archives, search engines, and the public, and allow libraries to build discovery layers that contain .gov and non-governmental materials (ie books etc) for their designated communities, either ongoing or on the fly. The big thing in libraries these days is “service,” but, as I have argued many times, a library can’t build services without collections, and these well-curated archives form the basis of library services going forward, not just for .gov content but across the library.
We’re moving in the right direction, but more work is needed to make the government information ecosystem a reality. Onward!
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