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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

James R. Jacobs

James R. Jacobs — not to be confused with Jim Jacobs, one of the other cofounders! — is one of the cofounders of Free Government Information. At the time of FGI’s founding in November, 2004, James was the local, state and international documents librarian at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He has since moved from UCSD to the Bay Area and is currently the Federal Government Information Librarian at Stanford University Library where he is very involved with both traditional collection development as well as digital projects like LOCKSS-USDOCS, the PEGI Project, and End of Term Web Archive. He received his MSLIS in 2002 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker (or CO-mover&shaker w Shinjoung Yeo!) and is a member of Beta Phi Mu.

James is very active in the library community. He is a member of the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of the American Library Association. He is former chair of GODORT’s Government Information Technology Committee (GITCO) and Publications Committee — where he started and served as editor of the GODORT Occasional Paper series — and has served on the State and Local Documents Taskforce (SLDTF), International Documents Taskforce (IDTF), and Federal Documents Taskforce (FDTF). Here are a few other honors he has received for his work:

Besides FGI and Radical Reference, James is on the board of Question Copyright, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that promotes a better public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages the development of alternatives to information monopolies. He has also helped to start the Stanford Open Source Lab.

On p.109 of the report “Managing and Sustaining A State Government Publications Program in California: A Report on the Existing Situation and Recommendations for Action” (2004) there’s a bar napkin kind of drawing that James did to map out what he thought the future CA state depository system *ought* to look like. This is basically the model he’d like to see for all government information. You get a picture of a distributed and collaborative model of storage, description, access and preservation, and *this* is what James is working toward with FGI.

Along with a list of commentaries on various GPO and public policy issues, here are some of James’ recent publications and presentations include:

 

James grew up in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. At one time or another he has called home the following places: NY City, Boston, Tokyo, Japan, Ithaca, NY, Eugene, OR, Urbana, IL, San Diego, CA and now San Francisco (and sometimes NYC!). James has always been a library rat and has called himself “librarian” since the age of 15 when he was “co-librarian” at a small public library in Homer, NY (yeah yeah, he’s heard about the faux pas of calling oneself a librarian without having an MLS!). As evinced by the number of places he’s lived, James took the road less travelled to being a librarian, with stints as an ESL teacher, social studies teacher, garlic farmer, beekeeper, and several technician jobs within various libraries. But, as Robert Frost wrote, that “has made all the difference.”

James can be reached at freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com.

 

[Updated March 10, 2020]

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