Home » Posts tagged 'less_access' (Page 26)
Tag Archives: less_access
“Less Access to Less Information” now available in its entirety!
From 1981 until 1998, Anne Heanue and the fine folks at the Washington Office of the American Library Association (ALA) published an amazing series called Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government, a chronology of efforts to restrict and privatize government information. Readers may remember that the Internet Archive was kind enough to digitize the series from 1981 to 1996 for FGI, but that I had not been able to get my hands on 1997-98 issues. Well now, thanks to Bernadine Abbott Hoduski who sent me the 1997-98 volumes, the complete chronology from 1981 - 98 is now digitized and hosted at the Internet Archive. Please check out the entire series of Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government available in the FGI library. Many thanks again to Ginger Bisharat and Robert Miller at the Internet Archive for their effort. Also thanks to Bernadine Abbott Hoduski for sending me her copies of the series and Emily Sheketoff, Associate Executive Director of ALA and manager of the Washington Office who graciously gave me permission to digitize the series. Continue reading
Public Online Information Act (POIA) announced. Libraries and the public cheer
The Sunlight Foundation announced today a new bill introduced by Congressman Steve Israel (NY-2) called the Public online Information Act (POIA) (read the bill (PDF)). POIA will require that all "public" executive branch documents be permanently available on the Internet at no cost. POIA also creates a:
"special federal advisory committee to coordinate the development of Internet disclosure policies. These policies promote information best practices, including data interoperability standards, and will keep the government up-to-date with new technology. The advisory committee’s 19 members – six appointed by each branch of government, plus one by GSA – are drawn from the public and private sectors and serve as watchdogs, synthesizing the needs of agencies and the public and making recommendations on updating federal law."While I wholeheartedly support the spirit of POIA -- free permanent internet access to executive branch documents! -- and will definitely be contacting my representative to support its passage, I have 2 concerns that I hope will be discussed by the Sunlight community, the soon-to-be federal advisory committee, libraries and the public: 1) preservation: There was an article in today's NY Times -- "Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit" -- that highlights the many issues surrounding digital preservation. Just putting something on the Web does not mean that it will be preserved. The GPO has been working on their Federal Digital System (FDsys) since 2004 (and really since 1994 when they started GPOaccess) to deal with the inherent digital issues. Many researchers, librarians, academics, computer programmers etc have been working on these issues pretty much since the 1960s. And the issues are still here today. So I'd like to see as part of this bill an acknowledgement that online information is expensive to preserve AND that there will be continued funding for research and sustainability of digital archives through the National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Readers are encouraged to explore the issues here and here. 2) privatization of govt information: The following from the Sunlight announcement caught my eye and concerned me:
Freeing government information from its paper silos provides the private sector with raw material to develop new products and services and gives the public what they need to participate in government as active and informed citizens.Federal government information is in the public domain. That's a good thing. However, there's a fundamental issue at stake here. One can't have "permanent free public access" to government information where the private sector is involved. The private sector has been involved in giving access to government information for a long time (see LexisNexis, Thomson West, Readex etc). They do it well but they certainly don't do it for free. Libraries and other organizations have paid many millions of dollars to license access to govt information for the communities they serve. Here's more background and context on privatization. For all intents and purposes, these private sector companies take public domain information and privatize it. Any digital govt information accessible on the internet should already be findable, usable and accessible in bulk at minimum. But there needs to be more. What I'd like to see in this bill and in the discussion after it passes (devil's in the details right?!) is not only a requirement that all govt information is online permanently and for free, but that there be the inclusion of a viral GNU General Public License-like piece of the public domain whereby anything IN the public domain (i.e., govt information) has to STAY IN the public domain. There are plenty of folks (I'm looking at you Sunlight, Govtrack.us, OpenCongress, OpenCRS etc) excited about making govt information more available, more usable and more shareable and this would support their public service. Please help Sunlight get the word out about POIA and contact your representative and let them know that they should co-sponsor POIA and assure its passage.
USPTO latest agency looking to outsource their data
[UPDATE: Michael Keller, University Librarian at Stanford University (and my boss), wrote a letter to USPTO as well. Thanks Carl for posting it to scribd.] Carl Malamud made me aware (see his letter to USPTO CIO John Owens below) of a posting on FedBizOpps of a Request for Information (RFI) from the US Patent and Trademark Office:
"This RFI seeks to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential opportunities to acquire patent and trademark data in bulk (my emphasis) and to provide such data to the public without cost. The USPTO is seeking comments on the identified problem and solutions that will make the data available to the public without charge."While there is mention in the RFI of IP data being easily accessible to the public, there's no mention of data.gov. This seems to be purely a "no-cost" way for USPTO to upgrade their IT infrastructure by giving away public domain information. This is worrisome on so many levels as it is just one more example of a government agency looking to outsource and privatize public domain information *and* its IT infrastructure -- see for example the Thomson West contract with the GAO to digitize their legislative histories. Additionally, in a vague nod to transparency, USPTO will be holding 1 (yes only 1) vendor information meeting on Sept 24. I'm not sure how USPTO thinks that a 2 week notice for a meeting held in DC will help the cause of transparency. Shouldn't they have several meetings in different geographic locations to talk about such a huge and important public resource (nearly 2 petabytes of data!!)? Luckily, this is only at the RFI stage, not RFP stage. USPTO is currently only looking for information on how to do this. This is the time for the government information/transparency communities to submit ideas for how the USPTO could make their patent information available *without* giving it away to vendors. Please contact the USPTO at the addresses below and give them ideas for making their data open, standardized and freely available in bulk. Public Meeting:
Thursday, 24 September 2009
9:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m.
USPTO Campus in the Madison Auditorium
600 Dulany Street
Alexandria, VA, 22314 Contracting Office Address:
P. O. Box 1450 - Mail Stop 6
600 Dulany Street, MDE, 7th Floor
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 Primary Point of Contact.:
publicdatadissemination@uspto.gov
Secondary Point of Contact:
V. Anne Tugbang,
Contracting Officer
vanne.tugbang@uspto.gov
Phone: 5712726550
Fax: 5712736550
Voting records expunged in California
In California, Legislative votes on bills are posted on the web (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/bilinfo.html). In fact, a bill cannot become a law without an official record of the vote. But it is possible to "expunge" votes and the L.A. Times reports that happened recently on a controversial bill.
- California Assembly expunges votes on oil drilling bill, By Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2009.
Although 28 members of the California Assembly supported a measure to allow new oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast, their votes are nowhere to be found in the official state database.According to the status page for the Assembly Bill "ABX4 23," on July 24, action was rescinded and the "record expunged whereby a final roll call vote was taken" but no record of the House vote exists on the web site today. Offshore oil drilling is very controversial in California and both private contractors and the State hoped to reap a lot of money from the drilling. (Plains Exploration Falls On Tranquillon Ridge Rejection >PXP, By Aja Carmichael, Wall Street Journal, JULY 27, 2009). While voting records are often mis-used, in my opinion, in political contests -- taking votes out of context and viewing them as isolated and simple when they are, in fact, part of a process of conflict, compromise, and (one hopes) consensus -- removing records from the public record is hard to justify on any grounds. The usual excuses were used for this recent expunging: It doesn't happen often; and: Another vote will be taken later on the same or a different bill; and: You can still find the information somewhere else. These are excuses and not reasons and they are not even very good reasons. This is nothing but an attempt to control political information. As one Republican, who wrote the measure, said: "The message to the public is 'this vote was an inconvenient vote and we would rather you not look at the man behind the curtain.'" Continue reading
“It can’t happen here”
November 18, 2010 / Leave a comment
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.
And the response by the Smithsonian: 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 →Continue Reading →