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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.

Call to arms: What government information librarians can do to help save critical federal information from being lost

Fire brigade! What is a government information librarian to do during these times when the very public information we base our daily work around is being redacted, cleansed, and deleted? First, make yourself aware of all the work that is already being done (and has been being done since 2008 and before). Our friend and PEGI colleague Lynda Kellam has helpfully created a growing google document of the efforts currently underway to collect and preserve federal government information and data.

Then, what can each of us do, at our libraries, to make sure that government information, once published, is collected, described, preserved, and made freely and publicly available? Here are some things that EVERY government information librarian (regardless of the size of the organization they work for) can do.

1) Send in “unreported” documents to GPO. The executive branch is rife with unreported documents that should be part of the FDLP but have slipped through the ever-growing cracks. We should be absolutely flooding GPO with unreported documents for them to catalog and preserve. It’s quick and easy to do by following the directions on the FDLP website. And the form includes a space to attach a digital file so make sure to do that as well.

EVERY FDLP librarian should agree to track at least one federal agency and submit at least 10 unreported documents to GPO every week. We can’t assure long-term preservation of government information unless we ALL do this. Perhaps GPO or GODORT can help coordinate this? Maybe we can use govdoc-l to announce and update our commitments.

2) Use the Internet Archive’s “save page now” tool to save every .gov page that you visit. IA will crawl and preserve every one of these in the Wayback Machine. It’s quick and easy – and fun! – to copy/paste the url into the “save page now” tool and watch wayback do its work! And it’ll even save that page to your own personal web archive (if you’ve created a free “library card” and are logged in to the site!). You can create your own web archive of important websites. And you can install their free browser extensions to save web pages with a single click. In short, be a librarian! See something save something! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information. GPO, LC, and NARA can’t do it by themselves.

3) Donate to the Internet Archive. (we are NOT IA staff!) It’s time to put our money where our livelihoods are. The Internet Archive does yeoman’s work to preserve the web. They have long put their valuable resources, infrastructure, technology, and staff time towards making sure the End of Term Archive is successful in collecting as much of the .gov/.mil web domain as they can. And they have started a new project called Democracy’s Library to collect the world’s born-digital web based government information and digitize historic government information. So you NEED to pitch in to help their efforts. Skip one or two Starbucks coffees and send them $10 a month. Every little bit helps them be able to continue to do their valuable work.

4) If you work for a library or organization that has an institutional repository and/or digital infrastructure, then advocate with your administration to put that repository and infrastructure toward the common good of hosting local copies of documents and mirroring important data sets.

5) And if your institution has some budgetary and infrastructure wherewithal (and especially if your institution is already a LOCKSS member!), please consider joining the LOCKSS-USDOCS project. The project just had its 16th birthday of distributed preservation of all content on GOVINFO (and FDsys and GPOaccess before that!).

In short, be a librarian! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information.

These are short-term strategies for things that all of us can do RIGHT NOW and we still need to use this current historical moment as an opportunity to develop a long term strategy for building a Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.

Finally: GPO, if you’re listening, please store a copy of EVERY document you catalog and provide a link to your stored copy. Whole websites are being deleted from the web and the only way to assure long-term access is to store a copy. Don’t POINT to a document when you should be COLLECTING every document which is your legal and statutory purview.

The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is

[This post is adapted from our forthcoming book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.]

Today we want to clarify something important about preserving government information. There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age.

When a new president is inaugurated, one expects new policies. The number of changes and the speed of change may vary for different administrations, but we expect that every administration will be different in some ways from its predecessor. After all, that is part of the reason we have elections. Also, information that the government publishes is updated all the time, not just when administrations change. Laws and regulations are added and amended and rescinded, new economic and environmental and census data are collected and published, government recommendations to the public (like the Department of Agriculture’s “food pyramid” guidance) are revised.

Changes in government information are normal in a democracy.

Because change is normal, it is essential to preserve government information – even “non-current” and “out of date” information – in order to document those changes. This is not a new idea, but a long-accepted principle of democracy. Citizens need a record of what a government’s stated values were and when they changed, what actions it took and when it took them, what data it collected and generated at specific points in time, and so forth. It is important to preserve even information that later proves to be inaccurate in order to document what the government knew and when it knew it.

Because published government information is the evidence for a democracy, its preservation is essential.

In the era in which government information was published in paper formats, preservation of that information relied on libraries. The information was distributed to FDLP libraries based on the needs of the communities that those libraries served. Beginning in 1962, Regional FDLs received and retained all the paper publications in the FDLP system. When new information superseded or replaced old information, the old information was not erased or discarded; it was preserved in Regional FDLs and in every FDL whose community valued that older information. In the print era, it was taken for granted that, once government information was released to the public, it would not be withdrawn or altered or lost.1

In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.

Some digital government information is actively preserved by GPO, NARA, and the Library of Congress. Some government-collected data are preserved by law or by tradition. But the laws that allow this are weak and government preservation of government information suffers from large gaps. Non-government projects (notably the Internet Archive and the End-of-Term Archive) use web harvesting to attempt to acquire and store government information, but these projects are, by their nature, incomplete and their long-term guarantees of access are fragile. As a result of all this, the public can no longer assume that any given piece of government information will not be withdrawn or altered or lost.

The early actions of the incoming Trump administration (as well as the actions of the first Trump administration) have brought the vulnerability of digital information to the public’s attention (see our previous post “Federal information scrubbing has begun”) and the public is rightfully worried. That vulnerability is, however, not limited to this administration. Digital government information was being lost before President Trump.

The current crisis of imminent loss of information exists not only because government information is being changed, but because it is being erased. The erasure is possible because of the gaps in the current preservation infrastructure.

The scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented and certainly requires immediate short-term action. But librarians and archivists and citizens should use this current crisis to demand more than short-term solutions. A new distributed digital preservation infrastructure is needed for digital government information.

James A. Jacobs
James R. Jacobs

  1. Even when information was withdrawn for some reason, there was a record of the withdrawals. (See this spreadsheet listing withdrawn documents 1981 – 2018, collated from GPO’s no-longer published “Administrative Notes” newsletter.)

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