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Documenting the Government — Strait of Hormuz edition
The recent encounter between U.S. warships and Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of depository libraries in the digital age.
Background
The incident occured on January 6. On January 7, Navy Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff briefed Pentagon reporters via video teleconference from his headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. On the defenselink web site, a transcript of that news conference includes a link to page with a video of the incident. The video includes a voice saying "You will explode [unintelligible] minutes." In an undated post, apparently from January 7 or 8, on the U.S. Central Command web site, there is a story that includes a link to the same video and a still photo from it labeled "From Defense Department Video."
- DoD News Briefing with Vice Adm. Cosgriff at the Pentagon, Arlington, Va., January 07, 2008
- Iranian boats approach U.S. Navy ships, by U.S. Fifth Fleet Public Affairs, US Naval Forces Central Command, United States Central Command.
The incident received widespread news coverage. This morning, a search on news.google.com for "hormuz iran explode" retrieved over 2000 stories.
The initial stories were followed by accusations from Iran that the video was faked and second thoughts and analyses.
- Iran airs own video of US ship incident, AFP, Jan 10, 2008
- Voices on Recording May Not Have Been From Iranian Speedboats, By Lartha Raddatz and Jonathan Karm, ABC News, Jan. 10, 2008
- Degrees of Confidence on U.S.-Iran Naval Incident By Mike Nizza, New York Times blog, The Lede, January 10, 2008
- What to Make of the Iranian Videotape by William M. Arkin, "Early Warning", Washington Post, January 10, 2008)
According to a story on TelegraphTV (The Pentagon have released amateur footage of the alleged encounter between the US Navy and Iranian vessels) the "amateur footage" released by the Pentagon was "filmed by a crew member of the USS Hopper" and "the audio and video recordings were made separately but have been put together in a compilation which showed more than 20 minutes of the alleged confrontation."
You can see copies of the 4 minute and 20 second video here:
- Iranian boats confront Navy, United States Central Command. (direct link to video, Quicktime, 5.1 megs)
- DoD News Briefing, Tuesday, 7 January 2008 - 2:00 PM. (direct link to video: Three U.S. Navy Ships Approached by Iranian Boats. (.wmv 28 MB) (080107-D-6570C-001))
Government Information Issues.
While the government has hundreds if not thousands of videos online, most go unnoticed by most Americans. But this video got extremely high media attention at a time when newspapers are running stories with headlines like "Bush's Iran war plot."
One analysis of the news coverage said:
ABC's Jonathan Karl quoting a Pentagon official as saying the Iranian boats "were a heartbeat from being blown up".
Bush administration officials seized on the incident to advance the portrayal of Iran as a threat and to strike a more threatening stance toward Iran. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared Wednesday that the incident "almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces". President George W. Bush declared during his Mideast trip Wednesday that there would be "serious consequences" if Iran attacked U.S. ships and repeated his assertion that Iran is "a threat to world peace".
- Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel Analysis by Gareth Porter, IPS, Jan 10, 2008.
This prompts me to ask several questions related to the role of the FDLP and libraries that wish to preserve and provide access to government information.
- Is the video an official government publication? You can ask this question from the point of view of FDLP and Title 44 and wonder if it is "within scope of GPO's information dissemination programs." GPO is careful to not get information that is not within its scope (see: Web Publication Harvesting). But we can also ask, Is an "amateur video" by a crewman on a warship "official"? Can ask, When does audio, apparently from a warship radio, become a public document? Does a label of "From Defense Department Video" on a still photograph make the video official? Does anyone happen to know what that official-looking number (080107-D-6570C-001) attached to the defenselink version of the video means?
- Who assembled the video and audio? This question is, of course, related to the one above. The video consists of 4 or 5 separate shots and the "explode" audio over a black screen. Was it assembled officially and if so, by whom?
- What is the provenance of the video and audio? Were the separate shots and the audio recorded by one individual or several?
- Will the video be deposited with the National Archives? or GPO? or FDLP? And, the converse of this question is, of course, Will it disappear from the .mil web sites? Will take-down notices be filed with copies on Youtube? Will its "official" status later become "unofficial"? Will the military claim the video is owned by a private individual and the military has no rights to it?
- Has any digital library saved a copy of this video? There are copies of the video and exerpts of it all over the net. My search for the "official" version took some time and I came across news media excerpts, copies of newsmedia versions, and other copies. But none of the places I found the video (including the "official" versions on the .mil sites) have any library-role of guaranteeing long-term preservation and free public access. There once was a time when more ephemeral documents distributed by the government might have some life in newspapers and the stories about them. But, in an age of video, are any libraries saving copies of significant public documents like this video? Or are they hoping that someone else (ABC? CNN? DOD? GPO?) will do that for them? And who is in control of those copies? Daniel has put a copy in the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/DodFootageOfJan62008IranianEncounter, but even the IA has a policy that web site owners "can voluntarily restrict access to their material."
- Where is the "20 minute" compilation cited in several news stories? Perhaps it is somewhere on the web, but I did not find it. If anyone has found it please let me know.
I believe that libraries should be asking these questions in general, not just of the highly-visible items like the Hormuz video. In fact, if anything, the Hormuz video will probably be saved somewhere because, like toothpaste out of a tube, it is hard to put something back once it's been release on the net. But libraries are the only places that will preserve the things that are not high profile today but which will have great value tomorrow. Unless libraries create explicit policies to select, acquire, organize, and preserve digital information, much will be lost -- whether it is "within the scope" of FDLP or not.
Continue readingCLIR Seeks Public Comment on White Paper
Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization By Oya Rieger
CLIR Seeks Public Comment on White Paper: Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) seeks public comment on a white paper examining preservation issues relevant to large-scale digitization projects such as those being done by Google, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance. The paper, Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization, was written by Oya Rieger, Interim Assistant University Librarian for Digital Library and Information Technologies at Cornell University Library. It is available at http://www.clir.org/activities/details/mdpres.html.
The paper identifies issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books being created by large-scale digitizing projects, and considers the relationship of these new resources to our print collections. It concludes with a set of recommendations for rethinking a preservation strategy.
In issuing this paper, CLIR aims to stimulate discussion among stakeholders and to generate productive thinking about collaborative approaches to enduring access. To this end, CLIR invites those who submit comments to indicate whether they would like their comments posted publicly on our Web site. CLIR will make public only those comments accompanied by permission to post (let us know if the comments are to be anonymous or signed), and all such comments will be moderated. Comments received without permission to post will be shared only with CLIR staff and the author.
Public comment is sought through Friday, October 5. Please address comments to Kathlin Smith (ksmith@clir.org). CLIR will issue a final print and electronic report later this fall.
Continue reading
Karen G. Schneider on LOCKSS
Karen explains LOCKSS software clearly and succinctly -- its technology, costs, benefits, and purpose. She compares LOCKSS and Portico, too.
- Lots of Librarians Can Keep Stuff Safe, By Karen G. Schneider, Library Journal (8/15/2007)
[Libraries] have never before owned so little of the content they manage. LOCKSS offers one solution... [T]he use of LOCKSS for preserving local born-digital content -- with a free download, plus one morning's worth of time -- is certainly worth a spin around the block.Continue reading
Wikipedia Scanner and government information
There's a very interesting article in Wired about a data mining tool developed to discover instances of whitewashing (e.g. editing in one's self-interest; presumably inappropriately) of Wikipedia entries. As has been noted before, Wikipedia has no authority control over the entries and is therefore particularly subject to self-serving or highly partisan edits. Now a clever grad student has developed a tool to identify those instances based on the version tracking built into wikis. While it doesn't necessarily identify a particular person, just knowing that, as described in the article, someone at Diebold HQ removed negative information about Diebold voting machines is adequate because it forces Diebold to prove they weren't the ones to make the changes. In short, it provides accountability by making use of the Wikipedia equivalent of the historical record. I mention this story because I think that this kind of activity is going to be increasingly important in determining what constitutes a real and/or official government publication. Traditionally, you held a government accountable by getting offiical documentation of its activities and holding on it for comparison with other official documentation. However, government information published electronically has made this a lot harder because of the changable nature of digital files. A longstanding concern of government information librarians with respect to electronic govnernment information has been how to know when changes have been made, what the changes consisted of and who made them. In this respect, the surging popularity of web 2.0 -style tools may be a great boon for government information. These tools -- wikis, online collaborative software like Google Documents or Zoho and so on -- derive their value from their ability to be shared. Government agency personnel are no different from anyone else - they've got work to do, a limited patience with messing around with how to do it and a desire to take the path of least resistance. So, for government employees, i.e. the folks creating government information, there's just as much reason to use these kinds of software as there is for me right now writing this post. And that means that neither the historical record nor legal accountability is necessarily lost, although it will entail expanding the definition of preservation of the historical record to include methods of acting on databases (creating data mining software to run against databases) in addition to the collection of objects (finding that last copy of a Serial Set volume) and any other activities that may become necessary as technology evolves. As with everything, the possibilities are not limitless. The Wikipedia Scanner was developed in cooperation with Wikipedia and required a full download of the whole database. Allowing that level of access is an option that individual agencies could turn on or off and certainly some agencies would never allow those levels of access to their publications. However, the agencies unlikely to play well with others in this scenario probably already don't provide much access to their information. For agenices that would be amenable to this kind of datamining, a benefit would be not just automated archiving (which the version tracking amounts to), but no-cost-to-the-agency management of those archives since they'll be allowing others to do it for them. Continue reading
Government Information in Legacy Formats
Government Information in Legacy Formats: Scaling a Pilot Project to Enable Long-Term Access, by Gretchen Gano and Julie Linden, D-Lib Magazine (July/August 2007) Volume 13 Number 7/8.
The Yale Library pilot project described here has served not only as a means for analyzing and documenting aspects of a CD-ROM migration approach, but also as a launching pad for a community-wide consideration of a large-scale, distributed project to migrate this legacy collection and ensure permanent public access to government information distributed on CD-ROMs.Continue reading
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