Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 25
With the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 now on its way to Obama for his signature, the question remains about what happens next. Word is Obama will be setting the stage for his next initiative -- a global fix on broken mortgages. Again, this demonstrates a clear set of scheduled (and unscheduled) events libraries of all types might use to promote a greater awareness about the implications of the soon to be enacted law (and subsequent policies and initiatives) for their communities. Recovery.gov is still aborning, profit and non-profit groups will offer, or do so now, there own web-enabled looks at the massive spending bill. But, what strikes me as missing from these techno-centric transparency efforts is the inability to explain the politics (or the policy implications) behind the numbers. One small example -- when people look at Thomas' links to H.R. 1, they will find seven different versions of the bill (soon to be eight when the President makes it a public law on Tuesday.) No where in the Thomas web site is any of this explained. I am fully aware there are links to selected published guides produced by the House Clerk and Senate Secretary that explain the legislative process -- but how many times have seen the thousand yard stare displace interest in the eyes of users as you attempt to explain the treasure hunt in locating relevant information sources. I think the basic operating program of American civic engagement is not the information technology. It's these fundamental government information sources (laws, regulations, rules, court decisions, reports, studies, etc.) And the technology still can not deepen the necessary political and social contexts of how all these information sources relate to each other. This one is for Daniel Cornwell --Imagine the possibilities if -- somehow, someway -- our several library associations were able to coordinate a national civic literacy program to enable trained and interested government information librarians to engage citizens in workshops, discussion groups, classes, and events that discuss and outline sources of information about the government's efforts to recover from the economic crises. This is the context building (and deepening) often missing from purely technological approaches. See you Day 26. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Love at First Sight
After a 13 week stint of covering how librarian-produced information guides could help inform President Obama, the Congress and the general public on the General Accountability Office's 13 Urgent Transition issues, we return to our regular format of one guide per week. In honor of Valentine's day, we highlight the one handout in the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange with the word "Love" in the the title:
Documents Librarianship: Love at First Sight, Powerpoint file (Grace York, University of Michigan, 2002) Creative Commons License - may be reused or altered with attribution to creator.This 2002 powerpoint presentation is an introduction to documents librarianship for non-specialists. I think it does a great job of highlighting the great breadth of government information in people's lives. Grace shows how government documents eventually touch anyone you can think of - workers, family members, students, business owners and so on. The slides also document challenges and trends in documents librarianship and in particular the challenges and opportunities facing Federal Depository Libraries (FDLs). While the FDL stats Grace used are dated, they could quickly be brought up to date for a presentation on government documents. Despite being seven years old, this powerpoint still stands as a handy intro to the world of US government information. Check it out. Then, if you're a documents librarian, bring it up to date, give Grace York proper credit for the original and link the resulting product back to the Handout Exchange. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 24
Happy Valentines Day! Happy Stimulus Day! Late last night, the U.S. Senate signed off on the stimulus deal. Far from an object of attraction between political partisans (only three republicans (all Senators) voted in favor of the legislation) -- a significant victory for Obama and his plans to "reboot" our national political/social perspective nonetheless. So, what will the various open government/civic information partisans do with this milestone? Perhaps it will give some hope that in spite of the lack of bipartisanship, it demonstrates a certain strength among democrats to hold their focus in face of strong republican push back. For the last fifty years, the democratic/liberal forces always seemed more receptive to the devices and desires of the free government information coalition. And the legislation itself represents a funding opportunity of a different kind, what with its millions of dollars slated for improvement in schools, universities, public libraries, and broadband infrastructure. Of course, who and when will get this federal bounty still remains to be seen. But, again, it just one more indication that we live in a time beset by both dislocation and opportunity. And in the fog of economic turmoil it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. I go back to my call for some kind of professional unity among the library associations and groups on this important issue. At the risk of sounding like some old testament prophet wandering in from a desert to harangue a community -- a time of reckoning is upon us. The principal institutional arrangement for national access to government information -- the federal depository library system -- is in a period of strategic planning and reconsideration of its core mission. Governments are either rushing blindly, or deliberately, into the next stages of digital government. Special interest groups and other organizations are well down the road towards the articulation of an evolved new civic information structure that does not necessarily assume the necessity of libraries in the same way these ancient institutions served in earlier epochs of technology. Participate in person, or virtually, in the upcoming Federal Depository Library council meeting in April. Note, especially, that the Public Printer is specifically asking library directors of depository institutions to come to Florida and participate. With many of these directors contemplating their future involvement in the depository program, and many more reorganizing stand-alone government information departments into mergers with other units, or out of existence all together -- you just have to know we are well past the tipping point. Change is going to come. It is just a question of how much we want to shape that change. The Association of Research Libraries has launched a major study to consider the future structure of the federal depository library program. As the study's prospectus points out -- There is a need and opportunity to identify a sustainable framework that will provide access to and preservation of government information in the years ahead. A new framework will address financial sustainability as well as the essential components of infrastructure for collaboration among federal depository libraries and with other stakeholders. Working with consultants, ARL will identify and explore such a framework that permits flexibility in the future while ensuring enduring access and providing for the efficient management of the legacy collections to insure the broadest public access to government information. Such access has been the hallmark of the FDLP. The framework approach is proposed as an opportunity to specify one or more models for configuring collection resources, access infrastructure, and expertise that would optimally support the the interests of an informed public and the capacity of our Nation’s libraries. When nearly 66 percent of the depository libraries are house in academic institutions, such an examination will have no small influence on many of those library directors being invited to Florida by the Public Printer. And at this summer's annual ALA conference, the Council on Legislation will host a special session among all participating ALA chapters, divisions, and roundtables with a specific interest in the depository library program's future. Just as Congress and the President struggle to work together in very difficult circumstances that challenge their constitutional prerogatives, especially steeped in the partisan bitterness that lingers from the last several national elections, so to will librarians and their allies need to come to terms and work together to build next century's civic information infrastructure. As a librarian with twenty-five years experience I really, really want my beloved institution to be part of that great project. As a student of our country's long running political and social conflicts, I know that what I want and what will happen is often determined by how much I am willing to join the discussion and the struggle in an effort to make that crucial difference. These next five months offer any number of opportunities to contribute. As I said in yesterday's blog -- a vibrant civic exchange of public information depends more on the sustainability of critical relationships between citizens and their government, and less on the methods/technology of civic information distribution. And just as St. Valentine represents both the romantic notion of love and faithfulness, there is a much more complicated side to this particular martyr's faith -- a defiance of authority to honor relationships. As one account puts it -- ... Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. One doesn't need to be a martyr. Just get involved. See you on Day 25. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 23
Tapping back into the "raw power" theme, I just read the New York Times article on Carl Malamud mentioned here by Jim Jacobs. I found the article curious for the simple reason that it equates "free" access to massive amounts of court records with power, and a good form of power, or what he calls the "operating system for democracy." Though this kind of rhetoric sparks the necessary energy to get people to leave their couches and join the open government brigade at the barricade, I think it also paints a too simplistic picture of the complex arrangement of constitutional and legal traditions that favor a highly evolved civic engagement. Missing from the newspaper article's description of what happened to the PACER pilot project and its sudden suspension is the more messy aspects of democracy that try to balance privacy with open access, free access with the necessary infrastructure (that requires money and personnel to function) to sustain long-term availability of "raw data." This balancing act depends on a series of relationships between the courts, users, the GPO and its depository libraries. Simply downloading millions of pages, as one person did in California is not a relationship, it is simply a power surge that may or may not be made useful by people on the information grid. However, as the article points out, Malamud does demand some level of privacy protection in these court documents, he puts that responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of the courts by pointing out that is the court's duty, and heavy lifting, to make sure this private information is not made publicly available. What I would expect to see, if indeed Malamud is interested in becoming a future Public Printer is less focus on the power aspects of the information grid, and more focus on the redistribution stations necessary to make government information understandable, accessible, and sustainable over long periods of time. Libraries have done this for several millennium, and they will continue to do so with the different technologies now being deployed. It isn't a race to see who can make the most government information available. It should be a long engaged relationship between those in power and those the power serves to assure that the knowledge, information and necessary data are understood and usable by the citizen. Power without breakers or distribution centers only overwhelms, it does not inform. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 22
The thing that strikes me as I look through the hundreds of pages of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" is simply this -- how is any normal human being going to deal with this mishmash of legalese, policy descriptions, and billions upon billions of dollars in budget figures? When we speak of the power of "raw data" the positive and pragmatic benefit of government information distribution rests primarily on the ability of people to do something with it. This action can not be determined by the power's distribution mechanism (much in the same way ComEd here in Illinois can't tell me which devices in my home I can and can not turn on -- they just charge me for the overall electricity I use.) Traditional libraries (paper and print universe) functioned much the same way -- people picked and chose information or media depending on what their particular needs might be. Librarians may intervene by limiting who can use the services, how many items can be used, or help users sort out what they might want to use. The power of text clouding, or the ability to pull out different stands of information from a large and complicated information object -- such as what ProPublica did for the stimulus bill -- moves the power relationship from one of passive distribution dominated by personal choices to passive distribution influenced by deliberative contextualizing by a third party. In other words, this third party takes the "raw data" and refines it into another kind of information by-product that might be more significant or meaningful to users. In fact, I would argue many traditional government information sources (i.e. Public Papers of the Presidents, congressional committee reports, Foreign Relations of the United States, Federal Register, or the Code of Federal Regulations) are of this type. What the web offers is the opportunity to make and distribute a wider variety of public information by-products. See you Day 23. Continue reading