A bill you are not allowed to see or discuss??
Surely, I thought, they're not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they're not going to say that the citizenry isn't allowed to know what's in the law that Congress is considering. [but it turns out] ...I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it. Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?We've seen this before. Laws that are copyrighted or considered the property of a private company. (One comment to the Felten post above says that it is it's perfectly acceptable for the law to be private intellectual property in forty-seven states.) But this is worse. Felten says of a proposed law to "plug the analog hole":
"This is much worse than a claim of copyright. Copyright doesn't stop you from talking about what is in the document, or from rephrasing it in your own words. A copyrighted law can at least be debated. Here, they're claiming the (proposed) law is a trade secret and cannot be discussed at all."What are the implications? There are at least two: First, treatment of a bill as being proprietary could become a precedent for even more private control of what should be public information leading to even less access to information and even less government accountability. Second, the law itself deals with "a fundamental vulnerability in copy prevention schemes" (see: the analog hole WikiPedia) in a way that would effect the functionality of all hardware for all purposes -- even legal copying of public information (say files downloaded from govt. agencies) could, potentially, be disabled because of this. Continue reading
Likely space requirements for digital deposit
One of the understandable concerns expressed by Federal Depository Libraries about the possibility of local storage and serving of electronic government publications is that of unknown storage requirements. How big of a hard drive and how expensive a computer would a depository library need to maintain a local digital collection? Our assumption at FGI is that if libraries were offered the option of digital deposit, they would only store materials that fit their depository profile. Thanks to the wonderful folks at Documents Data Miner, we now have a way to estimate storage requirements for particular depositories. I selected the libraries below at random and used the "URL Locator" feature to determine how many electronic titles these libraries would have received in 2005 if a digital deposit system had been in place. I then calculated storage space based on an average document size of 5MB per document or 10MB per document to come up with an amount of yearly storage space. For comparison, an Alaska State Document averages 3.7MB per document, so I'm being VERY conservative in my space estimate. If GPO has a figure for the average size of a federal electronic publication, I'd love to know it. Continue reading
Google agrees to censor search results in China
Google bows to China pressure by Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer Jan. 25, 2005 This is an interesting piece of information. On the one hand, Google is fighting the Dept of Justice subpoena on providing user information, but on the other hand the company has agreed (just as the other search engine companies have done) to censor search results in China. How does this get subclassified in the "do no evil" category?
"The popular search engine will block results that include such terms as "free Tibet," "democracy" and "Falun Gong" as part of a Chinese Web site the company is introducing today."Continue reading
CIA selective on publications
"A Tangled Web Woven," by David E. Kaplan, US News and World Report, January 30, 2006 Practiced in the art of deception, it seems that the Central Intelligence Agency is being selective in what official govt reports it releases to citizens. According to the US News, "since 2003, at least three unclassified CSI reports--all critical of the agency--have been withheld from the CIA's website ... During that same time, the agency has placed online three other CSI reports, all of those relatively positive or neutral." I'm sure these reports would make valuable additions for any library collection. To obtain the reports, contact the Center for the Study of Intelligence at 1-703-613-1753, or order through government publication vendors listed on CSI's website. Interestingly, GPO is one of those vendors listed, so perhaps libraries can request it as part of the FDLP. The titles are: Continue reading
Hundreds of libraries waiting for digital deposit
The Government Printing Office (GPO) presented an update of their recent work to a Mid-Winter meeting of the American Library Association last week in San Antonio. As part of that update, Superintendent of Documents Judy Russell made partial results of the biennial survey of federal depository libraries public. Ms. Russell shared the results of two questions related to digital deposit of federal electronic publications, based on 987 responses to the biennial survey. There are approximately 1250 libraries in the program, so at least 261 libraries have not yet been heard from. By law, all depository libraries must complete this survey, so I expect full results later this spring. On to the questions themselves and their results. Question 65 was related to current depository efforts at local collection of federal electronic publications. Currently there is no distribution mechanism, so depositories have to actively gather and store materials.
65: My library systematically downloads, stores online publications identified from GPO Access or through GPO-created PURLS, and makes them accessible to the general public from local servers. This past year my library downloaded the following number of digital publication files (this does not include shipping lists, Web pages, or datasets): 0 = 823 libraries 1-25 = 90 26-100 = 25 101-500 = 26 501-1000 = 7 1001-5000 = 11 More than 5000 = 4Even in the absence of a distribution system for federal electronic publications from GPO, 163 libraries are storing local copies of federal pubs. Based on a depository community of 1,250 libraries, this represents 13% of all depository libraries. One in ten libraries are already doing more than what GPO is asking of them. The other "digital deposit" question asked libraries how many digital documents they might be willing to store and serve locally, if GPO provided them. No distribution mechanism was proposed.
66. My library is willing to receive Federal digital publication files on deposit from GPO, store them, and make the accessible to the general public from local servers. My library is willing to receive the following number of digital publication files per year (this does not include shipping lists, Web pages, or databases): 0 = 652 libraries 1-25 = 176 26-100 = 56 101-500 = 41 501-1000 = 26 1001-5000 = 14 More than 5000 = 21This question tells me that 334 libraries are willing to at least make a trial of storing and serving electronic materials locally. These libraries represent more than a quarter of the depository community. Surely this should be a call to establish a formal deposit system for electronic publications for depositories to try. Even without a formal digital deposit proposal, over a hundred libraries are willing to store and serve more than 100 documents per year. Even if these hundred libraries are the only ones to step forward, that's a far higher level of backup and redundancy than the current system has. I believe that's worth GPO committing to a system of local, distributed system of electronic deposit such as the one described in Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program, today. Continue reading