Preservation
*Update October 21,2005: James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo, and Danial Cornwall were invited to speak at the Nevada Library Association Annual Conference. Here's Daniel's panel presentation about preservation and government information.
Preserving government information is key to our survival as a nation. If we don't remember what we've done and why we've done it, repeating history may be the least of our worries.
In the analog world, preservation is a relative simple matter of caring for a physical object. Millions of people can visit the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights because the National Archives has taken care of the paper these documents are written on. Since the words of these important documents are human readable, no machinery is needed to make the words understandable. Given the proper conditions, citizens celebrating our nation's 500th anniversary in 2276 will be able to read these core documents of history.
By contrast, digital publications and data are fragile. The main enemies of the successful preservation of digital materials are the media and the file format the data is in.
Currently there are two types of media for storing digital data - magnetic and optical. Magnetic encompasses audio and video tapes, floppy drives, removable hard drives, flash drives and magnetic tape. Optical media includes the various flavors of CDs and DVDs. Magnetic media has a proven poor track record as a durable storage format. Most magnetic media may last from 10-20 years. If material isn't copied onto new magnetic media, it can be lost. Optical media fares better in terms of holding data without decay. The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates that CD-R's and DVD-Rs may last several tens of years. Some people estimate the lifetime of the highest quality of optical media to be close to a century. Still, this is only a fraction of the lifetime of quality paper or the estimated lifetime of microfilm.
However, length of media is really the least of our worries. A much greater problem is technological obsolescence. Have you tried to read a 5 1/4" disk or pull up a Wordstar document lately? There are many examples of lost data because no equipment or software exists to read it. Data could be lost to technological obsolescence within ten years if it's not migrated into new formats.
So, how can we preserve digital information? Currently, no one knows how to best preserve digital information in a digital format, though there are some promising approaches. So far the safest approach is the "analog backup"; otherwise known as making tangible copies.
There are several groups studying the preservation of digital government information, including the Government Printing Office, the National Archives, the ALA Government Documents Roundtable and the LOCKSS group at Stanford University.
For further exploration try...
Web resources
Continue readingAccess
*Update October 21,2005: James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo, and Danial Cornwall were invited to speak at the Nevada Library Association Annual Conference. Here's Shinjoung's panel presentation about access and government information.
What do we mean when we say we want access to government information? What is government information? What is access? These are serious questions that can affect the debate on full public access to government information. What we call "government information" is produced by many sources and in many formats; but in our view any information activity that is taxpayer funded is government information. That is, if government paid for the information to be collected and produced, it should be considered government information. This includes reports, journals, databases and other products a government has funded. People like to say that "It's the people's money." We say that "It's the people's information." Aside from very narrow exceptions for personal privacy and honest national security concerns, we believe the public is entitled to what it has paid for. Having loosely defined "government information", let us turn to "access." Access can be defined as connecting a citizen with information produced by her government. This could mean the citizen finds a government publication or requests a public record. In the old days before the Internet, access was easy to define. You had access to a publication if either it was deposited in a library, or if the issuing agency provided you with a copy of their publication. This was after you learned that the publication existed, either by consulting a library or seeing a publication announcement in local media. On the down side, relatively few people could actually use government information because only person could access a given item at a given library. On the plus side, government agencies found it next to impossible to alter or destroy every single copy of a publication it no longer wished to be public. Also, a disaster in one city or even in Washington DC itself wouldn't affect the country's access to the publication. There would likely be at least one library that still had the item. The Internet changed everything for both good and bad. The good news was that now millions of people could access the same government document simultaneously. Also, people didn't have to wait for publications to be shipped out of Washington, DC. With some exceptions, people pretty much had equal access to the information. The bad news is that in many cases we are left with one, or perhaps two, digital copies of documents under Federal control. This leaves government information with the following vulnerabilities:
- A natural disaster or terror attack that eliminated Washington DC would remove electronic federal information from the public domain.
- A future cash-strapped government might decide to charge for access to taxpayer funded information.
- The government can, and already has limited simultaneous access to some government resources to one or two people at a time per library (i.e. StatUSA).
- Government agencies may choose to remove public information from the Internet without public process. This has already happened
- Government agencies or hackers could alter or corrupt copies of taxpayer funded reports and data.
For further exploration try...
Web resources
- ALA Task Force on Restrictions on Access to Government Information
- OMB Watch: Information and Access
- Open the Government
If you would like to locate one of the items below in a library, just click on the title of the book or journal. If the item is not held by a library near you, ask your local library to borrow it through Interlibrary Loan.
Articles
- Feinberg, Lotte E. FOIA, federal information policy, and information availability in a post-9/11 world. Government Information Quarterly, 2004, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p439, 22p.
- Kennedy, Shirley Duglin On the Net, Off the Net. Information Today, Nov2004, Vol. 21 Issue 10, p17, 2p;
- Hartman, Cathy Nelson. Storage of Electronic Files of Federal Agencies That Have Ceased Operation: A Partnership for Permanent Access. Government Information Quarterly, 2000, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p299, 9p
Books
- Hernon, Peter. (2002). United States government information : policies and sources. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
- Hernon, Peter and McClure, Charles R. (1988). Public access to government information : issues, trends, and strategies . Norword, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp
- Podesta, John and Shane, Peter M. (2004). A little knowledge : privacy, security, and public information after September 11th. New York: Century Foundation Press.
Please post suggestions for this bibliography in the comments section. Continue reading
Age of missing information
The Age of Missing Information: The Bush administration's campaign against openness. Slate, March 17, 2005. By Steven Aftergood. Steven Aftergood knows about government information. After all, he's the director of the American Federation of Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. Aftergood's article deals with the rapid and agressive control of unclassified government information since 2001. It gives several good examples of our government being overzealous with our information. Listen to Aftergood's interview on NPR's Day to Day. Continue reading
FGI signs on to EFF DRM report
Cory Doctorow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just written a document called "Digital Rights Management: A failure in the developed world, a danger to the developing world," written for an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) report on DRM that is aimed at telecoms regulators in national governments around the world who are trying to figure out which DRM to adopt. A number of distinguished Non-Governmental Organizations (including yours truly!) have signed onto the paper. If you're interested in singing on, please email Cory.
The "DRM hypothesis" is that the public is dishonest, and will do dishonest things with cultural material if given the chance. DRM is deployed in order to force dishonest customers to behave honestly and buy media and to limit their activities to those that are authorized by rightsholders. For this to work, it must be impossible for a potential customer for media to locate a non-DRM copy of their chosen movies, books, games or music. If a dishonest customer for an ebook can download an un-restricted version of a book that is otherwise available in a restricted DRM format, she surely will. Continue reading
Privacy
April 2, 2005 / Leave a comment
*Update October 21,2005: James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo, and Danial Cornwall were invited to speak at the Nevada Library Association Annual Conference. Here's James' panel presentation about privacy and government information.
What you read about your government (or about anything) should be your business. But how well is your privacy protected? There is a great difference in privacy between the analog world of government publications and the Internet. In the analog world you decide the amount of privacy you have; in the digital world the servers of the information decide how much privacy they'll let you have.
Let's look at three examples: walking into a federal depository library; viewing information on a library's web site; and downloading a document from Federal Agency X's web site.
The Physical Depository Library - You can usually walk right into a Federal Depository Library. There are a few that may ask for identification, but even these libraries do not track your browsing. Once you walk in, you can browse all you like without being tracked. You can take books off the shelves and look through them and if you put them back on the shelves, no one will know what titles you looked through. If you decide to check some reports out of the depository, you'll be protected by the confidentiality statutes of the state where the library is. Since October 2001, it's been possible for your reading records to be turned over to federal authorities, but most libraries erase the record of any books you've checked out once you turn them in.
Viewing information on a library web site - Most libraries have websites these days. Many have explicit privacy policies that limit the information that the library collects. Some of the information they could collect include:
- The address (IP) of your computer or Internet provider.
- The date and time you accessed their site.
- The Internet address of the web site that referred you to their site.
- Tracking information via cookies. Most libraries won't put cookies on your computer.
States differ, but most of the time you can expect that your use of the library's web site to be protected by the same laws that safeguard your reading record. Also, if you follow a link off a library's web site, you are no longer covered by their privacy policy.Downloading Files from the website of Federal Agency X - When you go to http://www.fedagencyx.gov; the agency is able to collect the same kinds of information that the library can. According to M-03-22, OMB Guidance for Implementing the Privacy Provisions of the E-Government Act of 2002, federal sites may use cookies if there is a compelling need. According to the same memo, federal agencies must have a policy. We at Free Government Information are unaware of federal statutes protecting federal web browsing.
Does this mean we cannot have Internet access to government information without Uncle Sam looking over our shoulder? No. One solution would be to deposit electronic copies of government information with libraries and let the libraries serve the information on their own servers. That way, electronic government documents would be accessed from privacy minded librarians. Even if the government used its new powers under the PATRIOT act, it would have to make literally thousands of requests to find out who has handled a given document. This is unlike the current system, where the gov't can ask its own webmasters for as much data as they like without anyone knowing.
For further exploration try...
Web resources
Articles
Books
Please post suggestions for this bibliography in the comments section. Continue reading →
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