Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
James F. Williams II, Dean
University of Colorado
I am here to speak this morning about a bias for action that ARL has always had in terms of an initiative regarding access to government information.
First of all, I would like to run through what is really at stake in terms of access to government information.
Control of the dissemination of government information is currently at stake, as is no-fee public access to government information and the availability of government publications in a variety of formats. The future of our Federal Depository Library Program, the future of the Government Printing Office (GPO), and the functions of the Superintendent of Documents are at stake. The future of the Joint Committee on Publishing is probably at stake, and the role of the private sector in disseminating government information is certainly at stake.
What’s going on right now in Washington is that the Government Printing Office has been under scrutiny for more than two years. It has been under scrutiny from Congress, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the National Performance Review, and the printing industry in the United States. Despite those attacks, the GPO has reduced the size of its task force by more than one half in the past decade. The GPO outsources about 80% of the government printing to the private sector, however, it still has the largest group of unionized labor in our federal government, which is probably a part of the motivation to either downsize or eliminate it.
We know that there are going to be hearings on the future of the GPO. I believe there has already been an appropriations hearing, and there will be a restructuring hearing in June. It is my understanding that the re-formation hearing is going to be chaired by the Chair of the Joint Committee on Printing, Congressman Bill Thomas, from California. He has already made it fairly clear that he would like to downsize or eliminate the GPO. He has also made it clear that he wants to eliminate the Joint Committee on Printing, even though he chairs it.
So there are a couple issues here for the Association, and one of them is the potential loss of the GPO as the central coordinator of government information. Another is the possible shift of that responsibility to the Library of Congress (LC), a member of ARL.
I would like to say just a bit about the Depository Library Program (DLP) and the proposals to move it to the Library of Congress. The majority of these proposals have been rejected by most people in Congress, excluding the Speaker of the House. My understanding is that LC doesn’t support the transfer of the Depository Library Program because it sees it basically as a distribution program that stands well outside of its own mission. We understand that the Government Printing Office does want to retain the Federal Depository Library Program.
If the Depository Library Program is removed from the GPO it means that production and dissemination of government information is separated. There is a sense in Congress that, when you have physical formats, there are tremendous cost savings and efficiencies of scale when production and dissemination are linked. Furthermore, separating production and dissemination also increases the likelihood of fugitive documents. However, when we talk about a depository program for electronic formats, things are very different. Currently, electronic dissemination is extremely decentralized throughout the government, owing to the fact that practically every agency in our government has its own Web site.
We see also that Congress is rushing to digitize everything. At the same time, they are paying little or no attention to the usefulness of various information formats, or to the unfunded mandate that comes to participants in the DLP regarding costs associated with electronic dissemination, to issues related to technological literacy and training, and to issues related to equity of access and preservation. Those are some things we ought to maintain as concerns.
I want to emphasize that we, ARL, are not here to question the basic assumptions about access to government information in an electronic format, including the assumption that the ultimate responsibility for disseminating government information still rests with Congress.
Nor are we here to question the assumption that libraries and our librarians will remain a critical component in ensuring access to government information, and that the Depository Library Program will continue to be a central player.
While government information in electronic format is both inevitable and, in many cases, desirable, paper publications will, however, probably continue to play an important role in the foreseeable future. We recognize that not all government agencies are prepared to generate their information in an electronic format, and that not all of our users are equipped or willing to deal with electronically formatted information.
We understand that the dissemination of certain publications into electronic form has many access-related factors that need to be closely examined, and we know that when we talk about different formats, there are still efficiencies of scale that can and should be achieved when production and dissemination are linked.
We don’t doubt that useful electronic publications and services will require us to have an increased dialogue with the government, the producers of information, the private sector, and our own users.
In the meantime, we must be aware of the facts. For instance, of the 65,000 titles that come to us in the Depository Library Program, only 300 are in electronic format. We want to be mindful of the fact that we have 150 years of paper sitting in our libraries. Sixty percent of the distribution of copies made through the program is in microfiche, and 80% of GPO’s printing and 98% of its microfiche production is already outsourced to the private sector.
The global estimate of people who have Internet capabilities is 30 million. An estimated three million people have World Wide Web access. The percent of households in the United States with a personal computer is approximately 36%. Our Census Bureau tells us that 70% of all computer sales in 1995 were for residential use. Sixty percent of computer users in the home today are 17 years old or younger. These are Census Bureau facts.
ARL’s response to all of the proposed changes for the structure of the DLP and the changing environment has been to appoint a committee. I am going to chair a subcommittee of our Information Policies Committee. We have taken a look at the federal electronic information landscape, and we are looking towards developing a collaborative access model by identifying a corpus of government information resources of particular interest to research libraries.
We have looked at a lot of collaborative models, such as the BFO, GIS, and GLS model. There is also the NASA model, our NAILDD model, the global resources model, coming out of the AAU/ARL project, and the Berkeley Lawrence Laboratory models. There are quite a few collaboration models regarding access, and we want to look at all of them.
We also will pick up on Technology and U. S. Government Information Policies: Catalysts for New Partnerships (the “Green Report” Nancy spoke about) in order to study characteristics of this type of information, and we will then develop the models. We then will need to propose evaluation mechanisms for the models and ask for participation in them. Basically, what we are talking about here is a set of goals to support whatever emergent collaborative management structure comes out of both Congress and our community in terms of implementation and coordination of federal electronic information.
We must formulate a flexible selection strategy for the corpus of resources with the realization that we have both a primary and secondary clientele for government information. We look to promote common standards to ensure universal accessibility as well as ease in retrieving information. Obviously, we will involve government agencies and the higher education community. Finally, we will develop an ongoing evaluation program to study the models and to make sure we can actually scale-up.
One such model, currently under development, involves the Greater Midwest Regional Library Consortium. The proposal includes putting the corpus together, locating it on a server at one of our member institutions, and getting some technical experts to look at the corpus. The experts would see whether or not there is commonalty in the search engines of each resource and if there is a client-server type software we can use, such as WAIS or an OCLC Site Search, to search across those data sets, then put them out on the Internet, making them available on each of our home systems, enabling us to measure access and use.
We also have a duty to develop a coordinated funding strategy that will support the access models, so we would like to enlist your interest. We hope to bring forth with some very dynamic models and we will need financial support for them.
Thank you.