- Email: [email protected]
British official publications — I. Scope and substance
Government
PublicarionsReview,
Vol. 4. No. 3, pp. 201-207.
Pergamon
Press.
1977. Printed
in Great
FJntain.
BRITISH OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS - I. SCOPE AND SUBSTANCE*
BARBARA E. SMITH Government Documents Librarian, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. 12866, U.S.A.
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office classifies British official publications into two categories: (1) Parliamentary Papers which, in their broadest sense, are those papers rising out of legislative and political need as determined by Members of both Houses in the discharge of their Parliamentary duties; and (2) Non-Parliamentary Publications which, initiated for the most part by the Government Departments on the basis of administrative need, encompass all the other publications of the Stationery Office and in fact constitute the greater part of its sales offerings. Essentially, this is a description rather than a definition of the term “official publications” and it is just possible that the lack of an agreed upon meaning is responsible for some of the problems involved in the overall handling of government publications collections. Certainly the lack of a hard definition of “official” does much to exacerbate the problems caused by the existence of what seems to be a third category, that of the non-H.M.S.O. publication. That librarians have long felt a degree of confusion about the distinction between Parliamentary Papers and Non-Parliamentary Publications is apparent. In his excellent book, An Introduction to British Government Publications, I’1 James Olle quotes this plaintive statement from a public librarian back in 1915:
“What precisely, constitutes an ‘official’ Non-Parliamentary publication one may not dare say definitely. The fact that in the same series of reports, or papers, some may be issued as ‘official’ [“Non-Parliamentary Publications” did not come into use as a heading in H.M.S.O. catalogs until 1924. Up to that time the designation used was either “Official Office Publications”] and some as Publications” or “Stationery ‘parliamentary’ publications militates against dogmatic definition. Why . . . some documents should not be required to be presented to Parliament whilst others, precisely similar, are required to be so presented is not self-evident.“” ’ The situation became thoroughly confused if not chaotic in 1921 when the Treasury issued its two now famous, or depending on your point of view, infamous circulars. The first, Treasury Circular No. 19A/21, 25 April 1921, directed that all Parliamentary Papers “shall in future be printed uniformly in royal octave.” This meant in effect that all papers requiring a larger format would automatically become Non-Parliamentary. The immediate result was to transfer at one fell swoop most statistical * This is the first of three articles by Barbara Smith on various aspects of official publishing in Britain. The research on which all three are based was supported by the Council on Library Resources, to whom the author wishes to make due acknowledgement. 201
202
BARBARA
E. SMITH
publications from Parliamentary to Non-Parliamentary series. Then in an economy measure designed to limit the number of Parliamentary Papers available free-of-charge to Members, government departments, foreign embassies, as well as the general public, Treasury Circular No. 38/21, 6 September 1921, directed that “the presentation by Departments to the Houses of Parliament of papers ‘By Command’ should be discontinued except in the cases of documents relating to matters likely to be the subject of early legislation, or which may be regarded as otherwise essential to Members of Parliament as a whole to enable them to discharge their responsibilities.” And it further stipulated that “other documents hitherto issued as Command Papers should in future be issued as Stationery Office publications, or, wherever possible, be discontinued.” Thus from 1921 on a great many papers and reports which normally would have been published as Command or House of Commons Papers have been issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications and a number of anomalies have developed. To give a single example, while reports of Royal Commissions are published as Command Papers, the minutes of evidence which accompany the report are invariably issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications; the Command Paper then appears in the bound sessional volumes which all too effectively separates it physically from the evidence upon which the report was based. The unfortunate result is that neither document is complete as it stands and a connecting bridge does not always exist. An excellent discussion on this and other problems inherent in the 1921 Treasury restrictions will be found in Professor and Mrs. Ford’s A Guide to Parliamentary Papers: What They Are, How to Find Them, How to Use Them12’.
While it remains perfectly true that it takes no great skill to determine into which category Parliamentary or Non-Parliamentary - the majority of government publications fall, it is equally true that the basis for decision on the ever-present exceptions is not all that clear. In fact, the Treasury booklet Official Publications (H.M.S.O., 1958) rather begs the question of “into what category should a particular paper fall” with the advice that “there are no hard and fast rules, and in many cases the precedent of similar documents will be the best guide.” (Paragraph 48). Though one may wonder what kind of guide is responsible for the decision that the Ministry of Transport publication Transport of Freight, 1967, should be issued as a Command Paper while its publication Reshaping of British Railways, 1963 (Beeching Report) appears as a Non-Parliamentary Publication, I31there would seem to be a satisfactory explanation. John Pemberton, author of the eminently useful text British Official Publications, notes that the problem for librarians arises out of the departmental decision as to which publications it will and which it will not present to Parliament as the subject of legislation. Hence, he concludes, it is sensible to use the generic term “Official Publications” rather than Parliamentary Papers and Non-Parliamentary Publications14’.
PARLIAMENTARY
PAPERS
A full discussion of the nature of Parliamentary Papers will not be attempted here; instead the reader is directed to Pemberton’s British Official Publications141 and 0116’s Introduction to British Government Publications” I. The two books complement each other nicely and used in conjunction should answer any possible questions about the subject in hand. What follows is simply a categorization of Parliamentary Papers, within a framework outlined in the Treasury’s Official Publications.
British official publications: I. scope and substance
203
(1) Papers initiated by Parliament itself For the House of Commons these include the Votes and Proceedings (Minutes of the daily proceedings which record what was done, rather than what was said); the Order Papers (the agenda of the House, which includes a listing of the items of public business to be dealt with that particular day, along with a list of Questions to be answered, as well as notices of motions and amendments to Bills); the Journal (the permanent official record of the proceedings, compiled from the notes of the Clerks at the Table along with certain other sources, and issued sessionally); the Official Report (the official record of what was said in Parliament, compiled from the records of the official reporters, known familiarly and, since 1943, officially as Hatward); and the Reports of Committees of the House (reports of both Standing and Select Committees). In the House of Lords there are Minutes of Proceedings (the record of each day) and the Order Paper (agenda of the current day’s business) prepared under the direction of the Clerk of the Parliaments; the Journal (the official permanent record of the proceedings of the House); and the Official Report of the debates, the Lords Hansard. (2) Bills and acts of Parliament Public Bills considered by Parliament are printed by H.M.S.O. on the instructions of the Public Bill Office, numbered serially (in a separate series for House of Commons Bills) and reprinted with a new number if and each time amended. House of Lords Public Bills are numbered in the same series as other House of Lords papers and reprinted as amended. Private Bills (dealing with matters of local interest, companies, corporations) must be printed by their promoters rather than through H.M.S.O. and done in a specified style and type. Public Bills passed by both Houses receive the Royal Assent, are printed by the Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament (Controller, H.M.S.O.) and as Public General Acts are assigned chapter numbers by the calendar year. Local and Personal Acts (the official term for “Private Acts”) are published by H.M.S.0 but as separate documents only. (3) Papers presented to Parliament “Act Papers” (reports and accounts presented as a result of a statutory requirement) since 1921 have been limited to those papers regarded as of value to Members of Parliament in carrying out their responsibilities; papers that do not meet the test are issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications. “Returns” are those papers produced by direction of either House in order to obtain information on matters in which Parliament or the Crown have jurisdiction. “Command Papers” (presented by Command of her Majesty) have been described as “a method of issuing spontaneous information without waiting for it to be called for by Parliament.“15r Numbering between three and four hundred a year, Command papers can be any of the following: State Papers; Policy Papers; Annual Reports; Reports of Royal Commissions; Reports of Departmental Committees; Reports of Tribunals and Commissions of Inquiry; Statistical Reports. What gives a government’s official publications their vital force is the mass of information they contain directly related to the everyday life and well-being of each citizen. “White Papers” and “Blue Books” and “Green Papers” are far from a dreary, dusty collection of reports and statistics; rather they mirror the social history of an era and reflect the kinds of problems a nation is wrestling with at any given time. Originally, White Papers were simply Parliamentary Papers printed uncovered on white stock as differentiated from those reports substantial enough in bulk to require a blue cartridge cover, hence given the name Blue Books. The massive 19th century reports that chronicled the government’s awakening to the social conditions of the time and recorded the sweeping state affairs of the Empire were familiarly known and spoken of as Blue Books. Today cover design is varied and not restricted to blue and the term has lost much of its earlier connotation. White Papers, however, are now commonly
BARBARA
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E. SMITH
referred to and thought of as statements of government
policy in that they are designed to indicate
“the broad lines of the legislation the Government intend to introduce and, very often, of executive action that will be taken”16’. Green Papers are a fairly new development and represent an effort on the part of Government to seek the opinion of interested parties by providing a vehicle of discussion in a tentative statement of a proposal before a hard decision and firm statement of government intention is published. The first Green Paper was issued in 1967 by the Department of Economic Affairs and the Treasury and was a statement of “The Development premium.”
Areas:
a proposal
for
a regional
employment
The term itself was defined by the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, Michael Stewart, in the debate on regional employment premiums in the House of Commons, 5 June 1967, as “a statement by the Government not of policy already determined but of propositions put before the whole nation for discussion” (House of Commons Debates, Hunsard, 5 June 1967, column 651). It is an interesting aside that the first six Green Papers were all Non-Parliamentary Publications. The first to appear as a Parliamentary Paper was the Command Paper “Public Expenditure: a new presentation” (Cmnd. 4017) April 1969. A more recent example in the Parliamentary category is “The Channel Tunnel Project” (Cmnd. 5256) presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Environment in March 1973. As the preface notes, this project has been talked about for nearly 200 years; the paper attempts to put together “the available facts and other consideration” in order to form a background for a decision on what is certainly a large and farreaching project. For a more complete discussion of this innovative use of government communication, the reader is directed to John Pemberton’s 1969 Library World article, “Government Green Papers”17’. Parliamentary Papers over the past few years have concerned themselves with such topics as the United Kingdom and the European Communities; Northern Ireland Constitution proposals; North Sea oil; Value added tax; Metrification; Education, a framework of expansion, Counter Inflation; Regional of local development; Power crisis regulations; the Three-day working week; Consolidation government; Capita1 investment; New towns. In January of 1974 bills up for second reading included Rehabilitation of Offender Bill; Rights of Women Bill; Pensions (Increase) Bill; Road Traffic Bill; Independent Broadcasting Authority Bill; while the Unit Pricing Bill was amended, considered, and read the third time. How clear it is that a nation’s business is the world’s concern as well. Many of the topics above are the subject of consideration by the governments of a number of countries - certainly they are familiar ground to anyone following the deliberations of the United States Congress.
NON-PARLIAMENTARY
PUBLICATIONS
A listing of the subjects covered by Non-Parliamentary Publications serves only to reinforce one’s realization that there are very few aspects of modern life that are not in some way subject to governmental notice, advice, or control. Quite outside the annual publication of some 2,000 Statutory Instruments (regulations made by a Minister under the authority of an Act of Parliament - delegated legislation) there are hundreds of reports, studies, guides, charts, books, pamphlets, periodicals, leaflets published each year by H.M.S.O. The range is nothing short of remarkable as can be seen from these few examples culled from several H.M.S.O. Monthly Selection lists: John Constable’s Sketchbooks of 1813 and 1814 (Victoria and Albert Museum); Out of Sight - Out of Mind, First report of the Working Party on the Disposal of Sludge in Liverpool Bay (Department of the Environment); Computers in Offices (Department of Employment, Manpower Studies); Documents Jf British Foreign Policy
British official publications: I. scope and substance 1919-1939 (Foreign and Commonwealth
205
Office); Broodcasting in Britain 1922-1972 (Science Museum);
Shopping Habits and Attitudes to Shop Hours in Great Britain (Social Survey Division, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys); Criminal Justice in Britain (Central Office of Information); The Royal Navy in the American War of Independence (National Maritime Museum); Staffing of Public Libraries (Department of Education and Science); Violence (Department of Health and Social Security); Economic Survey of the Tourist Industry in the South West (Department of the Environment); Agriculture and Water Quality (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food); A Century of Trade Marks 1876-1976 (Patent Office); Families Five Years On (Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys). In addition there are over fifty periodicals, among which are the well-known titles Trade and Industry (Weekly); Economic Trends (Monthly); Monthly Digest of Statistics; British Library Review; Marine Observer (Quarterly); Survey of Current wfairs (Monthly); Trends in Education (Quarterly); Tropical Science (Quarterly); Weather Report (Monthly). To indicate fully the scope of Non-Parliamentary Publications would take pages and would include, as does Pemberton’s book, entire chapters on the reference and statistical sources published by H.M.S.O. And in the end one could only second Majorie Ogilvy-Webb’s comment in her book The Government Explains: A Study of the Information Services: “The man who can find nothing to interest him in the Stationery Office’s list of publications must be either very erudite or very dull”‘*‘.
NON-H.M.S.O.
PUBLICATIONS
If, as we have noted above, it is sometimes difficult to know whether a particular paper has been issued as Parliamentary or Non-Parliamentary, and while we may agree that peculiarities abound (as for example in the case of the Green Papers which appear first in one category and then the other), at least these documents are all H.M.S.O. publications which means that the potential user has ready access to them through a fairly sophisticated system of cataloging and indexing. That is to say that the user does not necessarily need to know the official category of the document he seeks so long as H.M.S.O. provides the bibliographical controls that enable him to find the information he needs. Pandora’s box opens with the realization that there appears to be a third category of official publications for which no familiar identification tools exist. The publications of the nationalised industries are a prime example. For years their annual reports and accounts were presented to Parliament in the standard if not chaste Parliamentary Paper format and as such found their way into the official H.M.S.O. indexing network. At the same time, however, the various industries (British Gas Corporation, Scottish Transport Group, British Steel Corporation, BBC, to name but a few) were releasing free copies of their own glossy publicrelations-oriented versions of the annual reports, and it became more and more difficult to find buyers for the H.M.S.O. stock publication. In 1973 a decision was reached to allow the nationalised industries to publish on their own, and, at that moment, effective bibliographical control disappeared for some 72 sources. Although H.M.S.O. does act as a sales agent for a number of the industries, any serious collecting of the publications must now be done on an individual basis, subject both to the conditions set by each industry and the available energy of the collector and/or librarian. Unfortunately, the case of the nationalised industries is not an isolated instance, but it has served as a focal point of irritation for librarians forced to recognize that there exists a whole amorphous area of official publishing outside the H.M.S.O. perimeter. That the problem is real rather than imagined can be corroborated through the data gathered by Roy Knight for his Master’s thesis on the bibliographical control of the non-H.M.S.O. departmental publications lgl. Mr. Knight wrote or interviewed something
206
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E. SMITH
like 112 Government Departments and concluded from his research that the Departments are indeed autonomous, issuing in all some 17,000-20,ooO publications yearly. His figures tend to be supported by several librarians who had suggested to me in earlier conversations that of their entire input of British official publications only about 30% came from H.M.S.O. while close to 70% were obtained from other sources. Accepting H.M.S.O.‘s claim to issue about 7,000 publications a year, one finds Knight’s estimate reasonably valid. The implications of this flood of print are a bit staggering. Where does the responsibility lie for recording and cataloging these publications? For that matter are they all “official” publications in the first place, and without a specific definition of “official” who is to decide? Do you accept the premise used by one of the libraries - if an organization isfinanced wholly or almost wholly by the Government, then collect its publications. This might exclude some of the nationalised industries material but would in turn mandate serious collection of what appears to be a vast outpouring of Departmental publications not handled by H.M.S.O. Should H.M.S.O. serve as a collecting point? Do the individual Departments have a central source of information for the identity and availability of the publications issued in their name? There would appear to be more questions than answers in the immediate situation but sooner or later the problem will have to be faced and pressure brought to bear upon some suitable agency. H.M.S.O. has indicated that it does not initiate programs; rather “it responds to directives,” but what kind of arguments would be sufficient to convince the Treasury that the proper directives should be forthcoming? Perhaps, as Knight suggests, an ideal solution would be to see that one copy of every Departmental publication is deposited with the British Library, recorded and linked into the British National Bibliography setup, and announced in a fortnightly listing which would be offered to libraries on a subscription basis. Further panaceas aside, there are a few excellent tools for the here and now: (1) the Official Publications Library of the British Library issues a Check List of British Official Serial Publications (the 8th edition extends to June 1976); (2) the Department of the Environment compiles an Annual List of Publications (1971 through 1975 are currently available); (3) the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food issues an indexed catalogue of department publications every six months; (4) the British Library Lending Division at Boston Spa issues monthly the BLL Announcement Bulletin, a guide to British reports, translations and theses; (5) Jack Burkett’s third revised edition of Government and Related Library and Information Services in the United Kingdom (London: the Library Association, 1974) lists reporting and announcing tools put out by the various libraries; and (6) the Department of Health and Social Security has produced in 1977 its first Ann& List of PubIications (titles issued in 1975, to be followed by successive annual volumes). A number of other Government Departments put out lists of their publications and most Department libraries publish library accession lists, all of which are complete only to the extent of the effort expended in collecting input. If the various Department libraries were to act as central receiving points for each of their Department’s publications, the resulting accession lists could form strong links in an overall announcing scheme. However, a number of Department librarians do not see this as a feasible plan. They mention limitations of staff, as well as a feeling that it would be impossible for them to keep track of all Department publishing without a strictly enforced directive from the very top level giving them authority to demand copies of each and every Departmental publication. Apparently not every library can designate one person to work solely in this area as has been done in the Department of the Environment; nevertheless, the DOE example will hopefully serve as a spur. In the meantime, librarians will continue to find that their first indication of the existence of an official Departmental publication may well come as a result of a patron’s request, a disconcerting experience for library and patron alike.
British Official
publications:
1. scope and substance
201
REFERENCES 1. Ollt, JamesG. An Introduction to British Government Publications, 2nd edn. Association of Assistant Librarians. “Parliamentary Publications,” Library London (1973) pp. 55, 56. Quotation from an article by J. Walton, Association Record, XX (November-December, 1918) 243-244. 2. Ford, P. and G. Ford. A Guide to Parliamentary Papers: What They Are, How to Find Them, How to Use Them 3rd edn. Irish University Press, Shannon, Ireland (1972) pp. 15-17. 3. Ollt. An Introduction to British Government Publications. p.57. 4. Pemberton, John E. British Official Publications. 2nd edn. Pergamon Press, Oxford (1973). Conversation with Mr. Pemberton, November’l, 1976. 5. 0116 p. 37. 6. Pemberton. British Official Publications. p. 58. 7. Pemberton, John E. “Government Green Papers,” Library World, LXXI (August, 1%9) pp. 46-47, 49. 8. Ogilvy-Webb, Majorie. The Government Explains: A Study of the Information Services. Allen & Unwin, London (1965) p. 41. James Glle uses this quotation in the opening pages of his book. 9. Knight, R.F.E. (Roy). “An Investigation into the Bibliographical Control and Accessibility of non-H.M.S.O. Departmental Official Publications in England and Wales.” Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of London 1973 Passim.
PublicarionsReview,
Vol. 4. No. 3, pp. 201-207.
Pergamon
Press.
1977. Printed
in Great
FJntain.
BRITISH OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS - I. SCOPE AND SUBSTANCE*
BARBARA E. SMITH Government Documents Librarian, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. 12866, U.S.A.
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office classifies British official publications into two categories: (1) Parliamentary Papers which, in their broadest sense, are those papers rising out of legislative and political need as determined by Members of both Houses in the discharge of their Parliamentary duties; and (2) Non-Parliamentary Publications which, initiated for the most part by the Government Departments on the basis of administrative need, encompass all the other publications of the Stationery Office and in fact constitute the greater part of its sales offerings. Essentially, this is a description rather than a definition of the term “official publications” and it is just possible that the lack of an agreed upon meaning is responsible for some of the problems involved in the overall handling of government publications collections. Certainly the lack of a hard definition of “official” does much to exacerbate the problems caused by the existence of what seems to be a third category, that of the non-H.M.S.O. publication. That librarians have long felt a degree of confusion about the distinction between Parliamentary Papers and Non-Parliamentary Publications is apparent. In his excellent book, An Introduction to British Government Publications, I’1 James Olle quotes this plaintive statement from a public librarian back in 1915:
“What precisely, constitutes an ‘official’ Non-Parliamentary publication one may not dare say definitely. The fact that in the same series of reports, or papers, some may be issued as ‘official’ [“Non-Parliamentary Publications” did not come into use as a heading in H.M.S.O. catalogs until 1924. Up to that time the designation used was either “Official Office Publications”] and some as Publications” or “Stationery ‘parliamentary’ publications militates against dogmatic definition. Why . . . some documents should not be required to be presented to Parliament whilst others, precisely similar, are required to be so presented is not self-evident.“” ’ The situation became thoroughly confused if not chaotic in 1921 when the Treasury issued its two now famous, or depending on your point of view, infamous circulars. The first, Treasury Circular No. 19A/21, 25 April 1921, directed that all Parliamentary Papers “shall in future be printed uniformly in royal octave.” This meant in effect that all papers requiring a larger format would automatically become Non-Parliamentary. The immediate result was to transfer at one fell swoop most statistical * This is the first of three articles by Barbara Smith on various aspects of official publishing in Britain. The research on which all three are based was supported by the Council on Library Resources, to whom the author wishes to make due acknowledgement. 201
202
BARBARA
E. SMITH
publications from Parliamentary to Non-Parliamentary series. Then in an economy measure designed to limit the number of Parliamentary Papers available free-of-charge to Members, government departments, foreign embassies, as well as the general public, Treasury Circular No. 38/21, 6 September 1921, directed that “the presentation by Departments to the Houses of Parliament of papers ‘By Command’ should be discontinued except in the cases of documents relating to matters likely to be the subject of early legislation, or which may be regarded as otherwise essential to Members of Parliament as a whole to enable them to discharge their responsibilities.” And it further stipulated that “other documents hitherto issued as Command Papers should in future be issued as Stationery Office publications, or, wherever possible, be discontinued.” Thus from 1921 on a great many papers and reports which normally would have been published as Command or House of Commons Papers have been issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications and a number of anomalies have developed. To give a single example, while reports of Royal Commissions are published as Command Papers, the minutes of evidence which accompany the report are invariably issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications; the Command Paper then appears in the bound sessional volumes which all too effectively separates it physically from the evidence upon which the report was based. The unfortunate result is that neither document is complete as it stands and a connecting bridge does not always exist. An excellent discussion on this and other problems inherent in the 1921 Treasury restrictions will be found in Professor and Mrs. Ford’s A Guide to Parliamentary Papers: What They Are, How to Find Them, How to Use Them12’.
While it remains perfectly true that it takes no great skill to determine into which category Parliamentary or Non-Parliamentary - the majority of government publications fall, it is equally true that the basis for decision on the ever-present exceptions is not all that clear. In fact, the Treasury booklet Official Publications (H.M.S.O., 1958) rather begs the question of “into what category should a particular paper fall” with the advice that “there are no hard and fast rules, and in many cases the precedent of similar documents will be the best guide.” (Paragraph 48). Though one may wonder what kind of guide is responsible for the decision that the Ministry of Transport publication Transport of Freight, 1967, should be issued as a Command Paper while its publication Reshaping of British Railways, 1963 (Beeching Report) appears as a Non-Parliamentary Publication, I31there would seem to be a satisfactory explanation. John Pemberton, author of the eminently useful text British Official Publications, notes that the problem for librarians arises out of the departmental decision as to which publications it will and which it will not present to Parliament as the subject of legislation. Hence, he concludes, it is sensible to use the generic term “Official Publications” rather than Parliamentary Papers and Non-Parliamentary Publications14’.
PARLIAMENTARY
PAPERS
A full discussion of the nature of Parliamentary Papers will not be attempted here; instead the reader is directed to Pemberton’s British Official Publications141 and 0116’s Introduction to British Government Publications” I. The two books complement each other nicely and used in conjunction should answer any possible questions about the subject in hand. What follows is simply a categorization of Parliamentary Papers, within a framework outlined in the Treasury’s Official Publications.
British official publications: I. scope and substance
203
(1) Papers initiated by Parliament itself For the House of Commons these include the Votes and Proceedings (Minutes of the daily proceedings which record what was done, rather than what was said); the Order Papers (the agenda of the House, which includes a listing of the items of public business to be dealt with that particular day, along with a list of Questions to be answered, as well as notices of motions and amendments to Bills); the Journal (the permanent official record of the proceedings, compiled from the notes of the Clerks at the Table along with certain other sources, and issued sessionally); the Official Report (the official record of what was said in Parliament, compiled from the records of the official reporters, known familiarly and, since 1943, officially as Hatward); and the Reports of Committees of the House (reports of both Standing and Select Committees). In the House of Lords there are Minutes of Proceedings (the record of each day) and the Order Paper (agenda of the current day’s business) prepared under the direction of the Clerk of the Parliaments; the Journal (the official permanent record of the proceedings of the House); and the Official Report of the debates, the Lords Hansard. (2) Bills and acts of Parliament Public Bills considered by Parliament are printed by H.M.S.O. on the instructions of the Public Bill Office, numbered serially (in a separate series for House of Commons Bills) and reprinted with a new number if and each time amended. House of Lords Public Bills are numbered in the same series as other House of Lords papers and reprinted as amended. Private Bills (dealing with matters of local interest, companies, corporations) must be printed by their promoters rather than through H.M.S.O. and done in a specified style and type. Public Bills passed by both Houses receive the Royal Assent, are printed by the Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament (Controller, H.M.S.O.) and as Public General Acts are assigned chapter numbers by the calendar year. Local and Personal Acts (the official term for “Private Acts”) are published by H.M.S.0 but as separate documents only. (3) Papers presented to Parliament “Act Papers” (reports and accounts presented as a result of a statutory requirement) since 1921 have been limited to those papers regarded as of value to Members of Parliament in carrying out their responsibilities; papers that do not meet the test are issued as Non-Parliamentary Publications. “Returns” are those papers produced by direction of either House in order to obtain information on matters in which Parliament or the Crown have jurisdiction. “Command Papers” (presented by Command of her Majesty) have been described as “a method of issuing spontaneous information without waiting for it to be called for by Parliament.“15r Numbering between three and four hundred a year, Command papers can be any of the following: State Papers; Policy Papers; Annual Reports; Reports of Royal Commissions; Reports of Departmental Committees; Reports of Tribunals and Commissions of Inquiry; Statistical Reports. What gives a government’s official publications their vital force is the mass of information they contain directly related to the everyday life and well-being of each citizen. “White Papers” and “Blue Books” and “Green Papers” are far from a dreary, dusty collection of reports and statistics; rather they mirror the social history of an era and reflect the kinds of problems a nation is wrestling with at any given time. Originally, White Papers were simply Parliamentary Papers printed uncovered on white stock as differentiated from those reports substantial enough in bulk to require a blue cartridge cover, hence given the name Blue Books. The massive 19th century reports that chronicled the government’s awakening to the social conditions of the time and recorded the sweeping state affairs of the Empire were familiarly known and spoken of as Blue Books. Today cover design is varied and not restricted to blue and the term has lost much of its earlier connotation. White Papers, however, are now commonly
BARBARA
204
E. SMITH
referred to and thought of as statements of government
policy in that they are designed to indicate
“the broad lines of the legislation the Government intend to introduce and, very often, of executive action that will be taken”16’. Green Papers are a fairly new development and represent an effort on the part of Government to seek the opinion of interested parties by providing a vehicle of discussion in a tentative statement of a proposal before a hard decision and firm statement of government intention is published. The first Green Paper was issued in 1967 by the Department of Economic Affairs and the Treasury and was a statement of “The Development premium.”
Areas:
a proposal
for
a regional
employment
The term itself was defined by the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, Michael Stewart, in the debate on regional employment premiums in the House of Commons, 5 June 1967, as “a statement by the Government not of policy already determined but of propositions put before the whole nation for discussion” (House of Commons Debates, Hunsard, 5 June 1967, column 651). It is an interesting aside that the first six Green Papers were all Non-Parliamentary Publications. The first to appear as a Parliamentary Paper was the Command Paper “Public Expenditure: a new presentation” (Cmnd. 4017) April 1969. A more recent example in the Parliamentary category is “The Channel Tunnel Project” (Cmnd. 5256) presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Environment in March 1973. As the preface notes, this project has been talked about for nearly 200 years; the paper attempts to put together “the available facts and other consideration” in order to form a background for a decision on what is certainly a large and farreaching project. For a more complete discussion of this innovative use of government communication, the reader is directed to John Pemberton’s 1969 Library World article, “Government Green Papers”17’. Parliamentary Papers over the past few years have concerned themselves with such topics as the United Kingdom and the European Communities; Northern Ireland Constitution proposals; North Sea oil; Value added tax; Metrification; Education, a framework of expansion, Counter Inflation; Regional of local development; Power crisis regulations; the Three-day working week; Consolidation government; Capita1 investment; New towns. In January of 1974 bills up for second reading included Rehabilitation of Offender Bill; Rights of Women Bill; Pensions (Increase) Bill; Road Traffic Bill; Independent Broadcasting Authority Bill; while the Unit Pricing Bill was amended, considered, and read the third time. How clear it is that a nation’s business is the world’s concern as well. Many of the topics above are the subject of consideration by the governments of a number of countries - certainly they are familiar ground to anyone following the deliberations of the United States Congress.
NON-PARLIAMENTARY
PUBLICATIONS
A listing of the subjects covered by Non-Parliamentary Publications serves only to reinforce one’s realization that there are very few aspects of modern life that are not in some way subject to governmental notice, advice, or control. Quite outside the annual publication of some 2,000 Statutory Instruments (regulations made by a Minister under the authority of an Act of Parliament - delegated legislation) there are hundreds of reports, studies, guides, charts, books, pamphlets, periodicals, leaflets published each year by H.M.S.O. The range is nothing short of remarkable as can be seen from these few examples culled from several H.M.S.O. Monthly Selection lists: John Constable’s Sketchbooks of 1813 and 1814 (Victoria and Albert Museum); Out of Sight - Out of Mind, First report of the Working Party on the Disposal of Sludge in Liverpool Bay (Department of the Environment); Computers in Offices (Department of Employment, Manpower Studies); Documents Jf British Foreign Policy
British official publications: I. scope and substance 1919-1939 (Foreign and Commonwealth
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Office); Broodcasting in Britain 1922-1972 (Science Museum);
Shopping Habits and Attitudes to Shop Hours in Great Britain (Social Survey Division, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys); Criminal Justice in Britain (Central Office of Information); The Royal Navy in the American War of Independence (National Maritime Museum); Staffing of Public Libraries (Department of Education and Science); Violence (Department of Health and Social Security); Economic Survey of the Tourist Industry in the South West (Department of the Environment); Agriculture and Water Quality (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food); A Century of Trade Marks 1876-1976 (Patent Office); Families Five Years On (Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys). In addition there are over fifty periodicals, among which are the well-known titles Trade and Industry (Weekly); Economic Trends (Monthly); Monthly Digest of Statistics; British Library Review; Marine Observer (Quarterly); Survey of Current wfairs (Monthly); Trends in Education (Quarterly); Tropical Science (Quarterly); Weather Report (Monthly). To indicate fully the scope of Non-Parliamentary Publications would take pages and would include, as does Pemberton’s book, entire chapters on the reference and statistical sources published by H.M.S.O. And in the end one could only second Majorie Ogilvy-Webb’s comment in her book The Government Explains: A Study of the Information Services: “The man who can find nothing to interest him in the Stationery Office’s list of publications must be either very erudite or very dull”‘*‘.
NON-H.M.S.O.
PUBLICATIONS
If, as we have noted above, it is sometimes difficult to know whether a particular paper has been issued as Parliamentary or Non-Parliamentary, and while we may agree that peculiarities abound (as for example in the case of the Green Papers which appear first in one category and then the other), at least these documents are all H.M.S.O. publications which means that the potential user has ready access to them through a fairly sophisticated system of cataloging and indexing. That is to say that the user does not necessarily need to know the official category of the document he seeks so long as H.M.S.O. provides the bibliographical controls that enable him to find the information he needs. Pandora’s box opens with the realization that there appears to be a third category of official publications for which no familiar identification tools exist. The publications of the nationalised industries are a prime example. For years their annual reports and accounts were presented to Parliament in the standard if not chaste Parliamentary Paper format and as such found their way into the official H.M.S.O. indexing network. At the same time, however, the various industries (British Gas Corporation, Scottish Transport Group, British Steel Corporation, BBC, to name but a few) were releasing free copies of their own glossy publicrelations-oriented versions of the annual reports, and it became more and more difficult to find buyers for the H.M.S.O. stock publication. In 1973 a decision was reached to allow the nationalised industries to publish on their own, and, at that moment, effective bibliographical control disappeared for some 72 sources. Although H.M.S.O. does act as a sales agent for a number of the industries, any serious collecting of the publications must now be done on an individual basis, subject both to the conditions set by each industry and the available energy of the collector and/or librarian. Unfortunately, the case of the nationalised industries is not an isolated instance, but it has served as a focal point of irritation for librarians forced to recognize that there exists a whole amorphous area of official publishing outside the H.M.S.O. perimeter. That the problem is real rather than imagined can be corroborated through the data gathered by Roy Knight for his Master’s thesis on the bibliographical control of the non-H.M.S.O. departmental publications lgl. Mr. Knight wrote or interviewed something
206
BARBARA
E. SMITH
like 112 Government Departments and concluded from his research that the Departments are indeed autonomous, issuing in all some 17,000-20,ooO publications yearly. His figures tend to be supported by several librarians who had suggested to me in earlier conversations that of their entire input of British official publications only about 30% came from H.M.S.O. while close to 70% were obtained from other sources. Accepting H.M.S.O.‘s claim to issue about 7,000 publications a year, one finds Knight’s estimate reasonably valid. The implications of this flood of print are a bit staggering. Where does the responsibility lie for recording and cataloging these publications? For that matter are they all “official” publications in the first place, and without a specific definition of “official” who is to decide? Do you accept the premise used by one of the libraries - if an organization isfinanced wholly or almost wholly by the Government, then collect its publications. This might exclude some of the nationalised industries material but would in turn mandate serious collection of what appears to be a vast outpouring of Departmental publications not handled by H.M.S.O. Should H.M.S.O. serve as a collecting point? Do the individual Departments have a central source of information for the identity and availability of the publications issued in their name? There would appear to be more questions than answers in the immediate situation but sooner or later the problem will have to be faced and pressure brought to bear upon some suitable agency. H.M.S.O. has indicated that it does not initiate programs; rather “it responds to directives,” but what kind of arguments would be sufficient to convince the Treasury that the proper directives should be forthcoming? Perhaps, as Knight suggests, an ideal solution would be to see that one copy of every Departmental publication is deposited with the British Library, recorded and linked into the British National Bibliography setup, and announced in a fortnightly listing which would be offered to libraries on a subscription basis. Further panaceas aside, there are a few excellent tools for the here and now: (1) the Official Publications Library of the British Library issues a Check List of British Official Serial Publications (the 8th edition extends to June 1976); (2) the Department of the Environment compiles an Annual List of Publications (1971 through 1975 are currently available); (3) the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food issues an indexed catalogue of department publications every six months; (4) the British Library Lending Division at Boston Spa issues monthly the BLL Announcement Bulletin, a guide to British reports, translations and theses; (5) Jack Burkett’s third revised edition of Government and Related Library and Information Services in the United Kingdom (London: the Library Association, 1974) lists reporting and announcing tools put out by the various libraries; and (6) the Department of Health and Social Security has produced in 1977 its first Ann& List of PubIications (titles issued in 1975, to be followed by successive annual volumes). A number of other Government Departments put out lists of their publications and most Department libraries publish library accession lists, all of which are complete only to the extent of the effort expended in collecting input. If the various Department libraries were to act as central receiving points for each of their Department’s publications, the resulting accession lists could form strong links in an overall announcing scheme. However, a number of Department librarians do not see this as a feasible plan. They mention limitations of staff, as well as a feeling that it would be impossible for them to keep track of all Department publishing without a strictly enforced directive from the very top level giving them authority to demand copies of each and every Departmental publication. Apparently not every library can designate one person to work solely in this area as has been done in the Department of the Environment; nevertheless, the DOE example will hopefully serve as a spur. In the meantime, librarians will continue to find that their first indication of the existence of an official Departmental publication may well come as a result of a patron’s request, a disconcerting experience for library and patron alike.
British Official
publications:
1. scope and substance
201
REFERENCES 1. Ollt, JamesG. An Introduction to British Government Publications, 2nd edn. Association of Assistant Librarians. “Parliamentary Publications,” Library London (1973) pp. 55, 56. Quotation from an article by J. Walton, Association Record, XX (November-December, 1918) 243-244. 2. Ford, P. and G. Ford. A Guide to Parliamentary Papers: What They Are, How to Find Them, How to Use Them 3rd edn. Irish University Press, Shannon, Ireland (1972) pp. 15-17. 3. Ollt. An Introduction to British Government Publications. p.57. 4. Pemberton, John E. British Official Publications. 2nd edn. Pergamon Press, Oxford (1973). Conversation with Mr. Pemberton, November’l, 1976. 5. 0116 p. 37. 6. Pemberton. British Official Publications. p. 58. 7. Pemberton, John E. “Government Green Papers,” Library World, LXXI (August, 1%9) pp. 46-47, 49. 8. Ogilvy-Webb, Majorie. The Government Explains: A Study of the Information Services. Allen & Unwin, London (1965) p. 41. James Glle uses this quotation in the opening pages of his book. 9. Knight, R.F.E. (Roy). “An Investigation into the Bibliographical Control and Accessibility of non-H.M.S.O. Departmental Official Publications in England and Wales.” Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of London 1973 Passim.