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Citizen-centered government: information policy possibilities for the 108th Congress
INFORMATION POLICY edited by John A. Shuler ●
Citizen-centered Government: Information Policy Possibilities for the 108th Congress by John A. Shuler
A
s this is being written in the last days of December, the 2003 mid-winter national meeting of librarians is just a few short weeks away. Many academic librarians, especially those with a particular interest in government information policies, might be wondering how many more global events can shake the foundations of their centuriesold bibliographic perspectives. First, nearly two years ago, was the technology stock financial bubble burst, followed by deficits in state budgets and academic endowments. Next, just over a year ago, the horror of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which deepened the economic woes, as well as the formation of a federal system of surveillance as the government insisted it needed to prosecute the declared war on terrorism. These new security measures incorporated libraries and their records in such an intrusive way as to weaken several state and federal laws aimed at protecting the anonymity of library users. Just a few short months ago, the current administration shifted its national wartime priorities from an inconclusive military adventure in Afghanistan [where we may (or may not) have killed the chief architects of the September 11 attacks] to a determination that Iran is the next worthy target for military intervention. Finally, the economy keeps sputtering along, teetering between contraction and expansion, further endangering state and academic budgets. Along with the set of complicated and divisive policy issues generated by these conditions of economic trouble and declarations of war, there is one more topic to add to all future national conferences: “Electronic Government.” Although the discussions of government efficiency and reform stretch back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the civil service reforms of the late 19th century,1 the current healthy and wide-ranging discussion among elected officials, policy makers, academics, and librarians of information technology revolution will change the way federal (as well as state and local) government conducts business and actually began in the mid-1970s, when the early concepts of information resource management were formalized. The promise of an “electronic democracy,” even in the days before the reality of the World Wide Web, was an essential element in the argument that more rational information poliJohn A. Shuler, University of Illinois at Chicago, Documents Library Documents, Maps, Microforms & Circulation Department, M/C 234 801 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60677041, USA ⬍[email protected]⬎.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 29, Number 2, pages 107–110
cies enabled citizens to participate more effectively in civic life, as well as make the public bureaucracy more “businesslike” in the delivery of its programs and services. Government commissions investigated, consulted various experts, and wrote extensive reports. Librarians advocated, talked, and wrote their own reports. Non-profit groups lobbied and wrote reports. Business and industry groups agitated, challenged, influenced lawmakers and bureaucrats, and wrote reports. The first substantial legislative victory for IRM came in the form of the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act. As a result, at least a dozen federal laws were enacted over the next two decades that attempted to inject further rational and performance-based measurements of quality into the murky world of federal information resource management. This is the world-view government information librarians have been living with since the passage of PRA over two decades ago. However, two events in December 2002, taking place just a weekend apart, stand as fair warnings for all academic librarians to prepare themselves for a whole new world of rule-making, standard-setting, paradigm breaking, court-challenging and service-seeking environment of government information production and delivery. The first was a deadline on December 13 for public reaction to proposed changes to the Federal Acquisition Rules (FAR) governing the purchase of printing contracts for executive agencies,2 which set into motion a long-simmering constitutional struggle between the White House and Congress over the future of the Government Printing Office (GPO), and how the federal government shall manage its future printing procurement. The second, on December 17, was when President Bush signed into law H.R. 2458, the “E-Government Act of 2002.”3 The law accelerates the shift to electronic distribution of public information into high gear, as well as institutionalizes several initiatives launched in the mid-1990s. These two events must also be placed within the context of two other significant policy events that were a direct result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: the PATRIOT Act (Public Law No: 107-173) and the creation of the Homeland Security Department (Public Law 107-296.) These two laws add yet another level of complication into the professional lives of librarians, and will be discussed in more detail in a future column. Suffice it to say that the struggle over public printing contracts and the start of a new electronic government initiative must be carefully considered within the larger issues of privacy, national secu-
March 2003 107
rity, and intelligence gathering of the current war on terrorism.
THE PUBLIC’S PRINTING CONTRACTS CONTRACTION If there wasn’t a war on terrorism, or a new E-government law for that matter, the long-simmering constitutional struggle between the President and the Congress over how executive agencies use the GPO would get its usual emphasis as the way to frame the debate on how the federal government distributes its information products. The essential constitutional element of the dispute rests on a single (a seemingly simple) argument: can a legislative agency dictate how and when executive agencies procure particular services or programs without violating the Constitution’s “separation of powers” doctrine. And it isn’t as if the constitution is at all clear on this issue either. For two centuries, the Congress has been more than willing to exercise what many experts would consider “administrative” control over executive officers and programs through its oversight and budget constitutional authorities, as well as through the Senate’s power to vote on presidential appointees. The federal courts (including the Supreme Court) have ruled in a number of instances where the Congress has overreached its involvement in executive matters. But in the particular area of the Government Printing Office, with its ambiguous historical roots in both the legislative and executive branches, any decisive judicial renderings have yet to be delivered. This lack of judicial interpretation leaves the White House and Congress with an ever shifting struggle over how far each can influence the policy direction of who really controls the public prints: executive agencies and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or GPO. On the side of Congress stands the original 1896 Printing law, and subsequent legislative interpretations rendered by other public laws enacted since, the language is very clear, as is the congressional intent. GPO is the public printer for all three branches of government. Certain exceptions, usually along the lines of national security or military interests, have been made, but broadly speaking, Congress intended the Public Printer to execute and deliver printing contracts for all the federal government. It enforced this “rule-making” through its Joint Committee on Printing. On the executive side, the Public Printer is nominated by the President, and approved by the Senate, but his policy role over the decades has clearly been independent of both executive and legislative interests, though in the end Congress will always capture the Printer’s allegiance since they pay the bills. Ironically, the two most successful public printers, George H. Carter in the 1920s and early 1930s and Augustus E. Giegengack in the mid-1930s and late 1940s, declared themselves to be independent of both the executive and legislative interests (or at least acted as if they were), and got away with it because neither branch could muster enough political or administrative headway to challenge the independence. The one public printer who boldly declared his commitment with the policies of Ronald Reagan during the early 1980s, Danford L. Sawyer, ran into a world of hurt over his few short years in office as Congress, librarians, GPO labor unions, and other public interest groups challenged his leadership. The executive fought congressional influence over GPO with rules, regulations, circulars, and presidential declarations. Over the last quarter century, the energy for this resistance comes
108
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
from the Office of Management and Budget, which proposed the current rule changes earlier this year to allow executive agencies to go outside the GPO to get their printing contracts. Congress responded by incorporating very specific language in several appropriation laws directing executive agencies to use the GPO by clearly stating that no federal funds will be spent on any printing except that which is procured and managed through the current structure of the public printing office. It appears both the White House and OMB are going to ignore this legislative language and implement their plans to break what they label as a GPO “monopoly” on public printing. As a coda to this main constitutional theme, the traditional librarian argument goes something like this: GPO produces the publications, the Superintendent of Documents (as part of GPO) identifies, catalogs and distributes these publications to its depository libraries, as well as through its sales program and bookstores. From this perspective, librarians argue that there is an abiding relationship between production and distribution; that an effective public information policy depends on an interrelated dependency between the policies that foster the information’s production and the set of policies that foster the information distribution. In the case of GPO, this relationship is primarily along the lines of industrial cost-benefit analysis of economies of scale (i.e., because GPO manages the printing technology and procurement, it makes sound economic sense that it should also control the technologies that organize and distribute the finished products). When OMB proposed in early May 2002 to change its regulations and allow executive agencies to seek their own printing contracts, the cry went up from the library community. They argued strenuously to whoever would listen, in either the legislative or executive, that this essential bond between production and distribution should not be broken. Agencies, they further argued, if allowed to procure their own printing contracts, would never include these titles in the GPO’s federal depository library program. In response to this concern, the OMB’s final changes to the acquisition rules direct agencies to send these publications to the Superintendent of Documents for inclusion the depository library program. This did little to console librarians and their advocacy organizations. Whether or not this cripples the depository library program, I think, is beside the point. Strip away all the rhetoric about the program and what you have in the end is a system of historic information subsidies (albeit in the form of publications rather than cash) for a limited number of libraries, the largest portion of which are managed by academic institutions. It is wrong to think that there will be catastrophic loss of access to citizens if the material is not printed at the GPO. The loss will come to librarians, not the people. Indeed, the academic library community needs to align its advocacy and rhetoric to a new reality that GPO, except in some very limited ways, is no longer a major choke point within the federal government to monitor the distribution of federal information. The Superintendent of Documents increasingly manages a set of policies and traditions that have little to do with how the current information technologies and policies are delivering “information to the people.” If the librarians and their organizations could shift their attention and advocacy from keeping GPO unchanged, and focus more on influencing the unfolding events in the executive,
they will do more to make sure that the wealth of electronic government information now created is around for the 22nd century of service. This means working constructively with OMB, the National Archives and Records Administration, the chief information officers of the executive branch, and many others. The traditional concepts of a depository library are too passive in a world of such rapid change and communication transmissions. Rather than fighting the changes promised by the OMB proposals, librarians ought to declare a victory for better government management and move on to embrace a new world of possibilities outlined by the new E-government law.
THE “DEPOSITORY LIBRARY” CONCEPT E-GOVERNMENT LAWS
AND
NEW
The legislation signed into law by President Bush clearly challenges the long-held traditional depository library perspective, and even invites librarians to participate in shaping this new world, if they can just let go of GPO’s bureaucratic barrier reef long enough to drift with the information tides. Specific parts of the legislation call for interagency committees, standards on privacy, standards on naming and organization of electronic information, closer examination of preservation and archival issues. Here are the specific previsions of the E-government law that will have a direct impact on government information policies and libraries: Title I: Office of Management and Budget Electronic Government Services ●
Section 101 creates a specific position in the OMB for an Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government.
Title II: Federal Management and Promotion of Electronic Government Services ●
●
●
●
●
●
Section 205 requires each federal court to establish a Web site where the public can get court rules, decisions, docket information, and documents filed with the court. Section 206 requires federal regulatory agencies, “to the extent practicable,” to ensure that a publicly accessible federal government Web site includes all information that the agency is required to publish in the Federal Register and to accept electronic submissions in rulemaking proceedings. Section 207 calls for the establishment of an “Interagency Committee on Government Information.” Within two years, the committee is to recommend standards for the categorization of government information in a way that is searchable electronically and interoperable across agencies. Section 207 also requires OMB to provide specific guidance for agency Web sites within two years. Section 208 requires federal government agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments before developing or procuring information technology or initiating any new collections of personally identifiable information. Section 212 directs OMB to study and report to Congress on progress toward integrating Federal information systems across the agencies. Section 213 requires the Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government to develop an online tutorial explaining how to access government information services and information on the Internet.
● ●
Section 215 requires a National Academy of Sciences study on the digital divide. Section 216 codifies under law the long-standing and ongoing work of the Federal Geographic Data Committee in facilitating the development of common protocols for the development, acquisition, maintenance, distribution, and application of geographic information.
Title V: Confidential Information and Statistical Efficiency ●
Sections 501-513 establish a very strict rule of confidentiality for information collected by the federal government for statistical purposes.4
SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS If one reads the new law, understands the changed OMB regulations regarding printing contracts, and thinks carefully about their implications for the provision of government information in academic libraries, the library profession and its organized interests stand on a threshold of new possibilities. A first solid step in this direction could come from the new Public Printer, Bruce R. James and Superintendent of Documents, Judy Russell, to embrace the proposed spirit and intentions of the E-government law. The superintendent’s office has a century-long experience in organizing vast array of various government information products, and there is little reason to believe that this experience should be lost in the new environment, if the Public Printer and Superintendent could find some way to work with OMB, the new agency chief information officers, and others to shape a world of depository libraries and government information access that is not narrowly defined by printed documents or how they are produced. One area they need to reconsider, in particular, is the notion of permanent public access. If the government information products and official records are now being created, distributed, and stored in electronic formats, the National Archives and Records Administration and government agencies themselves attain a new importance as the primary agents in the federal government responsible for a consistent and permanent public access to information. The historic levels of advocacy librarians invest in sustaining GPO should, therefore, shift to monitoring and supporting these evolving administrative points of information policy and implementation. To make this shift, librarians and their supports need to lose the 19th century concept of a depository library that is largely a passive redistribution point of “free” publications from a centralized agency. The future of government information in academic institutions is going to rest on the notion of service to information sources that are not “owned” or housed by the library. This displaces the traditions of information mediation based largely on technical processing and bibliographic organization of static published artifacts with several ambiguous notions of public service where the knowledge of how the government works and performs the public’s business is going to be more important than identifying and collecting specific public reports. Librarians become proactive advocates of public access to government information, not keepers of outdated and displaced distribution mechanisms. Because this new service environment demands a fair degree of uncertainty, fluidity, and the need to finally give up the notion that our individual
March 2003 109
depository collections are somehow part of a great and good archival arrangement of preserving this nation’s recorded history (a role that will be the most difficult to surrender). As librarians, we need to fight for the parts of federal government that will properly preserve this growing electronic heritage and let them get on with it. In return for decommissioning our self-selected role as preservers of the holy government information object, we can invest more time and energy making sure our communities understand how the government works, and how they can use the information resources to make the government work better, or use the government information resources to make their own individual lives better. Yes, we can continue to work with other players in preserving electronic (and paper) government information, but it is no longer the primary duty of government information librarians. Despite all those hopes and good intentions, there is one potential difficulty. Both the laws that support GPO and the E-government initiatives fail in that the legislative language bind the distribution of government information to a particular form of technology. In the case of the legislative language that guides GPO, the language is clearly geared to the printed product, with some limited mention of other tangible and electronic means of production. In the new E-government bill, the language uses such terms as “Web,” “Internet,” and “portal.” As much as the techniques and technologies have changed over the past five years, one suspects that general government policy grounded in such specific technical terms are going to be difficult to manage for OMB and the agencies, in much the same way GPO was challenged when the industrial nature of printing presses were changed by the new printing technologies mimeographs and plain-
110
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
paper copiers. As long as the law ties the general information policy to a specific technology, the true impact of rational information management will never be grasped, a flaw that needs to be understood when the advocacy wars begin in the 108th Congress.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. For an excellent analysis of this kind of government reform and its impact in particular on the U.S. Presidency, see Peri E. Arnold’s Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996, 2nd edition, revised. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/gpo_proposed_rule_revised.pdf, the proposal specifically states, “The FAR Council is proposing amendments to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to implement the policy set forth in Office of Management and Budget Memorandum No. M-02-07, Procurement of Printing and Duplicating through the Government Printing Office (GPO) (May 3, 2002). To induce competition, save taxpayer money and promote small business opportunities, the memorandum eliminate restrictions that mandated use of GPO as the single sources and frees agencies to select printing from a wide array of sources that can demonstrate their ability to meeting the Government’s needs most effectively. Moreover, specific new actions are proposed to improve dramatically the depository library system by ensuring that all Government publications are in fact made available to the nation’s depository libraries.” 3. See the summary of relevant elements of the law at the Library of Congress’ legislative Web site THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:HR02458:@@@L&summ2⫽m&) (accessed December 23, 2002). 4. Taken from the American Library Association’s Washington Office Web site: http://www.ala.org/washoff/egovact.html (accessed December 23, 2002).
Citizen-centered Government: Information Policy Possibilities for the 108th Congress by John A. Shuler
A
s this is being written in the last days of December, the 2003 mid-winter national meeting of librarians is just a few short weeks away. Many academic librarians, especially those with a particular interest in government information policies, might be wondering how many more global events can shake the foundations of their centuriesold bibliographic perspectives. First, nearly two years ago, was the technology stock financial bubble burst, followed by deficits in state budgets and academic endowments. Next, just over a year ago, the horror of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which deepened the economic woes, as well as the formation of a federal system of surveillance as the government insisted it needed to prosecute the declared war on terrorism. These new security measures incorporated libraries and their records in such an intrusive way as to weaken several state and federal laws aimed at protecting the anonymity of library users. Just a few short months ago, the current administration shifted its national wartime priorities from an inconclusive military adventure in Afghanistan [where we may (or may not) have killed the chief architects of the September 11 attacks] to a determination that Iran is the next worthy target for military intervention. Finally, the economy keeps sputtering along, teetering between contraction and expansion, further endangering state and academic budgets. Along with the set of complicated and divisive policy issues generated by these conditions of economic trouble and declarations of war, there is one more topic to add to all future national conferences: “Electronic Government.” Although the discussions of government efficiency and reform stretch back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the civil service reforms of the late 19th century,1 the current healthy and wide-ranging discussion among elected officials, policy makers, academics, and librarians of information technology revolution will change the way federal (as well as state and local) government conducts business and actually began in the mid-1970s, when the early concepts of information resource management were formalized. The promise of an “electronic democracy,” even in the days before the reality of the World Wide Web, was an essential element in the argument that more rational information poliJohn A. Shuler, University of Illinois at Chicago, Documents Library Documents, Maps, Microforms & Circulation Department, M/C 234 801 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60677041, USA ⬍[email protected]⬎.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 29, Number 2, pages 107–110
cies enabled citizens to participate more effectively in civic life, as well as make the public bureaucracy more “businesslike” in the delivery of its programs and services. Government commissions investigated, consulted various experts, and wrote extensive reports. Librarians advocated, talked, and wrote their own reports. Non-profit groups lobbied and wrote reports. Business and industry groups agitated, challenged, influenced lawmakers and bureaucrats, and wrote reports. The first substantial legislative victory for IRM came in the form of the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act. As a result, at least a dozen federal laws were enacted over the next two decades that attempted to inject further rational and performance-based measurements of quality into the murky world of federal information resource management. This is the world-view government information librarians have been living with since the passage of PRA over two decades ago. However, two events in December 2002, taking place just a weekend apart, stand as fair warnings for all academic librarians to prepare themselves for a whole new world of rule-making, standard-setting, paradigm breaking, court-challenging and service-seeking environment of government information production and delivery. The first was a deadline on December 13 for public reaction to proposed changes to the Federal Acquisition Rules (FAR) governing the purchase of printing contracts for executive agencies,2 which set into motion a long-simmering constitutional struggle between the White House and Congress over the future of the Government Printing Office (GPO), and how the federal government shall manage its future printing procurement. The second, on December 17, was when President Bush signed into law H.R. 2458, the “E-Government Act of 2002.”3 The law accelerates the shift to electronic distribution of public information into high gear, as well as institutionalizes several initiatives launched in the mid-1990s. These two events must also be placed within the context of two other significant policy events that were a direct result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: the PATRIOT Act (Public Law No: 107-173) and the creation of the Homeland Security Department (Public Law 107-296.) These two laws add yet another level of complication into the professional lives of librarians, and will be discussed in more detail in a future column. Suffice it to say that the struggle over public printing contracts and the start of a new electronic government initiative must be carefully considered within the larger issues of privacy, national secu-
March 2003 107
rity, and intelligence gathering of the current war on terrorism.
THE PUBLIC’S PRINTING CONTRACTS CONTRACTION If there wasn’t a war on terrorism, or a new E-government law for that matter, the long-simmering constitutional struggle between the President and the Congress over how executive agencies use the GPO would get its usual emphasis as the way to frame the debate on how the federal government distributes its information products. The essential constitutional element of the dispute rests on a single (a seemingly simple) argument: can a legislative agency dictate how and when executive agencies procure particular services or programs without violating the Constitution’s “separation of powers” doctrine. And it isn’t as if the constitution is at all clear on this issue either. For two centuries, the Congress has been more than willing to exercise what many experts would consider “administrative” control over executive officers and programs through its oversight and budget constitutional authorities, as well as through the Senate’s power to vote on presidential appointees. The federal courts (including the Supreme Court) have ruled in a number of instances where the Congress has overreached its involvement in executive matters. But in the particular area of the Government Printing Office, with its ambiguous historical roots in both the legislative and executive branches, any decisive judicial renderings have yet to be delivered. This lack of judicial interpretation leaves the White House and Congress with an ever shifting struggle over how far each can influence the policy direction of who really controls the public prints: executive agencies and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or GPO. On the side of Congress stands the original 1896 Printing law, and subsequent legislative interpretations rendered by other public laws enacted since, the language is very clear, as is the congressional intent. GPO is the public printer for all three branches of government. Certain exceptions, usually along the lines of national security or military interests, have been made, but broadly speaking, Congress intended the Public Printer to execute and deliver printing contracts for all the federal government. It enforced this “rule-making” through its Joint Committee on Printing. On the executive side, the Public Printer is nominated by the President, and approved by the Senate, but his policy role over the decades has clearly been independent of both executive and legislative interests, though in the end Congress will always capture the Printer’s allegiance since they pay the bills. Ironically, the two most successful public printers, George H. Carter in the 1920s and early 1930s and Augustus E. Giegengack in the mid-1930s and late 1940s, declared themselves to be independent of both the executive and legislative interests (or at least acted as if they were), and got away with it because neither branch could muster enough political or administrative headway to challenge the independence. The one public printer who boldly declared his commitment with the policies of Ronald Reagan during the early 1980s, Danford L. Sawyer, ran into a world of hurt over his few short years in office as Congress, librarians, GPO labor unions, and other public interest groups challenged his leadership. The executive fought congressional influence over GPO with rules, regulations, circulars, and presidential declarations. Over the last quarter century, the energy for this resistance comes
108
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
from the Office of Management and Budget, which proposed the current rule changes earlier this year to allow executive agencies to go outside the GPO to get their printing contracts. Congress responded by incorporating very specific language in several appropriation laws directing executive agencies to use the GPO by clearly stating that no federal funds will be spent on any printing except that which is procured and managed through the current structure of the public printing office. It appears both the White House and OMB are going to ignore this legislative language and implement their plans to break what they label as a GPO “monopoly” on public printing. As a coda to this main constitutional theme, the traditional librarian argument goes something like this: GPO produces the publications, the Superintendent of Documents (as part of GPO) identifies, catalogs and distributes these publications to its depository libraries, as well as through its sales program and bookstores. From this perspective, librarians argue that there is an abiding relationship between production and distribution; that an effective public information policy depends on an interrelated dependency between the policies that foster the information’s production and the set of policies that foster the information distribution. In the case of GPO, this relationship is primarily along the lines of industrial cost-benefit analysis of economies of scale (i.e., because GPO manages the printing technology and procurement, it makes sound economic sense that it should also control the technologies that organize and distribute the finished products). When OMB proposed in early May 2002 to change its regulations and allow executive agencies to seek their own printing contracts, the cry went up from the library community. They argued strenuously to whoever would listen, in either the legislative or executive, that this essential bond between production and distribution should not be broken. Agencies, they further argued, if allowed to procure their own printing contracts, would never include these titles in the GPO’s federal depository library program. In response to this concern, the OMB’s final changes to the acquisition rules direct agencies to send these publications to the Superintendent of Documents for inclusion the depository library program. This did little to console librarians and their advocacy organizations. Whether or not this cripples the depository library program, I think, is beside the point. Strip away all the rhetoric about the program and what you have in the end is a system of historic information subsidies (albeit in the form of publications rather than cash) for a limited number of libraries, the largest portion of which are managed by academic institutions. It is wrong to think that there will be catastrophic loss of access to citizens if the material is not printed at the GPO. The loss will come to librarians, not the people. Indeed, the academic library community needs to align its advocacy and rhetoric to a new reality that GPO, except in some very limited ways, is no longer a major choke point within the federal government to monitor the distribution of federal information. The Superintendent of Documents increasingly manages a set of policies and traditions that have little to do with how the current information technologies and policies are delivering “information to the people.” If the librarians and their organizations could shift their attention and advocacy from keeping GPO unchanged, and focus more on influencing the unfolding events in the executive,
they will do more to make sure that the wealth of electronic government information now created is around for the 22nd century of service. This means working constructively with OMB, the National Archives and Records Administration, the chief information officers of the executive branch, and many others. The traditional concepts of a depository library are too passive in a world of such rapid change and communication transmissions. Rather than fighting the changes promised by the OMB proposals, librarians ought to declare a victory for better government management and move on to embrace a new world of possibilities outlined by the new E-government law.
THE “DEPOSITORY LIBRARY” CONCEPT E-GOVERNMENT LAWS
AND
NEW
The legislation signed into law by President Bush clearly challenges the long-held traditional depository library perspective, and even invites librarians to participate in shaping this new world, if they can just let go of GPO’s bureaucratic barrier reef long enough to drift with the information tides. Specific parts of the legislation call for interagency committees, standards on privacy, standards on naming and organization of electronic information, closer examination of preservation and archival issues. Here are the specific previsions of the E-government law that will have a direct impact on government information policies and libraries: Title I: Office of Management and Budget Electronic Government Services ●
Section 101 creates a specific position in the OMB for an Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government.
Title II: Federal Management and Promotion of Electronic Government Services ●
●
●
●
●
●
Section 205 requires each federal court to establish a Web site where the public can get court rules, decisions, docket information, and documents filed with the court. Section 206 requires federal regulatory agencies, “to the extent practicable,” to ensure that a publicly accessible federal government Web site includes all information that the agency is required to publish in the Federal Register and to accept electronic submissions in rulemaking proceedings. Section 207 calls for the establishment of an “Interagency Committee on Government Information.” Within two years, the committee is to recommend standards for the categorization of government information in a way that is searchable electronically and interoperable across agencies. Section 207 also requires OMB to provide specific guidance for agency Web sites within two years. Section 208 requires federal government agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments before developing or procuring information technology or initiating any new collections of personally identifiable information. Section 212 directs OMB to study and report to Congress on progress toward integrating Federal information systems across the agencies. Section 213 requires the Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government to develop an online tutorial explaining how to access government information services and information on the Internet.
● ●
Section 215 requires a National Academy of Sciences study on the digital divide. Section 216 codifies under law the long-standing and ongoing work of the Federal Geographic Data Committee in facilitating the development of common protocols for the development, acquisition, maintenance, distribution, and application of geographic information.
Title V: Confidential Information and Statistical Efficiency ●
Sections 501-513 establish a very strict rule of confidentiality for information collected by the federal government for statistical purposes.4
SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS If one reads the new law, understands the changed OMB regulations regarding printing contracts, and thinks carefully about their implications for the provision of government information in academic libraries, the library profession and its organized interests stand on a threshold of new possibilities. A first solid step in this direction could come from the new Public Printer, Bruce R. James and Superintendent of Documents, Judy Russell, to embrace the proposed spirit and intentions of the E-government law. The superintendent’s office has a century-long experience in organizing vast array of various government information products, and there is little reason to believe that this experience should be lost in the new environment, if the Public Printer and Superintendent could find some way to work with OMB, the new agency chief information officers, and others to shape a world of depository libraries and government information access that is not narrowly defined by printed documents or how they are produced. One area they need to reconsider, in particular, is the notion of permanent public access. If the government information products and official records are now being created, distributed, and stored in electronic formats, the National Archives and Records Administration and government agencies themselves attain a new importance as the primary agents in the federal government responsible for a consistent and permanent public access to information. The historic levels of advocacy librarians invest in sustaining GPO should, therefore, shift to monitoring and supporting these evolving administrative points of information policy and implementation. To make this shift, librarians and their supports need to lose the 19th century concept of a depository library that is largely a passive redistribution point of “free” publications from a centralized agency. The future of government information in academic institutions is going to rest on the notion of service to information sources that are not “owned” or housed by the library. This displaces the traditions of information mediation based largely on technical processing and bibliographic organization of static published artifacts with several ambiguous notions of public service where the knowledge of how the government works and performs the public’s business is going to be more important than identifying and collecting specific public reports. Librarians become proactive advocates of public access to government information, not keepers of outdated and displaced distribution mechanisms. Because this new service environment demands a fair degree of uncertainty, fluidity, and the need to finally give up the notion that our individual
March 2003 109
depository collections are somehow part of a great and good archival arrangement of preserving this nation’s recorded history (a role that will be the most difficult to surrender). As librarians, we need to fight for the parts of federal government that will properly preserve this growing electronic heritage and let them get on with it. In return for decommissioning our self-selected role as preservers of the holy government information object, we can invest more time and energy making sure our communities understand how the government works, and how they can use the information resources to make the government work better, or use the government information resources to make their own individual lives better. Yes, we can continue to work with other players in preserving electronic (and paper) government information, but it is no longer the primary duty of government information librarians. Despite all those hopes and good intentions, there is one potential difficulty. Both the laws that support GPO and the E-government initiatives fail in that the legislative language bind the distribution of government information to a particular form of technology. In the case of the legislative language that guides GPO, the language is clearly geared to the printed product, with some limited mention of other tangible and electronic means of production. In the new E-government bill, the language uses such terms as “Web,” “Internet,” and “portal.” As much as the techniques and technologies have changed over the past five years, one suspects that general government policy grounded in such specific technical terms are going to be difficult to manage for OMB and the agencies, in much the same way GPO was challenged when the industrial nature of printing presses were changed by the new printing technologies mimeographs and plain-
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paper copiers. As long as the law ties the general information policy to a specific technology, the true impact of rational information management will never be grasped, a flaw that needs to be understood when the advocacy wars begin in the 108th Congress.
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REFERENCES
1. For an excellent analysis of this kind of government reform and its impact in particular on the U.S. Presidency, see Peri E. Arnold’s Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996, 2nd edition, revised. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/gpo_proposed_rule_revised.pdf, the proposal specifically states, “The FAR Council is proposing amendments to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to implement the policy set forth in Office of Management and Budget Memorandum No. M-02-07, Procurement of Printing and Duplicating through the Government Printing Office (GPO) (May 3, 2002). To induce competition, save taxpayer money and promote small business opportunities, the memorandum eliminate restrictions that mandated use of GPO as the single sources and frees agencies to select printing from a wide array of sources that can demonstrate their ability to meeting the Government’s needs most effectively. Moreover, specific new actions are proposed to improve dramatically the depository library system by ensuring that all Government publications are in fact made available to the nation’s depository libraries.” 3. See the summary of relevant elements of the law at the Library of Congress’ legislative Web site THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:HR02458:@@@L&summ2⫽m&) (accessed December 23, 2002). 4. Taken from the American Library Association’s Washington Office Web site: http://www.ala.org/washoff/egovact.html (accessed December 23, 2002).