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Information management in public administration
BOOK
REVIEWS
Information Management in Public Administration. FORESTW. HORTONand DONALDA. MARCHAND (Ed%), Information Resources Press, Arlington, Virginia, 1982. xiv, 558 pp. $39.95 t $2.30 handling. ISBN: O-87815-038-2.
In 1977 the Commission on Federal Paper work made its final report to the President and Congress, presenting some 770 recommendations for reducing the burden that federal paperwork and red tape impose on the public and on state and local governments. Two of the Commission’s consultants now present a volume of readings which draws significantly from the background papers produced for the Commission. It is conventional, in reviewing composite works of this type, to note that it is impossible to characterize and evaluate all of the contributions that make it up; that some are good, some are indifferent, and some are out of place. So it is with this volume, which gathers 31 articles, five of them never previously published, to cover the subject of information management in the public sector. The most impressive articles are the ones reprinted from the work of the Commission on Federal Paperwork. (Incidentally, the term trivializes the issue the Commission studied, which was the full range of information gathering from the public and the management of the data gathered.) The “Paperwork Problem,” pp. 28-44, is a useful and succinct statement of the issues; and “The Burdens of Paperwork,” pp. 402-420, is a capsule statement not only of the direct and indirect costs to the public of federal data gathering. but also of a genera1 scheme for minimizing the burden in the future. Proposals include establishment of a central locator service to help agencies determine if the information they need is already held by the government; a requirement that information collection instruments be pretested; creation of better standards for reviewing and approving forms; and implementation of “zero-based reporting.” Other contributions are standard statements on the sociology of information, the uses and abuses of information in large organizations, and so forth. We are told that information is a source of power; how the decision-making process is conditioned by the flow of information within an organization; and why a centralized federal data bank (seemingly so efficient for collecting and disseminating government information about individuals) would be an unwanted feature in our American way of life. The conflict between the citizen’s need for privacy and the public agency’s need to fulfill its mission as effectively and cheaply as possible is pointed up in several articles. Michael Baker observes that privacy of information is a marginal concern for public managers for whom record-keeping is a low-visibility activity. Restrictions which afford privacy can also be nuisances for administrators; and moreover, educational, law enforcement and weelfareagencies tend to be less than sensitive to the privacy rights of their clients, whom they are used to controlling and manipulating. The least successful selections in this volume deal with budgeting and accounting for information resources, principally since it is virtually impossible to define what “information resources” are. Looking at the federal budget, for instance, we might agree that library services, printing and publishing and telephone communications are part of the cost of the primary information outputs of the government. Should we also include accounting and bookkeeping? Real estate agents and managers? Air traffic controllers, whose output is only “information”? In addition to these problems of definition is the fact there exists very little useful data on the cost of information activities. In their stead are only “estimates,” which vary widely among themselves. In discussions of the burdens which federal paperwork places upon respondents, federal estimates of respondents’ burdens are sometimes only 20 percent of respondents’ estimates. While budgeting for information resources is highly desirable in principle, how does one budget for resources whose annual cost in 1977 was estimated at either “in excess of $50 billion”, or “perhaps as great as $100 billion or higher”? In contexts like these, what can “budgeting” mean? Even though it is very difficult, if not impossible, to assess the costs of information gathering and record-keeping, the Commission amply demonstrated one very important fact: that information very definitely is not free. It is costly to gather, costly to maintain, and costly for the public to provide. The tendency of government officials to look upon information as a “free good” like air or sunlight is an important cause of excessive paperwork. This notion is not only made explicit by the Commission (see p. 30), attention is drawn to it in the forward of the volume (p. vii); in the introduction (p, 4); and in the editors’ remarks opening the first chapter (p. 14). Each of the subsequent contributors to chapter 1 repeats this idea in very similar terms (see pp. 40, 50 and 59), by which time this concept has lost some of its freshness for the reader. 187
188
Book Reviews
By the end of the book, the reader has an appreciation of the immense scope of the issue (the federal government annually collects between 130 and 300 billion individual data items from the public). We also learn that the House hearings on paperwork produced a seven-volume, 2,285 page work, now in many hundreds of libraries.
Microcomputer Operating Systems. MARK DAHMKE, Byte Books (McGraw-Hill),
New York,
1982.
238~~. $15.95 (P.B). ISBN: 0-07-015071-O. Dahmke has written what could have been a good introductory text on the CPfM and MP/M operating systems. I say “could have” because he has instead chosen to disguise his actual subject. He admits in the preface that “the bulk of the book describes.. an operating systems that looks a great deal like the disk operating system. in common use on most microcomputers today” (i.e. CP/M); however, in what I take to be an attempt at generality, all superficial resemblance to CPfM has been covered up. The reader is left with a book that is virtually non-functional: it does not really go beyond CP/M in its scope, and yet cannot be used as a reference to CP/M because all the names are changed and trivial changes are sprinkled throughout. For example, the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP) is called the Console Interpreter (CINT), and CP/M’s Transient Program Area (TPA) is referred to as the Application Program Area (APA). The only gestures toward fulfilling the promise of the title come in the sections on a small system monitor (i.e. hex keypad), which is quite good and features a lot of actual code, and a 31 page appendix on UNIX. Also included is a 13 page appendix on “structural flowcharts” that seems inappropriate; while they are used heavily in the rest of the text, they are fairly self-explanatory. The space would have been far better used to expand the UNIX material, or to add information on other systems, such as UCSD. A glossary serves to accentuate the equivalence of CP/M and the author’s DOS, while an inadequate two page index brings up the rear. All in all, Dahmke’s book might be of interest to someone who wants to implement a monitor for a minimal microcomputer, but it will not serve as an overview on microcomputer operating systems in general.
Library Law and Legislation in the United States. ALEX LADENSON,Metuchen, New Jersey. Scarecrow Press, 1982 (Scarecrow Library Administration Series No. l), 203 pp. $14.50, ISBN: O-8108-1513-3. One cannot easily understand the persuasive influence of local, state and federat government on libraries and library services without an understanding of the complex structure of laws that provide the legal framework for these institutions and their services. Ladenson in this slim volume has brought together not only a basic explanation of the types of law and a brief history of their evolution, but a clear and concise overview of library laws as they aKect public, school, academic and state libraries. The volume also focuses on special legal problems for libraries resulting from laws dealing with issues of privacy, intellectual property, commonly known as copyright, and library security. A very special feature of this volume are model laws for metropolitan area libraries, a model law relating to library theft, and a model state aid act for public libraries. Since a number of local and state jurisdictions may be in the position of initiating or improving their laws in these areas, the model laws can be quite useful.
REVIEWS
Information Management in Public Administration. FORESTW. HORTONand DONALDA. MARCHAND (Ed%), Information Resources Press, Arlington, Virginia, 1982. xiv, 558 pp. $39.95 t $2.30 handling. ISBN: O-87815-038-2.
In 1977 the Commission on Federal Paper work made its final report to the President and Congress, presenting some 770 recommendations for reducing the burden that federal paperwork and red tape impose on the public and on state and local governments. Two of the Commission’s consultants now present a volume of readings which draws significantly from the background papers produced for the Commission. It is conventional, in reviewing composite works of this type, to note that it is impossible to characterize and evaluate all of the contributions that make it up; that some are good, some are indifferent, and some are out of place. So it is with this volume, which gathers 31 articles, five of them never previously published, to cover the subject of information management in the public sector. The most impressive articles are the ones reprinted from the work of the Commission on Federal Paperwork. (Incidentally, the term trivializes the issue the Commission studied, which was the full range of information gathering from the public and the management of the data gathered.) The “Paperwork Problem,” pp. 28-44, is a useful and succinct statement of the issues; and “The Burdens of Paperwork,” pp. 402-420, is a capsule statement not only of the direct and indirect costs to the public of federal data gathering. but also of a genera1 scheme for minimizing the burden in the future. Proposals include establishment of a central locator service to help agencies determine if the information they need is already held by the government; a requirement that information collection instruments be pretested; creation of better standards for reviewing and approving forms; and implementation of “zero-based reporting.” Other contributions are standard statements on the sociology of information, the uses and abuses of information in large organizations, and so forth. We are told that information is a source of power; how the decision-making process is conditioned by the flow of information within an organization; and why a centralized federal data bank (seemingly so efficient for collecting and disseminating government information about individuals) would be an unwanted feature in our American way of life. The conflict between the citizen’s need for privacy and the public agency’s need to fulfill its mission as effectively and cheaply as possible is pointed up in several articles. Michael Baker observes that privacy of information is a marginal concern for public managers for whom record-keeping is a low-visibility activity. Restrictions which afford privacy can also be nuisances for administrators; and moreover, educational, law enforcement and weelfareagencies tend to be less than sensitive to the privacy rights of their clients, whom they are used to controlling and manipulating. The least successful selections in this volume deal with budgeting and accounting for information resources, principally since it is virtually impossible to define what “information resources” are. Looking at the federal budget, for instance, we might agree that library services, printing and publishing and telephone communications are part of the cost of the primary information outputs of the government. Should we also include accounting and bookkeeping? Real estate agents and managers? Air traffic controllers, whose output is only “information”? In addition to these problems of definition is the fact there exists very little useful data on the cost of information activities. In their stead are only “estimates,” which vary widely among themselves. In discussions of the burdens which federal paperwork places upon respondents, federal estimates of respondents’ burdens are sometimes only 20 percent of respondents’ estimates. While budgeting for information resources is highly desirable in principle, how does one budget for resources whose annual cost in 1977 was estimated at either “in excess of $50 billion”, or “perhaps as great as $100 billion or higher”? In contexts like these, what can “budgeting” mean? Even though it is very difficult, if not impossible, to assess the costs of information gathering and record-keeping, the Commission amply demonstrated one very important fact: that information very definitely is not free. It is costly to gather, costly to maintain, and costly for the public to provide. The tendency of government officials to look upon information as a “free good” like air or sunlight is an important cause of excessive paperwork. This notion is not only made explicit by the Commission (see p. 30), attention is drawn to it in the forward of the volume (p. vii); in the introduction (p, 4); and in the editors’ remarks opening the first chapter (p. 14). Each of the subsequent contributors to chapter 1 repeats this idea in very similar terms (see pp. 40, 50 and 59), by which time this concept has lost some of its freshness for the reader. 187
188
Book Reviews
By the end of the book, the reader has an appreciation of the immense scope of the issue (the federal government annually collects between 130 and 300 billion individual data items from the public). We also learn that the House hearings on paperwork produced a seven-volume, 2,285 page work, now in many hundreds of libraries.
Microcomputer Operating Systems. MARK DAHMKE, Byte Books (McGraw-Hill),
New York,
1982.
238~~. $15.95 (P.B). ISBN: 0-07-015071-O. Dahmke has written what could have been a good introductory text on the CPfM and MP/M operating systems. I say “could have” because he has instead chosen to disguise his actual subject. He admits in the preface that “the bulk of the book describes.. an operating systems that looks a great deal like the disk operating system. in common use on most microcomputers today” (i.e. CP/M); however, in what I take to be an attempt at generality, all superficial resemblance to CPfM has been covered up. The reader is left with a book that is virtually non-functional: it does not really go beyond CP/M in its scope, and yet cannot be used as a reference to CP/M because all the names are changed and trivial changes are sprinkled throughout. For example, the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP) is called the Console Interpreter (CINT), and CP/M’s Transient Program Area (TPA) is referred to as the Application Program Area (APA). The only gestures toward fulfilling the promise of the title come in the sections on a small system monitor (i.e. hex keypad), which is quite good and features a lot of actual code, and a 31 page appendix on UNIX. Also included is a 13 page appendix on “structural flowcharts” that seems inappropriate; while they are used heavily in the rest of the text, they are fairly self-explanatory. The space would have been far better used to expand the UNIX material, or to add information on other systems, such as UCSD. A glossary serves to accentuate the equivalence of CP/M and the author’s DOS, while an inadequate two page index brings up the rear. All in all, Dahmke’s book might be of interest to someone who wants to implement a monitor for a minimal microcomputer, but it will not serve as an overview on microcomputer operating systems in general.
Library Law and Legislation in the United States. ALEX LADENSON,Metuchen, New Jersey. Scarecrow Press, 1982 (Scarecrow Library Administration Series No. l), 203 pp. $14.50, ISBN: O-8108-1513-3. One cannot easily understand the persuasive influence of local, state and federat government on libraries and library services without an understanding of the complex structure of laws that provide the legal framework for these institutions and their services. Ladenson in this slim volume has brought together not only a basic explanation of the types of law and a brief history of their evolution, but a clear and concise overview of library laws as they aKect public, school, academic and state libraries. The volume also focuses on special legal problems for libraries resulting from laws dealing with issues of privacy, intellectual property, commonly known as copyright, and library security. A very special feature of this volume are model laws for metropolitan area libraries, a model law relating to library theft, and a model state aid act for public libraries. Since a number of local and state jurisdictions may be in the position of initiating or improving their laws in these areas, the model laws can be quite useful.