- Email: [email protected]
Information policies of local governments and academic libraries
INFORMATION POLICY edited by John A. Shuler ●
Information Policies of Local Governments and Academic Libraries by John A. Shuler
F
or many academic institutions and their libraries, the collection, organization, and provision of reference services based on American local government information remains a singularly difficult prospect. Several aspects of how local governments manage their information resources, along with how these public organizations are established and function, contribute to the bibliographic frustration. The first challenge, and not often acknowledged in library literature, is the sheer number of local government entities in the United States. According to the last U.S. Census Bureau’s census of governments,1 there are 87,543 units defined as “local.” These include the following types:
● ● ●
39,044 36,001 13,726 34,543
general purpose local governments (3,043 county, subcounty); school districts; and “special districts.”
Each of these governments evolves within a unique combination of history, geography, and constitutional formation largely driven by the political cultures of their home state governments. Even with the spread of “home rule,” matched by the acceptance of non-political civil service fostered by the creation of a city manager,2 over the last century leaves many local governments at the mercy of statehouse politics and economic largesse. These cultures are not easily understood outside of their immediate regions, and finding information produced by these entities requires a fair degree of knowledge of these unique characteristics, as well as a certain sense of “whom to ask.” These fluid and immediate information formations do not bear up under traditional bibliographic standards or norms. The second challenge stems from the rather simple fact that these governments do not apply any kind of predictable publication methods to what they might produce, even if one knew where to go in city hall and whom to ask. Release of information seems to depend on two basic factors: is there a compelling state law that forces local officials to release the information, or, absent this requirement, do the officials consider the information’s release to be in their electoral or po-
John A. Shuler is Associate Professor and Documents Librarian, Richard J. Daley Library, 801 S. Morgan St. (m/c 234), University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7041 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
244
litical interest. There is very little consistent bibliographic record production, distribution programs, or even agreement that local government publications should be made available to the public at all. Many times, citizens and librarians are told that a publication must be read only in the village office, or has not “been approved” by the elected officials and therefore cannot be given out. The third challenge is largely rooted in the concept of copyright and how it affects government information. At a significant level, a general practice is woven into the political fabric of American government that the people have an essential right to know what their government is doing on behalf of their public interests. As one considers federal, then state, and finally local government entities, this right is actively pursued by each level of government with varying degrees of commitment or enthusiasm. For the most part, this level of support for the free distribution of public information correlates directly to whether or not government information is free of copyright. At the federal level, there is a long tradition of legal, and regulatory, practice that sets its publications as free of copyright limitations. In other words, although the government may issue the information for free or for a small fee, it cannot prevent its republication and resale by others, perhaps at even a greater profit. Many state governments, however, keep the copyrights, or sell licenses, to distribute their information exclusively to private publishers, often at rates that prevent wide distribution to individual citizens or non-profit organizations. This kind of privatization has also frustrated any significant attempts to apply standard bibliographic practices to state publications. Furthermore, state government agencies do not consider the general public to be the natural customers for their information products, and often appear surprised that non-specialists (or commercial interests) might be a bit upset about the limited availability of material. Among local governments, this idea of freely distributed government publications is largely an exception, not the rule. The only consistently published items common among the many thousands of local governments across the fifty states fall into two basic categories: published minutes of elected bodies and official regulations that govern some activity within the government’s jurisdiction (i.e., building codes, zoning codes, professional requirements, and parking regulations). One would be surprised that financial or budget information is not included on this short list, but often this infor-
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 28, Number 4, pages 244 –247
mation is the most politically charged and coveted by the governing cultures in many localities. If it were not for state and federal laws that mandated some kind of openness regarding how local governments manage their financial affairs, many would minimize the release of this kind of information. The fourth challenge is the localized density and complexity of government at the ground level. To put it another way, local governments are most familiar (and understood) by individuals through their neighborhoods, schools, churches, and other community organizations. Unlike the federal or state officials, often considered unknown bureaucrats tucked away in distant state capitals or Washington D.C., local officialdom succeeds or fails by the differences it makes where individuals live, learn, associate with others, participate in local political or cultural organizations, and sometimes work. Acquiring information from this local political/cultural milieu just does not happen when traditional library values seek to create bibliographic accuracy, predictable access, or any sense of long-term preservation. Indeed, this singular grounding in a localized environment simply dooms any attempt to organize local government information on a national scale (following the patterns established by federal Depository Library Program) from the outset. This is not to say attempts to provide a kind of national bibliography for local information are without merit—far from it. The contributions of Index to Urban Documents, Statistical Reference Index, Public Affairs and Information Service (as well as the defunct Monthly Checklist of State Documents produced by the Library of Congress) remain benchmarks of bibliographic practice. Academic libraries with only generalized interest in local government information from other communities will do well to keep these on their shelves and electronic resources lists. But, these indexes and abstract services are useful only if local government information sources are considered as a “subject,” much like articles found in professional journals, popular magazines, or newspapers. It “reports” on the activities of local government, certainly, but the material gathered and organized in these national resources is often limited in geographic scope (a small fraction of 87,000 local entities are included) and episodic (limited to a handful of documents identified by the editors or abstractors); yet the material is somehow published in a formal fashion. Information creation and management at all levels of government are often more process than final product, and this is particularly true about local government information. Official publications are only written fragments of what the government is doing on a daily basis, and, as such, are representations of the larger information/knowledge exchange going on between the governors and governed. At the federal level there is a considerably stronger relationship between this information traffic and the published record. At the state level, this strength weakens, and a good deal of information is lost or localized within the state bureaucracy or state capital. For instance, think of the number of state legislators who publish and distribute their committee hearings or reports outside their chambers in comparison with the publishing activity from the U.S. Congress. At the local level, the process of governing is informed through other means. Local officials lack the deep pockets to produce any research on the issues they face, so they react
to problems and conditions either through tradition (consistent zoning practices for comparable property practices) or by a certain kind of pragmatic “splitting the difference” among competing interests, an arrangement not often formally documented, except to ensure the “variance” is within the code. If elected officials and local government managers seek knowledge outside it will often come from national professional associations, local regional governments, or from their state-wide municipal, county, or local associations. Actually, this exchange of professional information and practical advice is little different from what happens through national, state and local library associations. Furthermore, it should be noted that, since the late 1930s, many state governments established bureaus of government research often affiliated with either state universities or colleges, to advise local governments on everything from model building or zoning codes or how to use the latest U.S. census figures to understand the changing social and characteristics of the communities. These bureaus are creatures of the federal regional planning programs that thrived before and after the Second World War, and still operate in many states. Often, understanding what is happening within local governments comes from this general research and some of the associations allow subscriptions to some of their publications. Some of the more important associations include the U.S. Conference of Mayors (http://www.usmayors.org/), American Planning Association (http://www.planning.org/), International City/County Manager Association (http://www. icma.org/), the National League of Cities (http://www.nlc. org/nlc_org/site/) as well as the Government Finance Officers Association (http://www.gfoa.org/). As with the bureaus of governmental research mentioned earlier, these different professional associations attempt to inform and regularize local government practice through continuing education, sponsored research, and regular publications and journals. Any library service that serves the research needs of local government must include this set of knowledge in its efforts.
WHAT CAN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES DO? If an academic library wants to fashion an information services program designed to meet the needs of both citizens and researchers, especially in this age of electronic networks and distributed information nodes, the librarians need to embrace the idea of collecting and organizing information at the community level. This does not mean simply collecting formal and informal publications produced by (or about) a particular community, but rather the deliberate construction of an electronic digital knowledge base built on a matrix of “information frameworks.” This matrix places what can be known about a community within a context and perspective to facilitate further research and public awareness. The framework’s data structure can be drawn from dozens of traditional sources: statistical data from the U.S. census; data from economic and social organizations, official studies, reports, and analyses, geographic data, historical documents, and information mandated by state and federal governments. The framework connects the relationships among these discrete data points through specific linkages that rely on time, topic, and geography. For some, this may sound a good deal like metadata, or through an older tradition, subject cataloging. What is suggested here shares a common organizational root with these two concepts, but it assumes a much more
July 2002 245
dynamic environment in terms of data associations and delivery. An example of this kind of work can be found the various Web sites sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Civic Values (http://www.iscv.org/) and its Neighborhoods Online Project. Philadelphia is the first local urban area to produce this kind of integration of data (http:// phillyneighborhoods.org/index.html). What it lacks in design quality is balanced by the sheer amount of information it tries to reveal about Philadelphia. Another example of this kind of information integration, again from the Philadelphia area, can be found on the Web pages of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations (http:// www.pacdc.org/). Other examples of a national organization that is attempting to integrate local issues at the national level can be found at Brookings Institute’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy (http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/ es/urban/urban.htm) and the National Neighborhood Coalition (http://www.NeighborhoodCoalition.org/sites.htm). Actually, this information framework draws its inspiration from an earlier academic tradition created by University of Chicago’s social scientists from the early 1900s. Various faculty members from different fields came together to collectively study the social, political, and cultural conditions of the Chicago metropolitan area. They formed what the called the Local Community Research Committee, and began to consider Chicago and its regions as “a social laboratory.”3 As part of this effort, they began to identify major sets of social and economic data, previous surveys, building what they called a social base map, and began to work with city officials and other community leaders to coordinate their information gathering and reporting structures. One of the natural outcomes of this initiative was the creation of Local Community Fact Book.4 The Fact Book, over the decades, has become a common database for history, social analysis, and comparison for many of the communities in the Chicago urban area. What the sophistication of databases and geographic information systems promise is to take this to the next level, and offer the same community data in a way that links more information produced by other research, Web pages of the communities themselves, digitized historical publications, as well as images and other visuals that help frame the development and complexity of a community. Yes, social scientists (and others) create the basic information sets that inform the policy process and the understanding of the community, but the organizing skills of librarians, when marshaled with the information technology, can renew that dream of creating a “social laboratory” manual for citizens and researchers alike. The Fact Book, through the years, gives a solid statistical, descriptive, and analytical foundation that fosters useful social science research throughout the metropolitan region. For many of these communities and neighborhoods, these narratives and statistical analyses remain the only written artifacts of a shared history. These neighborhoods and communities became enshrined in official documents and reports, embedding themselves into the fabric of the community, even though many of original settlers and inhabitants had moved on and the culture changed completely. Back of the Yards was still Back of the Yards even though the cattle pens and slaughter houses that gave the community its distinctive name and place in the city were dismantled decades ago. As an experiment, consider the official local area Web
246
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
pages given below. Think about how much of this information was formerly collected by libraries, and how much of it is now distributed through this means. The local governments do not need the new publication programs, what they need are academic institutions and their libraries working in partnership with them to place the official information into a larger context and field of analysis. This kind of “digital library” building represents the future of local government information for universities and their libraries. For example see: City of Madison, WI: http://www.ci.madison.wi.us/ Rochester, New York http://www.ci.rochester.ny.us/ Fairfax County, Virginia http://www.co.fairfax.va.us/ Springfield, Missouri http://www.ci.springfield.mo.us/ Boston, Massachusetts http://www.cityofboston.gov/ Dupage County, Illinois http://www.co.dupage.il.us/ Santa Monica, California http://pen.ci.santa-monica.ca.us/cm/ Gwinnett County, Georgia http://www.co.gwinnett.ga.us/cgi-bin/bvgwin/egov/page.jsp Durham, North Carolina http://www.ci.durham.nc.us/ Jackson, Wyoming http://www.ci.durham.nc.us/ San Carlos, California http://www.ci.san-carlos.ca.us/frontdoor/ King County, Washington http://www.co.king.wa.us/ Indianapolis, Indiana http://www.ci.indianapolis.in.us/ Toledo, Ohio http://www.ci.toledo.oh.us/ Minneapolis, MN http://www.ci.Minneapolis.mn.us/ Dallas, Texas http://www.dallascityhall.com/ Seattle, Washington http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/ Oakland, California http://www.oaklandnet.com/ San Francisco, California http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/ Lincoln, Nebraska http://www.ci.lincoln.ne.us/ Torrance, California http://www.ci.torrance.ca.us/ New York, New York http://home.nyc.gov/portal/index.jsp?pageID⫽nyc_home Bloomington, Indiana http://www.city.bloomington.in.us/ Fort Collins, Colorado http://www.ci.fort-collins.co.us/ Santa Rosa, California http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/index.asp
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Governments, Government Organizations (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1997). 2. The creation of a non-political city manager grew directly out of several traditions in American political practice, but chiefly in direct response to the political corruption of the machine politics best represented by Tammany Hall in New York. Uncontrolled commercial and industrial development created unacceptable health and environmental risks (as captured by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle). Natural disasters (e.g., fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes) often overwhelmed the part-time and ill-equipped elected officials that governed many of American places before the civil service reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 3. T.V. Smith & Leonard D. White, Chicago, an Experiment in Social Science Research, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 4. Ernest Burgess & Charles Newcomb published Census Data of the
City of Chicago, 1920, and Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1930, forerunners of the fact books in the use of census data to describe Chicago’s community areas. Louis Wirth & Margaret Furez, editors, Local Community Fact Book, 1938 (Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1938). Louis Wirth & Eleanor H. Bernert, editors, Local Community Fact Book of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Philip M. Hauser & Evelyn M. Kitagawa, editors, Local Community Fact Book for Chicago: 1950 (Chicago: Chicago Community Inventory, University of Chicago, 1953). Evelyn M. Kitagawa & Karl E. Taeuber, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1960 (Chicago: Community Inventory, University of Chicago, 1963). Chicago Fact Book Consortium, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area Based on the 1970 and 1980 Censuses (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984). Chicago Fact Book Consortium, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area Based on the 1990 Census (Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 1995).
July 2002 247
Information Policies of Local Governments and Academic Libraries by John A. Shuler
F
or many academic institutions and their libraries, the collection, organization, and provision of reference services based on American local government information remains a singularly difficult prospect. Several aspects of how local governments manage their information resources, along with how these public organizations are established and function, contribute to the bibliographic frustration. The first challenge, and not often acknowledged in library literature, is the sheer number of local government entities in the United States. According to the last U.S. Census Bureau’s census of governments,1 there are 87,543 units defined as “local.” These include the following types:
● ● ●
39,044 36,001 13,726 34,543
general purpose local governments (3,043 county, subcounty); school districts; and “special districts.”
Each of these governments evolves within a unique combination of history, geography, and constitutional formation largely driven by the political cultures of their home state governments. Even with the spread of “home rule,” matched by the acceptance of non-political civil service fostered by the creation of a city manager,2 over the last century leaves many local governments at the mercy of statehouse politics and economic largesse. These cultures are not easily understood outside of their immediate regions, and finding information produced by these entities requires a fair degree of knowledge of these unique characteristics, as well as a certain sense of “whom to ask.” These fluid and immediate information formations do not bear up under traditional bibliographic standards or norms. The second challenge stems from the rather simple fact that these governments do not apply any kind of predictable publication methods to what they might produce, even if one knew where to go in city hall and whom to ask. Release of information seems to depend on two basic factors: is there a compelling state law that forces local officials to release the information, or, absent this requirement, do the officials consider the information’s release to be in their electoral or po-
John A. Shuler is Associate Professor and Documents Librarian, Richard J. Daley Library, 801 S. Morgan St. (m/c 234), University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7041 ⬍[email protected]⬎.
244
litical interest. There is very little consistent bibliographic record production, distribution programs, or even agreement that local government publications should be made available to the public at all. Many times, citizens and librarians are told that a publication must be read only in the village office, or has not “been approved” by the elected officials and therefore cannot be given out. The third challenge is largely rooted in the concept of copyright and how it affects government information. At a significant level, a general practice is woven into the political fabric of American government that the people have an essential right to know what their government is doing on behalf of their public interests. As one considers federal, then state, and finally local government entities, this right is actively pursued by each level of government with varying degrees of commitment or enthusiasm. For the most part, this level of support for the free distribution of public information correlates directly to whether or not government information is free of copyright. At the federal level, there is a long tradition of legal, and regulatory, practice that sets its publications as free of copyright limitations. In other words, although the government may issue the information for free or for a small fee, it cannot prevent its republication and resale by others, perhaps at even a greater profit. Many state governments, however, keep the copyrights, or sell licenses, to distribute their information exclusively to private publishers, often at rates that prevent wide distribution to individual citizens or non-profit organizations. This kind of privatization has also frustrated any significant attempts to apply standard bibliographic practices to state publications. Furthermore, state government agencies do not consider the general public to be the natural customers for their information products, and often appear surprised that non-specialists (or commercial interests) might be a bit upset about the limited availability of material. Among local governments, this idea of freely distributed government publications is largely an exception, not the rule. The only consistently published items common among the many thousands of local governments across the fifty states fall into two basic categories: published minutes of elected bodies and official regulations that govern some activity within the government’s jurisdiction (i.e., building codes, zoning codes, professional requirements, and parking regulations). One would be surprised that financial or budget information is not included on this short list, but often this infor-
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 28, Number 4, pages 244 –247
mation is the most politically charged and coveted by the governing cultures in many localities. If it were not for state and federal laws that mandated some kind of openness regarding how local governments manage their financial affairs, many would minimize the release of this kind of information. The fourth challenge is the localized density and complexity of government at the ground level. To put it another way, local governments are most familiar (and understood) by individuals through their neighborhoods, schools, churches, and other community organizations. Unlike the federal or state officials, often considered unknown bureaucrats tucked away in distant state capitals or Washington D.C., local officialdom succeeds or fails by the differences it makes where individuals live, learn, associate with others, participate in local political or cultural organizations, and sometimes work. Acquiring information from this local political/cultural milieu just does not happen when traditional library values seek to create bibliographic accuracy, predictable access, or any sense of long-term preservation. Indeed, this singular grounding in a localized environment simply dooms any attempt to organize local government information on a national scale (following the patterns established by federal Depository Library Program) from the outset. This is not to say attempts to provide a kind of national bibliography for local information are without merit—far from it. The contributions of Index to Urban Documents, Statistical Reference Index, Public Affairs and Information Service (as well as the defunct Monthly Checklist of State Documents produced by the Library of Congress) remain benchmarks of bibliographic practice. Academic libraries with only generalized interest in local government information from other communities will do well to keep these on their shelves and electronic resources lists. But, these indexes and abstract services are useful only if local government information sources are considered as a “subject,” much like articles found in professional journals, popular magazines, or newspapers. It “reports” on the activities of local government, certainly, but the material gathered and organized in these national resources is often limited in geographic scope (a small fraction of 87,000 local entities are included) and episodic (limited to a handful of documents identified by the editors or abstractors); yet the material is somehow published in a formal fashion. Information creation and management at all levels of government are often more process than final product, and this is particularly true about local government information. Official publications are only written fragments of what the government is doing on a daily basis, and, as such, are representations of the larger information/knowledge exchange going on between the governors and governed. At the federal level there is a considerably stronger relationship between this information traffic and the published record. At the state level, this strength weakens, and a good deal of information is lost or localized within the state bureaucracy or state capital. For instance, think of the number of state legislators who publish and distribute their committee hearings or reports outside their chambers in comparison with the publishing activity from the U.S. Congress. At the local level, the process of governing is informed through other means. Local officials lack the deep pockets to produce any research on the issues they face, so they react
to problems and conditions either through tradition (consistent zoning practices for comparable property practices) or by a certain kind of pragmatic “splitting the difference” among competing interests, an arrangement not often formally documented, except to ensure the “variance” is within the code. If elected officials and local government managers seek knowledge outside it will often come from national professional associations, local regional governments, or from their state-wide municipal, county, or local associations. Actually, this exchange of professional information and practical advice is little different from what happens through national, state and local library associations. Furthermore, it should be noted that, since the late 1930s, many state governments established bureaus of government research often affiliated with either state universities or colleges, to advise local governments on everything from model building or zoning codes or how to use the latest U.S. census figures to understand the changing social and characteristics of the communities. These bureaus are creatures of the federal regional planning programs that thrived before and after the Second World War, and still operate in many states. Often, understanding what is happening within local governments comes from this general research and some of the associations allow subscriptions to some of their publications. Some of the more important associations include the U.S. Conference of Mayors (http://www.usmayors.org/), American Planning Association (http://www.planning.org/), International City/County Manager Association (http://www. icma.org/), the National League of Cities (http://www.nlc. org/nlc_org/site/) as well as the Government Finance Officers Association (http://www.gfoa.org/). As with the bureaus of governmental research mentioned earlier, these different professional associations attempt to inform and regularize local government practice through continuing education, sponsored research, and regular publications and journals. Any library service that serves the research needs of local government must include this set of knowledge in its efforts.
WHAT CAN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES DO? If an academic library wants to fashion an information services program designed to meet the needs of both citizens and researchers, especially in this age of electronic networks and distributed information nodes, the librarians need to embrace the idea of collecting and organizing information at the community level. This does not mean simply collecting formal and informal publications produced by (or about) a particular community, but rather the deliberate construction of an electronic digital knowledge base built on a matrix of “information frameworks.” This matrix places what can be known about a community within a context and perspective to facilitate further research and public awareness. The framework’s data structure can be drawn from dozens of traditional sources: statistical data from the U.S. census; data from economic and social organizations, official studies, reports, and analyses, geographic data, historical documents, and information mandated by state and federal governments. The framework connects the relationships among these discrete data points through specific linkages that rely on time, topic, and geography. For some, this may sound a good deal like metadata, or through an older tradition, subject cataloging. What is suggested here shares a common organizational root with these two concepts, but it assumes a much more
July 2002 245
dynamic environment in terms of data associations and delivery. An example of this kind of work can be found the various Web sites sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Civic Values (http://www.iscv.org/) and its Neighborhoods Online Project. Philadelphia is the first local urban area to produce this kind of integration of data (http:// phillyneighborhoods.org/index.html). What it lacks in design quality is balanced by the sheer amount of information it tries to reveal about Philadelphia. Another example of this kind of information integration, again from the Philadelphia area, can be found on the Web pages of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations (http:// www.pacdc.org/). Other examples of a national organization that is attempting to integrate local issues at the national level can be found at Brookings Institute’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy (http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/ es/urban/urban.htm) and the National Neighborhood Coalition (http://www.NeighborhoodCoalition.org/sites.htm). Actually, this information framework draws its inspiration from an earlier academic tradition created by University of Chicago’s social scientists from the early 1900s. Various faculty members from different fields came together to collectively study the social, political, and cultural conditions of the Chicago metropolitan area. They formed what the called the Local Community Research Committee, and began to consider Chicago and its regions as “a social laboratory.”3 As part of this effort, they began to identify major sets of social and economic data, previous surveys, building what they called a social base map, and began to work with city officials and other community leaders to coordinate their information gathering and reporting structures. One of the natural outcomes of this initiative was the creation of Local Community Fact Book.4 The Fact Book, over the decades, has become a common database for history, social analysis, and comparison for many of the communities in the Chicago urban area. What the sophistication of databases and geographic information systems promise is to take this to the next level, and offer the same community data in a way that links more information produced by other research, Web pages of the communities themselves, digitized historical publications, as well as images and other visuals that help frame the development and complexity of a community. Yes, social scientists (and others) create the basic information sets that inform the policy process and the understanding of the community, but the organizing skills of librarians, when marshaled with the information technology, can renew that dream of creating a “social laboratory” manual for citizens and researchers alike. The Fact Book, through the years, gives a solid statistical, descriptive, and analytical foundation that fosters useful social science research throughout the metropolitan region. For many of these communities and neighborhoods, these narratives and statistical analyses remain the only written artifacts of a shared history. These neighborhoods and communities became enshrined in official documents and reports, embedding themselves into the fabric of the community, even though many of original settlers and inhabitants had moved on and the culture changed completely. Back of the Yards was still Back of the Yards even though the cattle pens and slaughter houses that gave the community its distinctive name and place in the city were dismantled decades ago. As an experiment, consider the official local area Web
246
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
pages given below. Think about how much of this information was formerly collected by libraries, and how much of it is now distributed through this means. The local governments do not need the new publication programs, what they need are academic institutions and their libraries working in partnership with them to place the official information into a larger context and field of analysis. This kind of “digital library” building represents the future of local government information for universities and their libraries. For example see: City of Madison, WI: http://www.ci.madison.wi.us/ Rochester, New York http://www.ci.rochester.ny.us/ Fairfax County, Virginia http://www.co.fairfax.va.us/ Springfield, Missouri http://www.ci.springfield.mo.us/ Boston, Massachusetts http://www.cityofboston.gov/ Dupage County, Illinois http://www.co.dupage.il.us/ Santa Monica, California http://pen.ci.santa-monica.ca.us/cm/ Gwinnett County, Georgia http://www.co.gwinnett.ga.us/cgi-bin/bvgwin/egov/page.jsp Durham, North Carolina http://www.ci.durham.nc.us/ Jackson, Wyoming http://www.ci.durham.nc.us/ San Carlos, California http://www.ci.san-carlos.ca.us/frontdoor/ King County, Washington http://www.co.king.wa.us/ Indianapolis, Indiana http://www.ci.indianapolis.in.us/ Toledo, Ohio http://www.ci.toledo.oh.us/ Minneapolis, MN http://www.ci.Minneapolis.mn.us/ Dallas, Texas http://www.dallascityhall.com/ Seattle, Washington http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/ Oakland, California http://www.oaklandnet.com/ San Francisco, California http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/ Lincoln, Nebraska http://www.ci.lincoln.ne.us/ Torrance, California http://www.ci.torrance.ca.us/ New York, New York http://home.nyc.gov/portal/index.jsp?pageID⫽nyc_home Bloomington, Indiana http://www.city.bloomington.in.us/ Fort Collins, Colorado http://www.ci.fort-collins.co.us/ Santa Rosa, California http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/index.asp
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
1. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Governments, Government Organizations (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1997). 2. The creation of a non-political city manager grew directly out of several traditions in American political practice, but chiefly in direct response to the political corruption of the machine politics best represented by Tammany Hall in New York. Uncontrolled commercial and industrial development created unacceptable health and environmental risks (as captured by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle). Natural disasters (e.g., fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes) often overwhelmed the part-time and ill-equipped elected officials that governed many of American places before the civil service reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 3. T.V. Smith & Leonard D. White, Chicago, an Experiment in Social Science Research, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 4. Ernest Burgess & Charles Newcomb published Census Data of the
City of Chicago, 1920, and Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1930, forerunners of the fact books in the use of census data to describe Chicago’s community areas. Louis Wirth & Margaret Furez, editors, Local Community Fact Book, 1938 (Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1938). Louis Wirth & Eleanor H. Bernert, editors, Local Community Fact Book of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Philip M. Hauser & Evelyn M. Kitagawa, editors, Local Community Fact Book for Chicago: 1950 (Chicago: Chicago Community Inventory, University of Chicago, 1953). Evelyn M. Kitagawa & Karl E. Taeuber, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area, 1960 (Chicago: Community Inventory, University of Chicago, 1963). Chicago Fact Book Consortium, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area Based on the 1970 and 1980 Censuses (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984). Chicago Fact Book Consortium, editors, Local Community Fact Book: Chicago Metropolitan Area Based on the 1990 Census (Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 1995).
July 2002 247