John A. Shuler

Implications of harmonizing the future of the federal depository library program within e-government principles and policies

article i nfo For more than 150 years, the United States Government Printing Office (GPO), along with its Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), has supported an informed citizenry and democracy by ensuring access and preservation to a broad swath of federal government information. This collaborative national public information program between local libraries and the national government, if it is to survive beyond its second century of service, must overcome profound challenges within a rapidly evolving complex of e-government policies and principles. The FDLP can (and must) find a way to serve its traditional values - permanent and publicaccesstogovernmentinformation -thatallowsforgrowthandchangewithinthedemandsofadynamic electronic environment between the governors and the governed.

A critique of universal service, E-Rate, and the chimera of the public's interest

Abstract This essay argues that Federal Communication Commissions implementation of the universal service requirements mandated by federal law fails to meet any measurable means of reducing the gap between the information haves and have-nots . It is primarily an information poverty reduction program. Introducing the idea of community-based universal service, along with a federally-funded entitlement program for specific local and state organizations, introduces several unsettling and untested aspects to the social equity equation. Gathering better measurements about participants in the program and specific research directions could go a long way toward reducing this uncertainty.

Editorial: E-government without government

The three-week United States federal government shutdown in late 2013 received a great deal of attention among the public and themedia. The closures narrative focused primarily on the economic costs, the political repercussions, the seeming lack of clear reasons for the impasse, and the threat of another left looming on the horizon. The tangible impacts were mostly framed in terms of the loss of services to the most needy, as well as the lack of access to museums, parks, and monuments, the most photogenic images that represented an obscure political fight. But the shutdown alsomanifested something unexpected: the loss of e-government information, communication, services, and transactions. As it turns out, for e-government to function, you actually need a government that functions. Virtually the entire evolution of e-government has occurred since the last federal government shutdown in 1996. At that time, the public face of the federal e-government presence was almost entirely limited to a minimal amount of information provision. Most interactions with the federal government occurred face-to-face at agencies, through phone calls, and writing to Pueblo, Colorado Federal Information Clearinghouse for many publications. Government information dissemination, overall, wasmuchmore limited, particularly in everyday information seeking, to government documents available in libraries. Even if more material had been available online, the majority of Americans were not regular users of the internet at that point. Nearly twodecades later, not only are the vastmajority of Americans daily users of the Internet, but the vast majority of interactions between the federal government and members of the public have migrated online. For most, the first place to search for government information, materials, services, and communication is through the various web search engines. Applying for social services, getting health information, finding out how to get a passport, signing up for Medicare, checking long-term weather forecasts, searching for government materials to use in classroom instruction, and a nearly-limitless set of other interactions now happens through the use of e-government. And this is migration is promoted through national technology plans (Federal Communication Commission, 2010; Obama, 2012), open government initiatives (http://www.whitehouse.gov/open), and a range of policies (for example, Obama, 2013). Even with this concentrated push towards digital services since 2000, when the government 2013 shutdown happened, many e-government sites and services were consigned to the “non-essential” category, going blank, off-line or dormant. The role of agencies in information access and dissemination was apparently not part of the decision tree when it was determined which services were “essential” and which were “non-essential.” Many government websites seemed to have become temporarily orphaned, stuck in time, or not functioning at all. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) sites carried a banner warning users that content was not being updated and may be out-of-date, a fairly alarming condition

Libraries and government information: the past is not necessarily prologue

This special issue of Government Information Quarterly considers how libraries, while they cope within a complicated information policy environment, will seek to collect, organize, distribute or preserve “information artifacts” born from a public record that is increasingly digitized. The traditional librarian perspectives of government information collection development/service need to change as public authorities continue their decadelong integration of sophisticated information technologies with in their bureaus. The result of this information uplift is a policy/administrative framework less “governmental” and more comparable to the corporate world. Librarians, for the most part, still place the tangible “document” or “publication” as the bibliographic centerpiece that sets the stage to understand a governmental process or event. Because of this perspective, librarians support an information policy that assures free and open access to all types of public documents organized within “public” depository library collections. These libraries are further sustained by a national system of indexing and or bibliographic control that favors centralization. Public managers and elected officials seek to build and sustain a process that ensures fairness, accountability, privacy, security, efficiency, as well as preservation of the public record. Through this sustainability, they promise citizens immediate access and knowledge about government activities, and consider this as the proper foundation for a rational information policy. Public managers, when endorsing the implementation of electronic government initiatives, see the advantages of information technology more and more as an enhancement to citizen services first, and improvement in public administration second.

Civic librarianship: Possible new role for depository libraries in the next century?

Abstract Profound changes have been taking place throughout the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) since passage of The Depository Library Act of 1962 (P.L. 85-579). This Act codified several critical perspectives regarding the role of libraries in a system of federal government information distribution; the responsibilities shared among FDLPs participating libraries (selective libraries and regionals), as well as the proper management and policy role for the Superintendent of Documents (and, by extension, the GPO). The foundation of these perspectives, obviously, depends on the relative limitations and advantages of printing technologies and paper-based distribution systems. Within this scheme, local “ownership” of collections housed in a wide variety of private and public institutions across the nation best meets the information needs of citizens. The enactment of the Government Printing Office Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-40) shifts the FDLPs historic emphasis on local collection building and maintenance back to the Superintendent of Documents and the GPO. This article outlines several possible implications developing from this transformation.

Informing the nation: the future of librarianship and government information service

Seventeen years after the U.S. Office of Technology published its seminal report Informing the Nation librarians specializing in government information remain confounded by a tangled knot of federal information policy, library practice, and rapid changes in technology. During the 1990s, a century of bibliographic practice born out of the 1896 Public Printing Act (the genesis of modern government information librarianship) shifted away from print and paper technologies of mass publishers and into a form of distribution and access not at all familiar. If librarians understood they were moving away from something, they were (and in many cases still are) in a struggle to understand where they were going. Electronic government initiatives, changes in right to know and freedom of information laws, the rapid growth of government Web space on the global information network stretch the conceptual outlines of a library; concepts largely unchanged since the earlier global cultural shift to mechanical printing four centuries ago. Further, each report, government study, or technological innovation since the OTA study’s release calls into question many of its fundamental perspectives that argue for an eternal bind between traditional libraries and public bureaucracies in a relationship that gets bdocuments to the people.Q Informing the Nation, along with librarians supportive of its findings, assumed that a centralized system of public information creation and distribution was indifferent to shifts in technology. In brief, this perspective argues that technological innovations have little impact on the legislative or policy foundations of the centralization. Rather, these technological improvements reinforced, for instance, the federal government’s ability to create, distribute (even push) information among a set of long recognized user communities: libraries, citizens (individuals and interest groups), as well as various publishing/information redistribution organizations. Information technology is primarily a means of production, not distribution. Further, many of the OTA report’s recommendations (as do the majority of subsequent reports published since 1988) call for measures that essentially side with the policy argument that this bcentralityQ is best governed by public authorities rather than private market mechanisms.

Partnerships and promises: the history and future of library and US Government information

Librarians involved with the US Federal Depository Library system need to seriously reconsider their roles and economic arguments, as more federal agencies bypass the Government Printing Office and publish government information directly through the World Wide Web. If “ownership” and “collections” were the watchwords under the earlier model, “service” and “partnerships” will dominate the practice of government information librarians in the next century.

Policy implications of a model public information service: the DOSFAN experience

Abstract The unique three-way partnership formed by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s federal depository library, the U.S. State Department, and the Government Printing Office (GPO) to deliver and preserve foreign policy information through servers housed at the University’s library offers some critical insights into the assumptions and policies of the GPO’s Federal Depository Library Program. Ultimately, the Internet’s explosive growth, combined with powerful graphical interfaces of the major Web browsers, undermines several recently enacted laws that attempt to standardize (or centralize) effective information resource management within the federal government. Not only has GPO steadily lost political and economic support over the last decade from both legislative and executive leaders for its production and distribution programs, many agencies now consider their “.gov Webspaces” the natural successors to the GPO and its depository library program. As a result, a new model of government information distribution is being forged within the highly decentralized and interactive environment of the World Wide Web.

A new order of things: The political future of documents librarians and a national system of federal depository libraries

Abstract This article places the efforts of documents librarians to reform the Federal Depository Library Program (DLP) in an historical and political perspective. As with many other earlier efforts of reform, the recent “Reinventing Access to Federal Government Information,” held in October 1993, would raise doubts, once again, about the public institutions and national information policy arrangements that support the Government Printing Office and its DLP. The specific reforms calling for centralized information should be abandoned. The depository library systems political power and public convictions were never fully expressed through the programs various national administrative incarnations. Its true community purpose flows from the local conditions and information needs of each depository library community. Democratic distribution of public information must begin and end within these local areas and regions.

Case study in e-government education programs: preparing future government information professionals

This paper presents a case study of the development of two innovative graduate programs in e-government. The goals of the paper are twofold. First, by detailing the principles and processes of the programs development, the paper demonstrates the importance of these types of education initiatives in LIS and across other academic fields as e-government continues to become the central means of interaction between governments and members of the public. Second, the paper will present the lessons from and assessments of the development of these programs to help inform the development of other e-government education programs at other institutions.