Federal Library and Information Center Committee Library of Congress Washington DC 20540-4930
Someday soon, intelligent highway systems may reveal your location, control the speed at which you are driving, or stop your car after embedded sensors test your breath and find a high level of alcohol. Inexpensive chips implanted in your pet or child may help you monitor their whereabouts. Smart image recognition systems may permit the computer matching of faces in large crowds or on the Metro.
"The technologies for collecting personal information transcend barriers--some of them are walls, some distance, some darkness, some skin, some time. All of these in the past have given integrity to the self and the social system," warned University of Colorado sociologist Gary Marx.
"There's no guarantee that hard-won conceptions that we hold about the rights of citizenship --the dignity of the person, the autonomy of organizations--will be upheld in the face of continual social and technological change absent knowledge, wisdom, and vigilance."
These were only a few of the predictions that Marx offered the forum audience during an afternoon session which focussed on rationales and methods for protecting both classified and personal information. During the forum's morning session, panelists discussed policies for obtaining government information in the US and other democratic countries.
While Marx and others expressed concern about the increased availability and vulnerability of information, several panelists spoke about the need to protect citizen access to public records. GPO Superintendent of Documents Wayne Kelley cautioned that the combination of decreased funding and increased electronic publication may make federal government information harder to locate, less reliable, and more expensive.
In this new climate, "there are no rules," said Kelley. He compared the emerging system of electronic documents to a "huge government etch-a-sketch," and pointed out the potential to hide, lose, alter, or destroy electronic publications. He also described recent instances in which agencies have published documents through private firms, or charged fees for electronic data, challenging the policy of public information distribution through the GPO.
Kelley defended the traditional model of distribution, and indicated that he hoped the principle of free access to government information would continue into the twenty-first century.
In the same panel, Toni Carbo-Bearman and Bruce McConnell discussed the progress in building the National Information Infrastructure.
Bearman, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh and a member of the U.S. Council on the NII, spoke about several of the Council s accomplishments. She described the Council's efforts to obtain the opinions of both regional and special-interest groups, to promote issues of access and reasonable cost, and to act as a clearinghouse for success stories about establishing public access to the Internet. Bearman also described public-outreach efforts, such as the creation of an educational videotape about the Internet with the collaboration of AT&T and Walt Disney, and her own work to create both local and state civic networks in Pennsylvania.
Documents created by the Council are now available via the WWW at the Benton Foundation's site at http://www.benton.org.
McConnell is Chief of the Information Policy and Technology Branch of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB and Chairman of the Government Information Working Group of the Information Infrastructure Task Force. He applauded the creative and democratizing opportunities offered by new information technologies, but like Kelley, expressed concern about the cataloguing, maintenance, and integrity of electronic information.
McConnell suggested that the responsibility for keeping information current and complete be explicitly granted to local agencies, who should be provided with basic standards for presentation.
A number of speakers explained ways in which the infomation policies and expectations in other countries differ from those in the United States.
Keynote speaker William Drake described Canadian, European, and Japanese models of information policy (see story below). Gail Dykstra, Director of Publisher and Government Relations, Micromedia Limited, spoke about excessive restrictions on and charges for distribution of Canadian government information. On the same panel, Robert J. Freeman, Executive Director of the New York State Committee on Open Government mentioned that Japan had only recently created a policy similar to the United States FOIA, but that very few Japanese citizens had come forth to demand government information.
Both Freeman and Dykstra attributed these contrasts with US attitudes to differing cultural assumptions about the relationship between the government and the public.
"We are used to fighting City Hall," said Freeman.
Freeman also proposed that Freedom of Information laws in the United States work much more effectively on a local level.
"Too often," he said, "the focus is on Washington . . . What happens if you don t like the public school lunch program? If your garbage isn t picked up? You will get in touch with your local government--City Hall, Town Hall, the Board of Education--and you will knowingly or unknowingly use access to government laws."
He explained that decisions on local FOIA cases have also made it clear that government agencies should provide information in numerous forms--on disk, as mailing labels, on-line--while Federal FOIA court cases have not moved as quickly on this question.
Speakers in the final two panels spoke about the protection of information.
Mark Rotenberg, Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, questioned the forum's title. Instead of demanding balance, the principles of protecting private information while making government actions public are complementary. He suggested that both are principles crucial to maintaining a strong democracy, and totalitarian societies are marked by a lack of those principles.
"The problem today is that we are facing enormous challenges to speech and privacy rights," Rotenberg said, and listed the recent Communications Decency Act, the regulation of technologies of anonymity, and the commodification of personal information among the greatest of those challenges.
Lance Hoffman, Director of the Institute for Computer and Telecommunications Systems Policy at George Washington University and Joan Winston, Principal Policy Analyst, Trusted Information Systems, Inc., spoke about the history of and methods for encrypting data. Eric Biel of the Committee on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy described strategies for both classifying and declassifying government documents.
In the last panel, Robert David Steele, Chairman and CEO of Open Source Solutions Group strongly suggested the need for a national information strategy that would allow for free sharing of information while protecting vital centers of electronic information and communication. These centers, he suggested, are currently extremely vulnerable to penetration.
"Hackers are a national resource," said Steele, "because they are telling us that the emperor is naked."
However, he warned audience members, conflicting interests and competing international models of information access will impede the creation of a true Global Information Infrastructure. The Internet will continue to serve this purpose, although it may change under the influence of corporate use and government regulations.
In order to provide a context for understanding the recent Telecommunications Act, Drake offered a capsule history of telecommunications reforms in the US. He described battles over mixed use of the radio spectrum during the creation of the 1934 Telecommunications Act; over access to cable channels; and even over who could provide telephone service to the public.
In each case, non-commercial interests--labor unions, church groups, educational interests, farmers' collectives--lost the option to provide service or programming to their constituents.
"Therefore, we have to think about where we are today as a turning point," advised Drake. "Each model of the National Information Infrastructure has different implications."
"So the question becomes: how best to organize it from a social and economic viewpoint in order to promote different objectives? That has been the crux of the debate over the past few years."
He also praised the Administration for promoting creative applications for information technology through initiatives such as the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, which gives grants to non-profit organizations for projects such as civic networks.
"This is a very creative way to provide folks at the grassroots level with tools to scale up education, health care, and so on," he said.
However, he proposed, the legislative process surrounding the Telecommunications Act was very different.
"There were huge battles between the different industry sectors--telecommunications carriers, cable companies, broadcasters, and publishers--about precisely how the new legislative model would be erected and who would have access to each others markets. That debate really dominated much of the public understanding of the whole effort," said Drake.
In the melee, the story of a broad-scale movement of non-commercial players asserting their place in the information infrastructure went unreported.
"The non-commercial sector is growing quite rapidly in the US, and there are a lot of people out there in these domains who have real and legitimate stakes in how the information infrastructure will be organized," said Drake.
"Librarians quite obviously do, as their raison d être is making information available to the public in a non-commercial setting. Obviously, then, if telecommunications policies are adopted which somehow restrict their ability to do so, this becomes a real issue."
Unfortunately, he suggested, this is exactly what has happened. After passage of the Telecommunications Act was blocked in the 103rd Congress, the 104th Congress hastily passed the Act after meetings which non-commercial interests weren't invited to attend. The final version of the bill, according to Drake, bore little resemblance to the one proposed by the Clinton Administration.
Does the final bill balance the interests of citizens and small businesses with those of large media conglomerates?
"The general view is that the bill takes some steps in that direction," said Drake, "but it really doesn t go very far, and at the same time, greatly promotes the concentration of economic power in many of the key market segments in ways that could have deleterious effects."
Clearly, he suggested, people in the education and library communities need to weigh in with the FCC and state and local governments on issues of how universal access should be defined and implemented.
He described the tone of a conference about universal access to advanced telecommunications that he had recently attended in Canada.
"Here, we tend to think of the rights of the individual as paramount, and in some senses, in opposition to the state," he said. "But in Canada, they don t think that way...when you speak with Canadians about how to tackle issues of universal access, they ask how to use public policy to leverage the information infrastructure to serve certain social needs."
Drake was particularly struck by Canadian businessmen s reactions to proposals that companies must provide public telecommunications services.
"People were sugesting ideas that, in the American context would be considered rather regulatory," he said. Yet businessmen replied that such mandates were part of the Canadian social contract.
"This really brought home the importance of talking about these issues in an international context."
According to Drake, European leaders also generally hold different opinions about how to provide public information--and how much information to provide. "They don't historically have the concept of transparency that we do in the US," he said.
He described the typical European approach to developing national information infrastructures as more bureaucratic and socially inclusive than the market-based US model, and suggested that the Japanese government is also very involved in the development of its national information resources.
"Everybody uses the language of exalting the market system, but what's really happening is that the state is heavily involved in trying to shape the way the information infrastructure is developed through regulatory mechanisms and allocation of funds," Drake said.
Finally, he proposed, some countries see government information as a resource to be sold. This conflicts with the American concept of government information as public property.
The resulting proliferation of American information on the Internet raises concerns about protecting national sovereignty. "People often refer to the GII (Global Information Infrastructure) as the Global Information Invasion," said Drake.
William Drake, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, is on a 1995-96 fellowship in Washington, DC. He is currently writing articles evaluating the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and a book on the historical evolution and contemporary transformation of the international telecommunications regime for the MIT Press.
Believing in the importance of centralized information services and advocating agency support for continued excellence in federal information services is an ongoing responsibility of each of us. We must hone our vision of what we can do for our clients and what an informed clientele can do for our nation.
FLICC continues to review and revise its VISION 2000, which was initiated last year. This is an evolving document that attempts to capture the most important roles we see for federal libraries/information centers in the 21st century. Are any of these envisioned roles relevant for your library? Do you have a vision of where your library will be in five years? Feel free to borrow from our broad document (see below) as you develop a vision statement for your own services. If you already have a vision or mission statement, share it with us. If you don't know where you are going, it will be difficult to get there!
At the March meeting of the FLICC Executive Board (FEB), members engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of strategies to promote the value of federal library and information services.
How can we help agency decision-makers appreciate the contributions of trained information managers to their agency mission and programs? In February, FLICC members heard GAO Director of Information Services Phyllis Christenson describe her experience in convincing GAO management that librarians are "essential to the mission of the organization." For the remainder of calendar 1996, the FEB recommended that FLICC continue to focus on the issue of "advocacy." At the May meeting, three federal library managers--from the National Library of Education, the Naval Research Laboratory and th National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--described their experience with library committees to get users involved in promoting library programs (see below).
For the September meeting, we plan to focus on "outcomes measurement"--how can we measure the impact of library/information programs on agency mission? If you have attempted to move beyond circulation and reference statistics, collections size, etc., to assess agency outcomes from these various activities, or if you know of a good consultant who has expertise in outcomes analysis, please share with me any information you have (suta@loc.gov).
One way to describe outcomes is through real world anecdotes. If we can t yet quantify outcomes, we should at least be prepared with a few illustrative stories that capture the essence of what we do for our agencies programs. In May, FLICC used two of its listservs, FEDLIB-L and FEDREF-L, to invite federal librarians to share anecdotes that illustrate the library/information center's contributions to agency mission.
Do you have a story to tell? Please send it to me at the above Internet address, and I ll pass it on to others on the list.
Also, we are planning to design a "federal library advocacy" poster that you can display in a prominent place in your library/information center. We announced a poster contest in the May issue of FEDLINK Technical Notes; we have had one proposal to date, but we know there are more of you out there who have ideas for slogans and/or graphic illustrations. No need to be a graphic artist--we can get assistance from LC s Graphic Unit for the final design. We just need your ideas (again, to the above email address, or fax to 202-707-4818).
Finally, we have an excellent Education Working Group subcommittee on advocacy, chaired by Amy Begg of the Smithsonian Libraries. This group has lots of ideas and is planning an advocacy symposium for December 10. Watch for more information in upcoming issues of the Newsletter.
In the year 2000 and beyond, the mission of federal libraries and information centers is to
contribute to the public good in the following areas:
Jackson is a graduate of the first Library of Congress Leadership Development Program (LDP). The program was established to develop future leaders for the library profession who will be prepared to take positions of national importance in the expanding electronic environment. Jackson was one of ten LDP Fellows selected from over 150 applicants to take part in this training, aimed to provide new opportunities for members of minority groups who will play an increasing role in America s cultural and educational institutions.
For 15 months, Jackson worked full time at LC and participated in over 200 hours of workshops and presentations related to financial management, strategic planning, interpersonal communication, and library technology. She also attended a week-long Leadership Development program at the Center for Creative Leadership of the University of Maryland's National Leadership Institute.
"The program allowed me to get a thorough overview of the Library of Congress," she said. Jackson worked in the Automation Section in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division as the Coordinator of the Machine-Readable Collections Reading Room. Processing various materials in new formats helped to acquaint her with many different parts of LC, as did a short stint as a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room.
Before starting at LC, Jackson managed the Littauer Library--a collection of economics, political science, and labor materials--at Harvard University for seven years. During this time, she also completed one year as a Harvard University Administrative Fellow.
Prior to her work at Harvard, Jackson served as Associate Librarian and Collections Manager for the Dewey Library at MIT. She is a graduate of Howard University, has an MLS from Simmons College, and an MBA from Northeastern University.
Early in her career, Jackson spent a year as a Research Analyst at LC. "I always wanted to get back to the Library of Congress, and the Leadership Development Program was my opportunity," she remarked.
Jackson has spent the past few months familiarizing herself with the needs of federal libraries. "I m just trying to learn as much about FLICC as I can to get myself up to speed on the program," she said.
She is working with the Education Working Group to set up half-day orientation tours of National Libraries which will focus on how national libraries can be of service to all federal libraries in terms of advocacy and assistance in setting up programs and systems. Via FLICC/FEDLINK listervs, Jackson has requested success stories about libraries' support of their agency's missions. She has also written an RFP for a study of the costs/benefits of using FEDLINK services.
"I hope that these projects will help me to both better acquaint myself with the program and meet more people in the federal library community," Jackson explained.
She expects the position to evolve as she participates in and helps to coordinate projects of the FLICC and FEDLINK working groups and task forces; supports FLICC and FEDLINK outreach programs; assists with publications and documents such as the quarterly performance report; and develops meeting plans for the FLICC Executive Board, FLICC, and the FAC.
"Working at FLICC/FEDLINK is interesting because there are many different types of federal libraries," said Jackson. "I think that my knowledge of special libraries will help me in understanding the needs of some of those libraries."
Laurie Stackpole of the Naval Research Laboratory Library and Information Center described the NRL Library Committee. Formed in the late 1940s, the committee was reorganized in 1996 to include higher-level NRL staff members in a more proactive role.
The outgoing Chair of the committee recommended that library staff conduct a study, called InfoVision/2000, so as to capture management attention and openly state resource requirements. The study team included NRL and ONR librarians and researchers as well as representatives from agencies, universities, and publishers.
The team recommended that the NRL library expand WWW access to databases and journals. The process also resulted in stated goals for the library which will most likely lead to more indirect support. For more information on InfoVision/2000, see the project's Web site at http://infoweb.nrl.navy.mil/services/IV2000.
Nancy Cavanaugh of the National Library of Education described the NLE Advisory Task Force. Members were appointed by the US Education Secretary when the Department of Education was reorganized and units were merged into a library.
The task force has worked to define the needs of the new NLE. Members discussed the possibilities of both "pointers" to resources and development of a comprehensive collection. "They can act as real advocates for us in the development of resources," said Cavanaugh. After the task force delivers recommendations, the library may continue to work with an advisory committee.
Carol Watts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Library spoke about two kinds of advisory groups.
In the early 1990s, the NOAA library gathered scientists together to evaluate their collection. "We gained visibility, learned a tremendous amount from them, and then had their report to quote for grant writing," said Watts.
NOAA libraries also have Library Advisory Councils. Members include library advocates from each local program office. When NOAA suffered severe budget cuts, council members defended the libraries against administrators who didn't always realize the significant role that the agency's libraries play. "It's very important to have researchers know what we have to offer," said Watts. "It's worked for everyone."
The FLICC Newsletter is published by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. Suggestions of areas for Federal Library and Information Center Committee attention or items appropriate for inclusion in the FLICC Newsletter should be sent to:
FLICC Newsletter Federal Library and Information Center Committee Library of Congress 101 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20540-4930
FLICC Executive Director's Office Phone: (202) 707-4800 Fax: (202) 707-4818 FEDLINK Fiscal Operations Phone: (202) 707-4900 Fax: (202) 707-4999
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Susan M. Tarr
WRITER/EDITOR: Jessica Clark
The Federal Library and Information Center Committee was established in 1965 (as the Federal Library Committee) by the Library of Congress and the Bureau of the Budget for the purpose of concentrating the intellectual resources present in the federal library and related information community. Its goals are:
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