FLICC
Newsletter

Table of Contents
FLICC Anticipates the Future in Fiscal Year 2000
Board Talk
Outcome Measures Part II: Analyzing E-Metrics
FLICC Working Groups Spotlight
2000 FLICC Awards
NCLIS Report Calls for Reform
Editorial Staff

FLICC Anticipates the Future in
Fiscal Year 2000

Information technology, digital futures, and performance measurement were the keywords for Fiscal Year 2000. With an eye on the future, FLICC governing boards, programs and publications were abuzz with new trends in knowledge management, electronic resources, and e-metrics.

Annual Fora Challenge All Branches

FLICC's 2000 information policy forum, "Government Futures: Impact of Information Advances in the 21st Century," explored how information technology drives changes in the international marketplace which in turn drive how the U.S. government expands and uses this technology. The forum took an in-depth look at how each branch of government anticipates the impact of these changes in information. FLICC also held its annual FLICC Symposium on the Information Professional in FY2000, focusing on developments in knowledge management and their application in a federal setting.

Beyond supporting the membership projects, FLICC staff members continued to implement customer service recommendations and initiatives, including the release of FEDLINK's online registration system for Fiscal Year 2001. Other accomplishments included expanding digital document management, improving members use of and payment for OCLC services, initiating consortial purchasing opportunities, negotiating substantial discounts with renewing vendors, and selecting 21 Books vendors on the basis of competition and technical review. Staff members also supported 28 seminars and workshops for 1242 participants and conducted 77 OCLC, Internet, and related training classes for 738 students.

FLICC's cooperative network, FEDLINK, continued to enhance its fiscal operations while providing its members with $53.5 million in transfer pay services and $53.2 million in direct pay services, saving federal agencies more than $12 million in vendor volume discounts and approximately $6.3 million more in cost avoidance.

FEDLINK also procured software and support services to initiate work on electronic invoicing and increase online access to financial information for member agencies and vendors. Furthermore, FEDLINK's continuing financial management efforts ensured that FEDLINK successfully passed the Library's Financial Audit of Fiscal Year 1999 transactions performed by Clifton Gunderson, LLP.

FLICC managers worked throughout Fiscal Year 2000 to improve project planning, implementation, and staff participation through effective use of Facilitative Leadership (FL) techniques and leadership development programs fostered by the Library.

Meetings Stay on the Cutting Edge

In addition to regular FLICC Working Group updates and reports from FLICC/FEDLINK staff members, each FLICC quarterly meeting included a special meeting focus on a new or developing trend in federal libraries:

• the first FLICC Quarterly Membership meeting featured a group brainstorming session on "Congressional Awareness of Federal Libraries, their Achievements and their Needs;"
• the second meeting included a presentation from Congressional Research Service staff members Richard Nunno and John Moteff titled "Legislative Update: IT Issues in the 106^th Congress," followed by Dick Griffith from the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR), who spoke on the "NPR Public Access Project on Electronic Government;"
• the third meeting focused on the Special Libraries Association project on "Valuating Information Intangibles: Measuring the Bottom Line Contribution of Librarians and Information Professionals," with consultant and author Frank Portugal as the speaker; and
• the fourth meeting featured federal digital developments with remarks from Winston Tabb, Associate Librarian for Library Services and Chair Designate of FLICC, on the National Academy of Science's study report; from George Barnum, Electronic Collection Manager, Government Printing Office (GPO), on a GPO/OCLC project to archive electronic government publications for permanent access; from Judy Russell, Deputy Director, National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, on the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) Phase Two study; and from Kenneth Nero, National Labor Relations Board, on FirstGov.

FLICC also continued its collaboration with the Library's General Counsel on a series of meetings between federal agency general counsels and agency librarians. These general counsel fora grew out of the recognition that federal attorneys and librarians face many of the same questions in applying copyright, privacy, FOIA, and other laws to their agencies' activities in the electronic age—with regard both to using information within the agency and to publishing the agency's own information. These meetings enhanced the relationship between agency attorneys and librarians and helped them develop contacts with their counterparts at other agencies. This year's series continued discussions on emerging FOIA and privacy issues and on other issues raised by the FLICC Forum.

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BOARD TALK

Have you started hearing all kinds of people who have never frequented a library talking about taxonomies, metadata, content management and even knowledge management? Do you find yourself silently translating those words into library terms, such as classification, subject headings and information management?

As we reported in the fall issue of the FLICC Newsletter, FLICC has been carefully monitoring developments at FirstGov.gov and participating in the NCLIS study concerning government information distribution. (See update on NCLIS study in this issue.) At the December 2000 FLICC meeting, Mike Conklin (Treasury) recommended that FLICC take a leadership role in federal content management. Conklin's motion was referred to the FLICC Executive Board (FEB) for further action, and at the February Board meeting, the FEB established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Content Management, to be chaired by Blane Dessy (Justice), former vice chair of FLICC. The charge to the working group was: "Recommending to FLICC cooperative activities related to Content Management, including FirstGov and other central federal information portal initiatives, by March 20, 2001."

Under Dessy's very capable leadership, the group explored the current state of content management in various government agencies, including central and cooperative organizations such as GPO, NTIS, NCLIS, the Library of Congress, FirstGov, CENDI and the CIO Council. The FLICC working group identified interagency working groups and other discussion groups that deal with this issue. They also discussed how federal libraries could collaborate to improve the state of federal content management for the benefit of their agency information users and federal information seekers at large.

On March 20, two days before the March FEB meeting, the working group submitted four broad recommendations with specific action items for immediate focus. Following a presentation by Ken Nero, chief of the National Labor Relations Board Library and FEB liaison to the working group, the FEB conducted an informed and spirited discussion of the group's recommendations. The FEB agreed that FLICC should:

• form and foster partnerships with other Federal stakeholders...in the area of content management,
• help improve access to content by promoting the coordination of major federal taxonomies and thesauri..., and
• expand training on Knowledge Management, thesaurus development, information architecture, taxonomies, organization of portals, XML, etc.

The FEB was also generally supportive of the initial recommendation to make the Content Management Working Group a permanent working group of FLICC. However, before passing that recommendation, they asked that Dessy, Nero and others from the ad hoc group meet with members of FLICC's Information Technology Working Group to sort out respective missions. This meeting took place in April and additional recommendations are expected shortly.

Watch newsletters and listservs for additional information about FLICC's activities regarding content management, and send any comments or suggestions you have to me by email to suta.loc.gov or to the broader community via the FEDLINK listserv at fedlib.loc.gov.

                                                Susan M. Tarr
                                                Executive Director, FLICC

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Outcome Measures Part II:
Analyzing E-Metrics

The last issue of the FLICC Newsletter offered a look at the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), a method for measuring the impact of library services and tailoring them to better serve users. While the BSC strategy is complex, it draws from measures and feedback that librarians have grown used to recording, such as collection and circulation figures, budget numbers, and user complaints.

Measuring the use—and usefulness—of electronic library resources presents additional challenges, however, because neither the technologies nor the categories used for doing so have been standardized. While many libraries offer some access to digital resources through their Web sites or intranets, the materials themselves come in varied formats, including CDs, proprietary and Web-based databases, electronic abstracts and journals, e-books, digital images, Web sites, and the library's own OPAC. The formats and terms for reporting the use of online resources are nearly as diverse: Web experts may speak of "hits" and "visits," database vendors may enumerate "searches"and "sessions," and content aggregators may report documents retrieved by type and publication.

As a result, a library's e-metrics may seem a bit like an onion: layers of discrete measurements, held together by the skin of Web site usage logs—all ripe with the potential to become a stinky mess. However, recipes are emerging that can help librarians blend electronic measurements into the mix of all of the library's functions.

Tips and Tools for Web Measurements

At a January FLICC workshop on outcome measurements, Mark Kaprow, the General Services Administration's webmaster, described the inexact science of tracking Web site traffic. He discussed several related terms and concepts:

Hits
While some Web novices assume that each "hit" a site receives is equal to a user viewing one page, a "hit" actually refers to the display of each object on a Web page, including each graphic or multimedia element. Text-based sites therefore generate many fewer hits than highly graphical, high-end sites. "The number of hits is a nice, very gross measure of traffic," said Kaprow. "If the structure of your site stays constant overtime, you can measure the growth of traffic with hits, but you cannot compare your hits to someone else's and claim victory."

Page views
Site usage tools often measure users' visits to specific HTML and text pages, and report them as numbers of "page views." Kaprow pointed out, however, that such results do not account for users' interaction with Word documents, movies, PDFs, images, Cold Fusion pages, or other resources that a site might offer in different formats. "If you are not recording unique file downloads, you are leaving information out," he said.

Visits and new visitors
Kaprow explained that different traffic measurement programs may define user "visits" quite differently. He offered an example: if a person leaves his/her desk in the middle of perusing a site and comes back later while the window is still open, is that one visit or two? "The industry has not decided," he said. Similarly, is a visitor "new" if he or she has not returned to the site in a month or a year?

To muddle things even further, some "visits" are not even made by human users. Search engines and archiving projects may use automated "spiders" to index sites and search for content changes.

Proxy servers
Similarly, large Internet service providers and organizations may use "proxy servers," to provide cached copies of often-accessed sites to their users. In order to ensure that the content is current, these machines may be programmed to check the sites for changes hourly, daily or weekly. Proxy servers therefore both create false visits and siphon traffic from a site. "A significant amount of traffic from AOL might represent thousands of users instead of what your measurements present," said Kaprow.

Unique hosts
While site measurement tools can record visitors' domains, different IP addresses may sometimes be associated with the same user. Kaprow explained that "dynamic host addressing," which allows a bank of machines to assign an IP address to a user for a limited period of time, can make it difficult to track one user's visits over the course of a week or a month. "What can you do about it?" he asked. "Nothing, because you don't know how your user's IP addresses are being allocated."

Referrer
Site logs also record the "referrer," or the site that sent a visitor to yours. Kaprow suggested that these logs are useful for finding sites that might become partners or revealing sites that should be, but are not, referring users to yours.

Despite all of his caveats, Kaprow has worked to track the traffic for a number of GSA sites over several years. He stressed that Web sites must follow directly from an agency's strategic plan in order to succeed. By aligning their goals and performance measurements with those of the agency, Webmasters can better determine which site trends to track and develop new features that more accurately meet users' needs.

"Increasing traffic is not the goal," he said. "The goal is whatever you want to achieve with your business. The tools to do these things are not necessarily all in place; we still have a long way to go. But we can really push the vendors to do a better job, to really extend beyond what you are doing."

Kaprow suggested a number of related references and programs that perform Web site traffic measurements (see below). He briefly demonstrated the logs and reports generated by Analog, a free, open-source log file analysis tool which provides a basic weekly set of HTML-based results and reports, and Aria, an expensive, high-end program which monitors data on Sun servers and provides real-time, graphical traffic reports across a number of sites.

"Regardless of what tool you use to track traffic," Kaprow said, "analyzing measurement results will always rely on `www.hardwork.com.' You still have to take the data and put it in Excel yourself to do comparisons between multiple sites or sections."

Tracking Electronic Library Usage

While Web traffic measurement methods may still seem a bit rough, advances in that field have nonetheless been driven by the explosion of commercial sites since the mid-1990s. In comparison, the library profession—and those vendors who serve libraries—still have much work to do to make usage data for databases and online collections accurate, comparable, and meaningful for both collections managers and those holding the purse strings.

A November report from the Association of Research Libraries' E-Metrics Project, Developing Statistics and Performance Measures to Describe Electronic Information Services and Resources for ARL Libraries, outlines the complexity of the issues related to tracking digital library resource usage.

During the first phase of this ongoing study, which began in April 2000, researchers from the Florida State University's Information Use Management and Policy Institute surveyed 24 research libraries, including the Library of Congress, about the data they collect on electronic services and resources, and the ways in which this data is used. Researchers also conducted research on-site at the Virginia Tech Library, the University of Pennsylvania Library, Yale University Library, and the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library. Finally, they analyzed sample vendor reports and usage data submitted by members of the ARL Working Group on Database Vendor Statistics.

While they found that the proportion of library budgets spent on electronic resources has increased significantly in the past several years, many of the libraries have only begun to measure digital products and services. Their records and reports typically follow traditional library measurement patterns, noting the numbers of databases, online journals, etc, without providing information about user experience or cost-effectiveness.

Many of the libraries only report this information annually, and the researchers found that there was a wide variation in the dates when the libraries regularly began tracking electronic offerings. The libraries were using much of the data they collected internally, to make decisions about renewing contracts or change the number of simultaneous user licenses. Fewer than half of the libraries queried reported that the data is used to justify library budgets or to assess existing collections and services.

Inconsistencies between the terms used to measure patrons' use of digital materials rendered comparative analysis of these measurements nearly impossible. While some vendors provide user statistics, these may be reported in terms of logins, visits, searches, sessions, records, documents, electronic reference service transactions, or other ill-defined units. The libraries did use programs such as Analog or WebTrends to capture Web site usage, but the researchers did not find good examples of summary reports of this data that could help the libraries improve online service. Because most of these libraries do not require users to individually log in to digital resources, they cannot collect their own records about the users' characteristics or affiliations.

Making Vendors Stick to Statistical Reporting Guidelines

Complaints about vendor data topped the list of reasons for the libraries' inability to effectively measure digital resource use. In 1998, the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) drafted guidelines for five elements that a vendor's report should provide the number of:

• queries (searches),
• menu selections, if the display of data is accomplished by browsing through menus,
• sessions (logins),
• turn-aways,
• items examined (i.e., viewed, marked, selected, downloaded, emailed, printed).

The ARL researchers analyzed the compliance of reports from twelve top vendors: Academic Press/IDEAL, Bell & Howell/ProQuest, Ebsco, Elsevier/ScienceDirect, GaleNet, HighWIre, ISI, JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis, OCLC/First Search, Ovid, and Silver Platter. All of the vendors but Ovid fell short on providing information about one or another of the elements. However, the report suggests that these vendors are willing to comply with the guidelines if libraries can coordinate their requests for comparable statistics.

Currently, both individual libraries and a variety of library and information groups are in contact with vendors regarding statistics and performance measures. Active efforts include a project spearheaded by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) to clarify vendor data for public and state libraries; a research project on e-journal usage statistics funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR); and a review of international standards for library statistics by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The ARL report calls for continued communication and cooperation among all of these efforts.

Changing Library Cultures

While the ARL e-metrics report acknowledges the scope of this larger effort, it suggests several ways that libraries can refocus their work in the short term to better evaluate and provide digital services. The researchers advise libraries to "cultivate a culture of assessment"—that is, to tightly relate electronic services and collections to the library's overall plan for meeting user needs.

Such a change may require changes in organizational structure, especially the creation of a position designed to deal specifically with evaluation of services. Such a "data advocate," they suggest, would collect and analyze internal and external statistics, design a data-gathering infrastructure, and communicate measurement results and problems to library staff, agency management, vendors, and interested professional organizations. If staffing considerations make creating a new position impossible, they suggest training existing staff to use data analysis and presentation tools, and having them focus on gaps in current statistics to solve specific problems.

Moving Forward

The next steps in the ARL E-Metrics Project will include continued work with vendors to standardize reporting information, the involvement of researchers and participating libraries in a variety of meetings, and the development of detailed performance measurement terminology to describe activities in the networked environment.

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FLICC Working Groups Spotlight

FLICC working groups achieved a broad agenda in Fiscal Year 2000: the second annual FLICC Awards to recognize the innovative ways federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of government, business, scholarly communities and the American public; a Web-based handbook of federal librarianship; new educational initiatives in the areas of cooperative online cataloging and serials cataloging; Web site development, reference issues, and library and information center evaluation; revisions for the Office of Personnel Management's librarian 1410 qualifications requirements; increased federal library participation in the Library of Congress Bicentennial; and expanded access to resources through online video broadcasts, distance learning and the FLICC Web site.

FLICC Ad Hoc LC Bicentennial Working Group

In honor of the Library's Bicentennial celebration, the working group implemented programs for the federal library and information center community to participate in the Library's celebration and to increase recognition of federal library programs through a larger campaign to publicize the "Nation's Collections." In Fiscal Year 2000, the working group mailed a collection of materials, including a celebratory letter, bookmarks, blank letterhead, and a poster celebrating federal libraries and the Library's Bicentennial to more than 2,000 federal libraries. Recipients used these materials to supplement their local activities, and many requested the electronic files of the materials and additional sets of bookmarks to expand their activities throughout the fiscal year. The working group also released a virtual promotion tool kit available through the FLICC/FEDLINK Web site. Interested libraries and information centers downloaded a celebration overview, ideas for local activities, and a chronology of federal libraries. The Library's Bicentennial Web site created a link to the FLICC tool kit, and the Library included the poster and the chronology in its official time capsule. Although the working group was dissolved by the end of Fiscal Year 2000, members of the group will continue to offer help to the FLICC Preservation and Binding Working Group in their efforts to survey the historical holdings of federal libraries and information centers in the hopes of identifying those materials most in need of preservation and digitization.

FLICC Awards Working Group

To honor the many innovative ways federal libraries, librarians, and library technicians fulfill the information demands of government, business, research, scholarly communities, and the American public, the Awards Working Group awarded 1999 national awards for federal librarianship and administered the competition for 2000. (See below for the latest winners.)

FLICC Budget and Finance Working Group

The FLICC Budget and Finance Working Group developed the Fiscal Year 2001 FEDLINK budget and fee structure in the Winter quarter. When approved unanimously by the FLICC membership in May 2000, the final budget for Fiscal Year 2001 kept membership fees for transfer pay customers at Fiscal Year 2000 levels: 7.75 percent on accounts up to $300,000 and 7.00 percent on amounts exceeding $300,000. Direct pay fees also remained at Fiscal Year 2000 levels. FEDLINK training fees increased modestly. The Library approved the budget in the Summer of 2000.

FLICC Education Working Group

During Fiscal Year 2000, the FLICC Education Working Group developed or supported 28 programs for 1242 participants in the areas of knowledge management, evaluation, technician training, reference issues, cataloging and preservation. In addition, the FLICC Orientations to National Libraries and Information Centers and brown-bag luncheon discussions continued throughout the year.

The working group also pilot tested and released an online handbook of federal librarianship to serve as a resource tool for librarians new to the federal community and a quick reference guide for established federal librarians.

FLICC Information Technology Working Group

To encourage more consortial purchasing through FEDLINK, working group members served as "technical advisors" to FEDLINK staff in consortial negotiations with selected online vendors. Several of these efforts resulted in new FEDLINK consortial offerings for legislative branch agencies, with plans for expansion to executive agencies in Fiscal Year 2001. The working group also sponsored a multi-session luncheon discussion series and a technology update on distance learning technologies.

FLICC Nominating Working Group

The FLICC Nominating Working Group oversaw the 2000 election process for FLICC rotating members, FLICC Executive Board members and the FEDLINK Advisory Council (FAC). Librarians representing a variety of federal agencies agreed to place their names in nomination for these positions.

FLICC Personnel Working Group

The working group received a letter from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirming their assertion that the Library Equivalency Test is no longer being used. At the working group's request, OPM revised the GS-1410 Qualifications Standard, deleting all reference to the written test. Meetings with OPM representatives throughout the fiscal year focused on the need to substantially revise and streamline the qualification requirements for professional librarians. At year end, OPM implemented most of the working group's proposed revisions to the GS-1410 Qualifications Standard, now available on the OPM Web site. In the future the working group will work with OPM to expand and develop "core competencies" for the professional librarian series.

FLICC Preservation and Binding Working Group

The working group began preparing specifications for acceptable preservation procedures and containers and prepared a statement of work for preservation services that they submitted for consideration for the FEDLINK program. Their negotiations with the Government Printing Office resulted in binding contract modifications that include new requirements for small repairs and standard pricing for such repair work. The working group also sponsored a disaster preparedness educational program and established a link to the Navy Disaster Preparedness Manual through the FLICC/FEDLINK Web site.

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Federal Libraries and Information Centers,
Librarians, and Technicians
Win FLICC Awards

To recognize the many innovative ways federal libraries, librarians, and library technicians are fulfilling the information demands of government, business, scholarly communities, and the American public, the Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) has announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship. The award recipients were honored at the 18^th Annual FLICC Forum on Federal Information Policies on March 27, 2001 in Washington, D.C., where they received engraved awards and were guests of the Forum. Their names will remain on permanent display with the names of the winners from previous years in the FLICC Offices at the Library of Congress. See the awards video online at http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/vidlib.html.

Federal libraries and staff throughout the United States and abroad competed in three award categories for the third annual FLICC Awards; the winners are listed below:

2000 Federal Library/Information Center of the Year

The Scientific & Technical Information Center, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)—is recognized for increasing examiner knowledge of, and access to, electronic and print resources by determining mandatory search sources, identifying alternative information resources, creating desktop tools, developing and delivering training on framing search strategies and on searching commercial databases and full text Internet tools. Working with focus groups, the center determined performance standards, collected both quantitative and qualitative data from users as indicators of customer satisfaction, and published reports describing its contributions to the organizational mission. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Library and the U.S. Agency for International Development Library received Honorable Mentions.

2000 Federal Librarian of the Year

An abundance of highly qualified librarians with outstanding, innovative, and sustained achievements in Fiscal Year 2000 resulted in a tie for this category:

Sherrie M. Floyd, Chief, Army Library Program, Vicenza Italy—is recognized for her innovative leadership, entrepreneurial spirit, enthusiasm, and determination to negotiate and guide the successful development, outfitting and staffing of two U.S. Army libraries in Bosnia. While working under austere conditions, amplified by increased force protection threat condition levels, she enhanced the Army's peacekeeping mission in the Balkans by providing services that supported the mental and physical well being of soldiers, built morale and cohesion, and improved the quality of life through recreational, social and educational reading.

Carlynn J. Thompson, Director, Research Development and Acquisition Information Support Directorate, Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)—is recognized for her active and innovative leadership and professionalism in the provision of information services. She is an acknowledged expert on both technical and policy issues associated with Web development, privacy and information security, network operations and management. Her information science background provides the basis for her understanding of client requirements, end-user interfaces and content management. Her overall skills set makes her a government-wide leader both to the Department of Defense and to the federal information community at large.

2000 Federal Library Technician of the Year

Darcy Bates, Library Technician, Electronic Information Center, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)—is recognized for personal initiative, technical skills, and rapport with customers. His willingness to respond to emerging customer needs resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for information services and created a group of satisfied and repeat customers. His ability to rise to new challenges and deal with a rapidly increasing workload while maintaining high customer service standards has contributed to the growing success of PTO's recently established Electronic Information Center. Carolly J. Struck, of the U.S. Naval Hospital Medical Library, Great Lakes, Illinois, received an Honorable Mention.

Information on the 2001 Award program will be announced later this Spring. For the latest information on the awards, interested parties may refer to the FLICC Web site (http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/) where information regarding the 2001 nomination packet will be posted on the "What's New" section as soon as it becomes available.

Special thanks go the members of the Awards Working Group for making this year's program a success: Mark Ziomek, Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Library and chair of the working group; Jonda Byrd, EPA Library Network Program Manager; Blane Dessy, Director of the Department of Justice Library; Doria Grimes, Chief of Library Contract Operations, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Central Library; Elaine Hickey, Chief of the Scientific Literature Division, Patent and Trademark Office; Shirley Loo, Information Control and Automated Systems Specialist for the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress; Rosemary Marlowe-Dziuk, Senior Reference Librarian, National Defense University Library; Kenneth Nero, Chief of the Library Section, National Labor Relations Board; and Janet Scheitle, Command Librarian, TRALINET Center, U.S. Army.—BACK

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NCLIS Report Calls for Reform

Last year, the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) began an extensive series of meetings and opinion-gathering efforts to evaluate the Department of Commerce plan to close the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and transfer its collections and services to the Library of Congress (LC). (See the FLICC Newsletter, Summer/Fall 2000 for a comprehensive review of the preliminary assessment and study.)

A number of FLICC members participated on four working panels that submitted preliminary reports last October that were aggregated in a single draft for public comment last December. In addition to those reports was a technical review by fourteen "field experts" who reviewed the recommendations for NCLIS to ensure that "the technical aspects of the Commission's findings, conclusions, and recommendations were sound, feasible, and practical." The end result was a two hundred-plus page report titled A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination.

The main recommendation of this report, "that the United States Government formally recognize and affirm the concept that public information is a strategic national resource," is boxed boldly on its inside cover page: To meet this objective, the report details another 16 strategic recommendations and 20 other recommendations.

Strategic recommendations

• Adopt the national goal that public information is a strategic resource.
• Establish the Public Information Resources Administration (PIRA).
• Include broad, explicit public information dissemination authority in all agencies' missions.
• Implement an Information Dissemination Budget.
• Enact "The Public Information Resources Reform Act of 2001."
• Establish the Congressional Information Resources Office (CIRO).
• Establish the Judicial Information Resources Office (JIRO).
• Extend key provisions of the Paperwork Reduction Act to the Legislative and Judicial Branches.
• Encourage state, local, and tribal governments to adopt comparable policies and programs for their public information resources.
• Retain, temporarily, the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) in the Commerce Department.
• Provide funding for the public good functions of NTIS and other comparable information service agencies.
• Update the NTIS business model.
• Partner with the private sector, both forprofit and not for-profit, to perform public information dissemination functions.
• Remove barriers to public information for individuals with disabilities and for other special populations.
• Coordinate the information dissemination activities among the Legislative, Judicial and Executive Branches.
• Improve training of librarians and other information professionals to better assist users of public information.

Other recommendations

• Implement recommendations regarding NTIS in the Commerce Department.
• Improve Congressional oversight of public information dissemination laws.
• Review and harmonize all laws that deal with public information resources.
• Strengthen cooperative efforts to promote public information sharing.
• Improve "Government Information Life-Cycle Planning and Management."
• Modernize current awareness systems for public information.
• Make consistent federal identifiers for information across all agencies.
• Harmonize information identifiers at all levels of government—federal, state, local and tribal.
• Evaluate pre-electronic government information for digital conversion.
• Develop guidelines regarding the availability of public information by branch and level of government.
• Develop a comprehensive inventory and database of public information resources.
• Specify the metadata by which agencies classify records prior to archival retention or disposal.
• Partner broadly, in and outside government, to ensure permanent public availability of public information resources.
• Identify the public's most critical unmet requirements for public information resources.
• Identify the federal government's most critical requirement for technologies to manage public information resources.
• Involve the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the effective management of scientific and technical information.
• Monitor cooperation between PIRA and the National Archives and Records Administration.
• Require that data elements set forth in the Government Paperwork Elimination Act be reported in XML, and review the impact of this requirement regularly.
• Ensure the availability of a trained federal workforce with skills in Internet Age technologies.
• Advance the recommendations of this Assessment report to other nations worldwide.

NCLIS emphasized that these recommendations were just intended to "...improve the condition of government information dissemination in the United States." Recognizing that there are other views and approaches, the commission concluded its summary by calling upon the President and Congress "to determine whether and to what extent these recommendations should be implemented."

Three Volumes Now Available

The main Web page for the complete commission report is http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.html. Links from this page offer pdf-format versions of Volume One which includes the Executive Summary, Report, and Appendices One through 10.

Volume Two contains the legislative and regulatory proposals in .pdf format as well as Appendices 11 through 12. Of special interest in this volume is the commission's legislative proposal, "The Public Information Resources Reform Act of 2001" in Appendix 11 and suggested revisions to the Paperwork Reduction Act and OMB Circular A-130 in Appendix 12.

The original white papers, panel reports, survey results and bibliographies appear in Volume Three, in Appendices 13 through 34 which are also in .pdf format. When the fourth volume is available, it will contain a compilation of recent federal statutes pertaining to public information dissemination and a complete index to the commission study's volumes in Appendix 32.

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Editorial Staff

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 Ave., SE, Adams Bldg., Room 217
Washington, DC 20540-4935
Email: [email protected]
Internet: http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc

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

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Robin Hatziyannis

CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Jessica Clark

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Mitchell Harrison

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 to foster excellence in federal library and information center services through interagency cooperation and to provide guidance and direction for the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK).

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