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Federal Depository Library Conference, October, 2005
Bruce James:
This past April Public Printer, Bruce James, asked the Federal Depository Library Council to lead the effort to draft a vision statement and a plan of action for creating the Federal Depository Library Program of the 21 st century. Under Mr. James' leadership, which began at the start of 2003, the Government Printing Office has significantly reorganized its management structure and drafted a new strategic plan. This plan would lead the agency from the Red Brick building on North Capitol Street with massive printing presses in its basement to a new facility in Arlington equipped primarily for digital publishing and dissemination of electronic government documents.
While Mr. James took the opportunity to once again reaffirm his commitment to free and permanent public access to government documents through libraries and the Internet, he was also steadfast in his belief that GPO needs to move from being a 19 th century printing factory to a 21 st century leader in digital information technology. He said that in five years there would be 1000 times more information than there is at present, and in 10 years there would be 5000 times more information. Ten years from now GPO will be routinely producing and disseminating audio and video content as well as text. James also stressed that whatever we come up with today will certainly be different in 10 years given the pace of technological change. “The important thing, in terms of a plan, is that we need to know that we are moving in the right direction.”
Very few librarians are unappreciative of the incredible advances in access and searching that digitization has brought us, but many are also aware of the possible draw backs to putting our information future squarely in cyberspace. Many are not as confident as Mr. James that it is time to leave the paper behind in the way that our ancestors left horsepower behind in favor of motorized technology.
It was noted by Mr. James that this Federal Depository Library (FDL) planning effort begins at least 2 years behind the overall strategic planning at GPO. Whether his commissioning of Council to draw up a plan for the future of the FDLP will result in a genuine opportunity for the depository library community to control its own fate, or whether we will in the end be simply carried along by the swift current of changes already taking place at GPO remains to be seen.
Depository Library Council:
Council chair Barbie Selby, of the University of Virginia , laid out a timetable. Discussions at this October conference in Washington would lead to further talks at the Spring 2006 Council meeting and conference, and result in a final draft vision statement and action plan produced by Council by May 15, 2006.
Discussions at the conference centered on the 4 main themes of the Council's draft vision statement http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/pubs/dlc_vision_09_02_2005.pdf :
New roles for FDLs in the non-exclusive digital government information environment
Non-exclusive Environment. With the publishing of government information directly to the Web, in essence, all libraries can be government information libraries. GPO is relying on the Web more than it is on Federal Depository Libraries (FDLs) in its new strategic initiatives. In fact, it is co-opting the FDLs role as disseminator of government information to the public. Superintendent of Documents, Judy Russell, now head of the Information Dissemination (ID) branch of GPO, and who was unable to attend this conference due to a family emergency, had this to say back in April about the changes at GPO, “This transformation is changing the ways that GPO acquires, preserves and provides access to government information (emphasis added) …We will continue working with you [the depository community] on an orderly, but accelerated transition to a digital FDLP. This will continue to cause depository librarians to transform themselves from managers of collections into managers of electronic services, a trend that is not limited to government documents.” Both Council and GPO are encouraging Docs librarians to expand and develop our role and presence as human search engines. Even in this arena we are not the gatekeepers that we used to be but rather a last resort. The Public, who wants to be independent, comes to us when Google fails to satisfy its needs. Rough statistics show 39 million hits per month for GPO Access while FDLs see about 712,000 per month. Listed below are some of the initiatives discussed that would expand and deploy our expertise to the public, create new roles for documents librarians and add value to digital documents on the Web.
Deploying Expertise and Adding Value (much crossover between these two)
Council defines deploying expertise as:
Ideas:
Managing Collections and Delivering Content: Digital Deposit of Surrogate Documents
It is clear that the government intends to become a disseminator of government information to the public, a role traditionally played by the FDLs. Many librarians want digital surrogates on their servers to increase preservation security, guarantee free and permanent public access and to eliminate chances for government censorship in the future. The deposit of digital surrogates on depository libraries' own servers, would essentially keep the system as it is today, only tweaking it to accommodate digital requirements.
The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) pilot project may be a means by which this can be achieved but GPO remains unclear on their policy position on whether this approach will be applied across the board to all documents in the FDLP. To date there seems to be reluctance on the part of GPO to commit to deposit of digital surrogates into willing FDLs. When asked directly at the end of the conference he seemed a bit evasive, but Mr. James said that GPO is looking at the technology to make this possible.
GPO is currently using the LOCKSS software system to provide 19 libraries with current volumes of three Government e-journals over a 12-month pilot project. Whether a successful outcome to this project would lead to dissemination of all digital documents is unclear, but GPO does seem to believe that as a whole, its strategic initiatives including the National Bibliography and the National Collection (with about 10 or less “light” and “dark” paper archives dispersed around the country) and the developing Future Digital System (FDsys) within which these programs would run, effectively deal with the difficulties which can arise with tracking, preserving and accessing Web based content.
Librarians are still concerned that if the information is only available on government servers that it would be susceptible to censorship when the administration in power finds that certain information is unsupportive of its position.
Luckily the high costs of establishing digital repositories are being reduced by cost sharing efforts among academic libraries. There was talk at the conference that FDLP regional libraries of the future would look like consortia rather than individual libraries. It was also mentioned that memory organizations such as the Internet Archive might be enlisted to serve as digital repositories of surrogate documents. However, it is still believed by many that the cost of establishing digital infrastructures for most libraries will be prohibitive and unsupported by library administrations. MK
MK's "tidbits" (major points):
This was one of the highlights of the meeting, a very exhilarating, but at the same time down-to-earth review of the current and near future state of digitization, digital storage, and attendant issues. The speaker was Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information. Mr. Lynch epitomized the afore-mentioned optimist/cynic dichotomy, speaking with enthusiasm one moment about the Google digitization initiative and in the next wondering about what lies in some of the secret details of the agreements between Google and their partners. He feels that there is something of a misperception about the amount of stuff currently digitized, and that there is more available digitally now than we usually think. However random the current corpus of freely available digitized material is, he feels that comprehensive coverage is at least visible on the horizon. However, he also bemoans the shrinking of the public domain due to extravagant copyright-term extension, and feels that the relationship between researchers and pre-1920 material will eventually be quite different than that between researchers and post-1920 material.
More out-there kinds of observations included the possible lack of necessity for metadata with automatic indexing becoming better and better. He also pointed out that not all textual material is being read by humans, that computational indexing, and computational linguistics, are making possible not only the harvest but also the analysis of material by machine agents, especially in the sciences.
The main subject area covered in Mr. Lynch's talk was storage, and it was pretty breathtaking stuff. He feels that although the information output of our society continues to grow rapidly, it's not growing as rapidly as storage capacity and systems. In the not-too-distant future he thinks that we'll be able to have incredible amounts of text and data on our little iPods, or whatevers. He thinks that high school grads could go off to college soon with complete sets of all kinds of information, complete libraries of material. KA