January 15, 2010

6 Years Later

To start this, I am going to be entirely self-serving by quoting myself:

California has a large, well-organized state library, which maintains a catalog of material that the state has published, with information on how it can be accessed by other agencies and the public. A recent report on current efforts of state governments to provide permanent public access (PPA) to electronic information found that the state of California has made only inconsistent efforts to preserve access to digital information, despite the attempts of the state library: “Due to limited staff and other resources, it is often difficult for the state library to capture many electronic government documents.”

In a May 2003 catalog of California state publications, there was an entry for an e-commerce report published and placed on the state government Web site in PDF format in 2000. According to the catalog entry, the publication is out of print, but the PDF file was still accessible on the Web via IA. However, the PDF has since been removed from IA’s server.

In effect, the state of California is relying on a private nonprofit to provide public access to public information.

From "From Ephemeral to Enduring: The Internet Archive's Role in Preserving Digital Media"

Apparently, not much has changed from 7 years ago:

Posting documents online was meant to increase the public’s access to the workings of government, but it’s actually having the opposite effect. For years now, official government records created electronically have been vanishing. And while a June 21, 2009 University of California press release makes mention of “the wholesale disappearance of information,” no one seems to be able to quantify the extent of losses.

“The problem is, I don’t think anybody has done a scientific evaluation of exactly how many electronic-only documents of California state government are disappearing,” David Cismowski, the State Library’s bureau chief for library services, e-mailed on Jan. 7.

...

None of this is new. In fact, the deletion — accidental or purposeful — of state e-records has been going on a long time. This is made clear by examining two state reports, both released in August 2004. Ironically, despite the fact that they’re nearly six years old, the reports represent the most recent studies of the loss of government e-records.

-- From "Official state records are disappearing"

I'm glad the California Digital Library has stepped up to the plate with a crawl of the ca.gov domain. I'm glad the California State Library is still trying to keep track of state gov docs. And yet, I suspect it's not enough, that these efforts are like taking two regular-sized funnels and heading off to Niagara Falls.

Are crawls and catalogs enough? Can a repository model? Is there a way we can make gov docs have the same shelf-life as messages in Gmail? Or is this much ado about nothing and CA is comparable to other states in their retention and access to born-digital government information?

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January 12, 2010

Happy World Fair Use Day!

It's the 1st Annual World Fair Use Day. May it be the first of many ...

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October 14, 2009

CLA Resolution on USA PATRIOT Act

Released yesterday:

October 13, 2009 • SACRAMENTO, CA - The California Library Association (CLA) has just announced a resolution calling on Congress to dramatically revise the up-for-renewal USA PATRIOT Act, passed hurriedly in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.

Librarians have been front-line opponents of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act since its passage. The Act has made it possible, under Section 215, for the FBI to request and obtain library records for large numbers of individuals without reason to believe they are involved in illegal activity. This jeopardizes the basic ethics of the library profession, expressed in the Library Bill of Rights of the American Library Association.

Expanding on the American Library Association's PATRIOT Act resolution last July, the CLA resolution goes further to address imminent First and Fourth Amendment concerns with Section 505. This provision grants the FBI broad authority to sidestep constitutional safeguards though use of National Security Letters to obtain information.

CLA Intellectual Freedom Committee chair, Mary Minow, a leading expert on library law, said, "It's past time for the blatantly unconstitutional aspects of this legislation to be removed from the books, and now is the opportunity for Congress to act."

Two sections of the PATRIOT Act are currently up for reauthorization, with sunsets at the end of December 2009, and librarians across the country see this as an opportunity to correct those provisions that attack basic civil liberties. CLA's resolution calls for Congress to allow Section 215 to sunset, to amend Section 505 to "include a clear exemption for library records," and in general to intensify Congressional oversight of the use of the Act.

CLA Resolution on 2009 Reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act (PDF - 481k)

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September 02, 2009

From Kumar Percy Jayasuriya of Georgetown Law Library via GOVDOC-L:

You may have heard that some law librarians have drafted a petition to ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to enhance the search features of PACER (the database of federal judicial information) and to make it free for GPO depository libraries.

On September 11 Erika Wayne of Stanford Law Library, Terry Martin of the University of Texas Law Library, and I will deliver the petition to the AO's office as well as staff members from the Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, and Senator Lieberman's office. Please take this opportunity to join hundreds of librarians and such legal notables as Jonathan Zittrain, Eugene Volokh, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Ellen Miller, and many others in this effort to update PACER.

As government documents librarians, please consider lending your voice to this effort to create more open government.

Please feel free to write any personal comments if you sign the petition. From the petition web site you can read some of the insightful comments and additional requests individuals have submitted when they signed. We invite your input.

You can sign here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-pacer

You can also see the number of people who have signed (830 as of this writing) and see the list of names along with any comments submitted.

Also, we recently posted a summary to our PACER spending survey on our Legal Research Plus blog. The finding are available at:

http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/08/28/pacer-spending-survey/

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August 25, 2009

The Curious Case of West

West, now part of Thomson Reuters, appears to be having issues in marketing and outreach. Note the plural.

1) The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) rejected West's proposed sponsorship of the 2009 Annual Meeting, in response to West/TR's continued refusal to participate in AALL's Price Index. [Personally ... wow, turning down major dollars in this economic environment? Bravo to AALL for putting its money where its mouth is, as it were.]

2) Both West & LexisNexis expend considerable funds, time and manpower to get law students hooked on their brands (and as a former law student, I am so appreciative ... thanks for the free Nintendo DS, LexisNexis!) For those of you who never been to a law school library, one of the bennies both companies provide are dedicated printers that print WestLaw/LN material for students free of cost. Very convenient, useful, addicting. But West has decided that a very few schools don't get this benefit, and pulled their Westlaw printers from their law libraries. Happily, West printers have been reinstated at the University of Puerto Rico law school.

3) And now there's the email. West sent out an email to attorney clients with a graphic of "librarian" eyeglasses and the following text: "ARE YOU ON A FIRST NAME BASIS WITH THE LIBRARIAN? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time in the library." Needless to say, law librarians aren't pleased.

So, really ... what's going on with West? Is this going on with other types of libraries? Other vendors? And what's the appropriate response from the library community?

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June 30, 2009

Methodology, Part I: How to Score the Obama Administration's Information Policy

After hearing various piecemeal accounts of how the Obama Administration has been treating government information, it occurred to me that a score card could be a rather useful thing.

This is a big no-no in legal and academic writing, but I'm going to start with the caveats:

1) Truth be told, I think it's a touch early to be "grading" the Obama Administration on much. It hasn't even been 6 months since he was sworn in as President of the United States. And the executive branch of the government has a lot on its collective plate: 2 formal wars, a deeply troubled (and troubling) economy, and an international campaign against terrorism is just what we started with at the beginning of the administration and things haven't exactly slowed down since January '09.

Continue reading "Methodology, Part I: How to Score the Obama Administration's Information Policy"

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