(from Information Retrieval & Library Automation, Vol. 36, No. 7, December 2000)
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s science advisor appointed a special task force to examine federal scientific and technical information programs. The task force made two major organizational recommendations: a central authority to lead government information activities and an office in each R&D agency to direct and control information activities. The second recommendation was in large part implemented, but the central authority was never established. In August 1999, the Department of Commerce announced its intention to close the central information dissemination agency, the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). The rationale for the closure was that, suffering from declining sales and income, NTIS had been overtaken by the advance of electronic technology, the distributed nature of the Internet, and the progress of individual agencies in mounting their publications on their own Web sites. In the distributed environment of the Internet a centralized organization such as NCLIS was an anachronism.
The Fate of NTIS
In the ensuing outcry from the library and research communities, the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) made a formal study of the matter. In its preliminary assessment, NCLIS concluded that the fate of NTIS could only usefully be considered in a larger context.
In June 2000, Senator John McCain, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, asked NCLIS to take on that larger context. He requested that NCLIS review “the reforms necessary for the federal government’s information dissemination practices,” to include “at a minimum” new or revised laws, rules, regulations, missions, policies; modernizing organization structures and functions; “revoking NTIS self-sufficiency requirement”; and “strengthening other key components of the overall federal information dissemination infrastructure.” He also asked the commission to make specific recommendations on the future of NTIS.
Senator Joseph Lieberman later joined in the request, adding further issues for consideration. Five months later, the commission has responded with a comprehensive plan, including a proposal to establish a central authority to lead government information activities in a distributed environment. The draft report was accompanied by draft legislation and an array of appendices and white papers. The final report is due to Congress and the President on December 15.
Recent proposals for reform--most notably legislation developed by a working group of the library associations and introduced in 1998--have sought to revise the existing structure and strengthen and expand the role of the Federal Deposit Library Program (FDLP).
In its draft legislation, NCLIS has proposed to “reform the federal government’s public information infrastructure at all levels, and in all branches of government.” The commission puts FDLP, the Government Printing Office (GPO), the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs), and NTIS in a new structure under a new independent executive-branch agency, the Public Information Resource Administration (PIRA). That agency would be the central public information authority in the federal government.
Not Just a Reorg
But the proposal is not just a reorganization. It is an attempt to institutionalize strongly held principles of librarians, information scientists, and researchers in the Information Age. Public information is not a by-product of agency missions. So the NCLIS proposal makes it explicitly part of each mission. Public information planning, management, and dissemination is a government-wide mission in itself. So a lead agency is assigned with that mission.
The “new organization is not really what this report’s about,” NCLIS Executive Director Robert Willard said in a public hearing on the proposal. It is above all, the commission makes clear in its report, about public information as a “strategic national asset.”
Access to this resource is a right of citizens, not granted through passive agency acquiescence but as a result of “proactive dissemination.” The commission: “After all, has not the taxpayer paid for the information in the first place, and do not the citizens of this country own their government’s information?” NCLIS has sought to weave these principles of librarianship, information science, and scientific research into the fabric of legislation, executive orders and guidance, the federal budget, and agency practice.
The Public Information Resources Program
The Public Information Resources Administration of the NCLIS proposal would oversee the Public Information Resources Access Program and provide “overall policy leadership, management, oversight, and accountability for public information resources.” The agency incorporates existing offices and functions and takes on new ones. It has “sufficient independence and authority to ensure agency compliance.”
FDLP and the executive-branch functions of the GPO would move to PIRA from the legislative branch, where GPO currently resides. GPO’s Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) would be retitled superintendent for information services (SuPIR) and would come under the deputy administrator for public information resources. A deputy administrator for public information and communications technologies would oversee a new position, the superintendent of public and information communication technologies (SuPICT).
FDLP would become the Public Information Resources Access Program (PIRAP), responsible for the “selection, cataloging, classification, locator, and indexing services for all public information resources,” according to the draft legislation, from all three branches of the federal government. “In dire need” of a new service model “appropriate to the Internet Age,” FDLP would be revitalized and contribute to the general effort its “elite cadre of government information specialists.”
PIRA and the National Archives Administration (NARA) would work together to allow agencies to make a single submission for permanent records retention under the Federal Records Act. The agencies would create standards and guidelines for the authentication of resources and their transfer to PIRA and for deciding whether PIRA maintains a particular resource or transfers it to NARA. Resources at both agencies will be retained indefinitely.
FirstGov and the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) would move from the General Services Administration to PIRA.
CIRO & JIRO
Document and information functions carried out by GPO for the legislative branch would come under the new legislative-branch agency, the Congressional Information Resources Office (CIRO). CIRO would also be responsible for ensuring that “information resources management principles and practices are diffused more widely throughout the entire Legislative information life cycle.”
The judicial branch would have its own office to oversee public information matters, the Judicial Information Resources Office (JIRO).
Advisory Councils
In addition to PIRA, CIRO, and JIRO, the commission proposes two advisory councils to help guide the Public Information Resources Program.
A Council on Public Information Resources (CPIR) would “serve as an advisory board” to PIRA to “ensure a consistent application” of “policies, regulations, standards, guidelines, and procedures.” The council would comprise the heads of agencies with public information missions; two state-level CIOs; one local-level CIO; two public members; a minimum of four other persons representing executive departments “with significant information dissemination missions”; and at least one other representative of “an independent agency with a significant dissemination mission.”
A Public Information Resources Users Council (PIRUC) would advise the SuPIR and the Council on Public Information Resources on the effect of federal regulations, policies, standards, guidelines, and procedures on the availability of public information resources. It would consist of at least 15 members: at least 6 from the Public Information Resources Access Libraries (current Federal Depository Libraries) and 9 from state and local government, public interest groups, user groups, trade and professional associations, and individuals with a substantial knowledge of public information resources.
Other Entities
The commission also proposes to establish administrators to head federal efforts in
State, local, and tribal governments might “consider establishing comparable public information resources planning, management, and control machinery,” the commission suggests.
GPO & NTIS
Two venerable institutions in the history of U.S. government public information, the Government Printing Office and the National Technical Information Service, find themselves hamstrung by outmoded laws and regulations and at odds with each other.
Created as an agent of the legislature when Congress produced most government publications, GPO now works heavily for the executive branch, which views the current arrangement as a violation of the separation of powers, according to the NCLIS report.
The use of information technology and the Web have “made it virtually impossible and impractical to effectively manage Executive Branch information activities from a Legislative Branch office,” NCLIS says, but it also acknowledges the opposition that the proposal may face:
However, the likelihood of the Congress approving a shift of the Superintendent of Documents to the Executive Branch seemed so remote to many of the panel members that they were very reluctant to even want to propose it.
In the 1990s, as more information became available free on the Internet, and as much publicly funded research shifted to the private sector, sales declined. The reaction of the Department of Commerce was to close what appeared to be an obsolescent service.
For now, the commission recommends that NTIS remain in the Department of Commerce with sufficient funding to allow the lifting of the current hiring freeze. The scope of the service should be limited to scientific and technical information (STI) and should exclude general public information. For information that resides with mission agencies, NTIS should be able to provide searchable access and pointers for obtaining documents. It should provide backup for distribution of reports not available elsewhere and assure the permanent availability and accessibility of documents.
Under PIRA, NTIS would be funded by a mix of appropriated funding, revenues from sales, and reimbursements for its services to other agencies. The “inherently governmental” activities that NTIS carries out for the “public good” would be paid for through appropriations, not sales revenues. NTIS should not charge royalties, the commission says, and its charges for documents should be “based on the incremental cost of providing the copies.”
Private Sector & Research Libraries
The federal government is responsible for “the entire life cycle of electronic government information, including the dissemination and permanent public access to government information, without restrictions, to the American public.” Nevertheless the private sector has “an important role in the development of new technology and new systems for information publication, access and retrieval.”
Government is obligated to “facilitate a multiplicity and diversity of sources and roles” and make information “openly available in readily reproducible form without any constraints on subsequent uses.” The government must not “frustrate private sector redissemination activities by imposing restrictions or by limiting private sector access to electronic formats.”
Partnerships between the public and private sectors “should be strengthened, extended, and expanded,” the commission says. Much of the work to prepare information for dissemination, along with the tools to locate and search information resources, is appropriate for the government to do. Given the limits of its resources, however, “the government should undertake only the most necessary user assistance activities and need not duplicate or adopt all types of services that private sector and library providers offer.” Small business and sole proprietorships make up a “disadvantaged population,” the commission says, that needs special assistance from the government to compete and grow.
The commission also calls for partnerships between federal agencies and “major research libraries.”
The commission recommends Library Services and Technology Act (LCTA) funding through NCLIS, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and others for the training of library and information professionals in the assistance of end users of government information.
The Concepts
“There needs to be a single, government-wide focal point for policy development, coordination, and oversight, for the government as a whole, and within each branch.”
The lack of this policy leadership, the commission says, has contributed to unnecessary duplication; the loss of important information; inattention to the needs of disadvantaged and disabled Americans; difficulties in information sharing between governments, branches, and agencies; and uncoordinated policies, programs, standards, guidelines, and practices.
Information Life Cycle Management
The Paperwork Reduction Act directs agencies to develop a management system for information dissemination. OMB Circular A-130 provides the guidance for implementing the act’s intentions. But the commission finds contradictions in the document. Although the circular emphasizes both content and technology in its discussion of policy, in its discussion of planning, it addresses only information systems (hardware and software).
Information content management should be addressed at all stages of the information life cycle. That systems approach needs to be strengthened and clarified in the reauthorization of the Paperwork Reduction Act in 2001 and revisions of OMB Circular A-130. NCLIS proposes the development of “an integrated information life cycle management software module” as a tool in satisfying information policy requirements.
Proactive Dissemination
NCLIS seeks to bestir mission agencies from the passive approach to public information. “Agencies have assumed that by merely making the information electronically accessible, they thereby, somehow, relieve themselves of the obligation of disseminating the information proactively to the public. They incorrectly equate passive information access with proactive information dissemination.”
Agencies’ posting documents to the Web, the commission says, “does not relieve them of the responsibility of ensuring that their information is disseminating equitably and cost-effectively” to the citizens they served before the Internet.
Permanent Availability and Authenticity
Public information should not only be widely available, but permanently. Existing laws and institutions, however, do not assure permanent availability or preservation of important information.
With each agency posting on its own, the life-span of any document may be determined by the needs of the agency rather than the public. “Electronic government documents often, quite literally, appear one day and disappear without a trace the next,” the commission found.
“Public access should not end when the agency sponsoring the research decides—possibly for budgetary reasons—that the report will no longer be made available on the agency’s website.” A centralized agency, such as FDLP and NTIS, acts as the backup for documents not posted to or removed from agency sites. But with conflicts between the two agencies, documents fall through the crack.
As more agencies post more documents to their own sites, and as rules for posting electronic documents remain unclarified, more “fugitive” documents escape capture. Many agencies, for example, are unaware of their responsibility to deposit research results information through GPO and assume that a submission to NTIS reaches the depository libraries.
The commission recommends “the establishment of a single, authoritative electronic public information resources database to complement agency web site postings.” By combining the mission and functions of the FDLP and NTIS under one roof, the commission hopes to provide a more reliable safety net for documents not held permanently by the agencies.
Electronic publication and the decentralization of information dissemination raise new problems in establishing authenticity that need to be addressed.
Interagency Information Sharing
NCLIS gives particular emphasis to the importance of facilitating and encouraging information sharing between agencies, the branches of government, and levels of government. Existing guidance to facilitate this internal dissemination of information is inadequate and inconsistent, the commission finds.
OMB Circular A-130 briefly addresses interagency information sharing in passing, directing the agencies to look for existing governmental and commercial sources “before creating or collecting new information,” but it does not consider sharing as an activity with value on its own, in a “positive construct,” the commission says. Indeed the circular specifically excludes interagency information sharing, internal dissemination, from its definition of information dissemination.
Interagency information sharing should be part of “overall government knowledge diffusion goal.” NCLIS would integrate dissemination of information to the public with information sharing between agencies. In new legislation and guidance, internal and external information would no longer be treated “as if one had no relation to the other,” but as paths that cross in the information life cycle.
Enforcement
Information is sometimes lost because agencies are unclear about what to do—Is posting to the agency site enough? Are STI research results required to go to the FDLP as well as NTIS?
In other cases agencies slide past requirements as they focus on more pressing demands, and responsible agencies fail to enforce.
An OMB Circular A-130 requirement that agencies keep an inventory of information dissemination products, for example, “has never been adequately enforced.” The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) has been implemented by some agencies but ignored by others with weaker information management organizations and more immediate spending priorities. OMB has failed to enforce the requirement.
In its efforts to keep GPO Access complete and up-to-date, GPO is forced to search for many of the online resources it links to, as is the Library of Congress for its Thomas collection of congressional information and NTIS for the FedWorld STI collection.
NTIS estimates that 25% of reports that should be submitted to it under requirements of the American Technology Preeminence Act are not.
Administration Action, Legislation,
& Congressional Oversight
In addition to the recommendations in its report, NCLIS has given the executive and legislative branches a rough cut of tools to construct the program and implement the recommendations. The commission has drafted an executive order for the President to issue, establishing the importance of proactive agency initiatives in making information resources available. The President should also issue an executive order or memorandum calling for “a standard paragraph in every agency’s mission statement identifying public information dissemination as a primary responsibility”—and to consider it a direct cost of doing business, not overhead.
Legislation
Under the NCLIS proposals, legislation would mandate dissemination as a responsibility of each agency and would budget for it. It would also contribute to the clarity and consistency of information policy by providing a single definition for certain concepts heretofore poorly and inconsistently defined, such as public information, government document, and permanent public access. The same definitions would be included in other applicable laws. Congress should ensure that these concepts are incorporated into legislation and into its conduct of agency oversight.
The commission found many statutes that “authorize, and even mandate, the dissemination of research results, best practices and model programs as an integral part of the program. Yet, the funding for this dissemination is rarely identified as a specific cost in either the authorizing or the appropriations language.”
The commission rejects the view of “many Internet gurus” who claim that the cost of dissemination is now “an outmoded concept.” On the contrary, the commission finds, “burying public information dissemination expenses in overhead accounts is completely inappropriate and counterproductive in the Information Age.” The commission would have an information dissemination budget line item included in each agency’s appropriation. An overall line item would be included in the President’s Budget.
By making information dissemination central to agency missions, and by setting aside funding for it, the commission hopes to make it safe for agencies to carry out their information dissemination responsibilities. Currently, agencies fear that spending nonmission activities, such as information dissemination, risks cuts in appropriations from a disapproving Congress.
The line item would be divided between STI and non-STI funds. The STI component would come out of R&D appropriations, at least .03%. The FY 2001 proposed $85 billion in federal R&D funding would entail $25.5 million for “public good functions” to disseminate information.
The commission has provided a hefty and detailed draft of legislation it suggests might be introduced in the next Congress, preferably as early as the first session, “to provide a new statutory foundation for the formal establishment of government’s knowledge holdings as a strategic national asset.”
The commission has also volunteered—preferably with the assistance of the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, and the National Research Council—to compare laws using the cumulative public information laws database to eliminate contradictory policies and duplicative requirements.
Other Recommendations
In addition to its “strategic” recommendations, NCLIS includes in its report a list of other recommendations, including several concerning NTIS. Other recommendations concern federal information identifiers (e.g., DOI and PURLS), long-term content management, XML, archiving metadata, digital conversion, Web-posting guidelines, and international public information management.
Oral Comment
At a December 4 meeting to take comments on the draft report and legislation, NCLIS Chairperson Martha Gould opened the session by recalling discussions about the study with congressional staff, who urged the commission not to strain for consensus or stakeholder agreement, but to give Congress the benefit of its own assessment. The report should not “pull punches” or keep back a proposal because it might be “politically difficult.”
In the testimony of Mary Alice Baish—the American Association of Law Libraries’ Washington representative, and a panel member contributing to study—the commission’s success in following that guidance was confirmed. In expressing her “disappointment” in the NCLIS report, Baish also pulled no punches. She called the study “an ambitious undertaking” but expressed doubt that a “new and larger” public information bureaucracy is “politically feasible” or even advisable. While the commission proposes “dramatic” organizational changes “that have not yet been reviewed by stakeholders” and that “may or may not have the support of the administration or of the Congress,” she said, “NTIS may be left dangling in the wind.”
Baish also urged NCLIS “to review the statutory language drafted by the library community as part of S. 2288,” legislation that faced opposition from information technology and publishing firms and died in the 105th Congress two years ago. That proposal, she said, was “a thoughtful, incremental approach to strengthening the Federal Deposit Libraries Program.”
Nancy Kranich, president of the American Library Association, did not address the NCLIS proposals directly but said that her organization “believes that these issues are so important that our members will discuss them extensively at our midwinter conference coming up in January here in Washington. Likewise,” she said, “we highly recommend that the general public be granted the same opportunity for a full and robust discussion of these very important issues.”
Speaking for herself as a federal librarian, Susan M. Tarr, executive director of the Federal Library and Information Center Committee, echoed some of the commission’s findings. While the main function of federal libraries is to serve the members of the agency, she said, “service to external users and internal users is converging.” She endorsed the idea of giving agencies “explicitly budgeted responsibility” for public information dissemination. Many, she said, “consider the job ends when they acquire their research results” and are unable “to see it from a user’s perspective.” She did disagree with the report, however, in its statement, “In many cases federal agencies have no central information content management organization and thus no mechanism to promote sharing.” “Yes they do,” Tarr said, “their library.”
- Maxine Hattery -