Washington, DC - The U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) announced that the final report of a nine-month survey entitled Assessment of Electronic Government Information Products was received today. The report was prepared for NCLIS by a contractor, Westat, Inc., and was commissioned by the Government Printing Office (GPO). The purpose of the survey was to collect detailed information on federal agency plans and practices related to the migration of ink-on-paper and microform products to electronic formats and mediums (especially the Internet). The study used a cross-section sample of several hundred electronic government information products.
The report's Executive Summary, which contains the survey's key findings as well as other background details related to the survey's methodology, may be accessed on NCLIS' Web site at www.nclis.gov/news/news.html#gpo. The complete final report will be published shortly in hard copy by GPO. Copies of the report will be distributed to the 24 federal agencies which participated in the survey, the study's advisory group, as well the Nation's 1350 federal depository libraries. A limited number of copies is available from NCLIS. The complete report will be available on the GPO Access Web site at www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/nclisassessment/report.html.
NCLIS Chairperson Jeanne Hurley Simon pointed out that the survey enjoyed the active support and participation of all three branches of government. Twenty-four different federal entities participated, including the Supreme Court, several committees of the Congress, one regulatory commission, and 19 executive branch agencies, including most of the cabinet departments. In addition to this broad and diverse participation, an impressive 74% of the survey forms (242 out of 328 sent to the agencies) were returned completed.
Among the key findings of the survey was the observation that there is an overall lack of government information policy guiding electronic publishing, dissemination, permanent public access, and information life cycle management, especially as information policy relates to agency missions. Also, there is a lack of overall coordination of these initiatives at the governmental, branch, and even agency level. Moreover, responsibility for electronic publishing within agencies is decentralized, diffuse, and unclear. Some agencies either could not identify or had difficulty identifying the proper respondent within their own agency, or even the person who was responsible for the product.
On the other hand, the survey found that some government agencies have already, or are moving to, establish guidelines or best practices for presenting and organizing government information products on the web, although full compliance with guidelines is a goal that has not yet been achieved. And agencies are also exploring a wide range of innovative formats and web design approaches for products. Clearly, agencies are responding to the opportunities being presented by the new electronic information technologies to improve public access to the vast reservoir of available government information.
In summary, Simon said that the survey findings probably will not surprise very many people, especially those who have been aware for some time of the underlying problems of coping with multiple mediums and product formats, rapidly changing technologies, the absence of widely agreed-upon standards, and the availability of very few cost-effective alternatives. Nor, she said, will readers of the final report find any "magic bullets" that will make the problems go away overnight.
NCLIS is planning a third and final study phase for the purpose of identifying concrete actions the government could and should pursue, taking into account the results of the contractor's report (Phase II), along with an earlier review undertaken by the Computer Sciences and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 (Phase I). NCLIS promises that this final effort will be underway by the summer, 1999.
The U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science is a permanent, independent agency of the federal government charged by Public Law 91-345 to advise the President and the Congress on national and international library and information policies and plans.