Government Publications Review, Vol. 11, pp. 363-367, 1984 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.

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THE STAKEHOLDERS: PANEL DISCUSSION

Panelists representing the public sector, the private sector, the federal sector, and end users provide brief “perspectives” on key concerns relating to government information and the increased use of electronic/computerized resources for information management, crea- tion, or dissemination.

PUBLIC SECTOR

BARBARA SMITH Associate Professor and Government Documents/Reference Librarian,

Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

Abstract-Smith describes the role of depository libraries in providing government information. She speaks against policies which restrict access to information and argues for information as a public good to be provided free of restraints and free of unreasonable costs in whatever media it is produced.

Just five weeks ago, Friday, March 30, to be exact, Senator Charles Mathias rose on the Senate floor to introduce a resolution. Noting that “The nation will soon be celebrating Na- tional Library Week to recognize the vital public service that has characterized [the] nation’s libraries,” and speaking for his co-sponsors as well, his “distinguished colleagues” from the Joint Committee on Printing and the Joint Committee on the Library, Senator Mathias asked for immediate consideration of Calendar No. 730, Senate Resolution 359, honoring the depository library program. Remarking that “the Senate of the United States has a long tradition of supporting the public’s right to know about policies, programs, and actions of our Government,” Senator Mathias went on to quote from a letter written in 1822 by James Madison, our fourth president, that “strict constructionist” and illustrious father of our Constitution. Writing to William Taylor Barry, Kentucky lawyer and statesman, Madison warned that “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Senatsr Mathias then put on the record his intention that “this resolution will serve to reaffirm the commitment of the U.S. Senate to arm U.S. citizens with the power that knowledge gives,” and to reaffirm the Senate’s support of a program that

Barbara Smith has been coordinator for the American Library Association Government Documents Roundtable Federal Documents Task Force, a fellow of the Council on Library Resources, and a member and chair of the Depository Library Council to the Public Printer.

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insures its citizens “public knowledge of their Government’s action in each and every con- gressional district in our land.” And so that body did indeed resolve, “That the Senate pay tribute to depository libraries throughout the land and commend the many dedicated people associated with the depository library program for their significant contribution in further- ing the cause of free and open public access to Government information” [l].

Contrast that legislative position on government information, if you will, with what seems to be the primary goal of our present Administration’s policy: to restrict, cost, and control the dissemination of information; to make of government information, a commodity, the only and underlying principle being that: “Information is not a free good but a resource of substantial economic value and should be treated as such” [2].

For make no mistake, our friends in this administration clearly recognize that one, infor- mation is money, and two, information is power; that “who knows what” is very likely to become more important than “who has what” [3]. At the same time, this administration ex- hibits a veritable Alice in Wonderland quality in the way it handles information; on the one hand treating it as a powerful economic resource, looking to open to the commercial sector for private gain that vast cornucopia of public, scientific and technical information that has been “collected, produced, or created by and for the federal government, with federal funds” [4]. On the other hand, we see an administration nursing an almost obsessive preoc- cupation with the risks of information, equating security with secrecy until, as New York at- torney Floyd Abrams writes in the New York Times Magazine of September 25, 1983, it “treats information as if it was a potentially disabling contagious disease that must be con- trolled, quarantined, and ultimately cured” [5].

How do we then, as librarians, see our stake in this curious quagmire? How do we, as public sector stalwarts, intend to speak for the public good in an automated age? It would seem to me that our first and primary responsibility lies in enunciating, very clearly, a set of principles that we believe must be incorporated into public information policies. We were very fortunate in New York to have Dr. Marta Dosa of the Syracuse University School of In- formation Studies as a member of a task force charged with the development of a state plan for federal depository library service. Professor Dosa helped us draft a statement describing the political, economic, and social significance of access to government documentation in a free and increasingly automated information-oriented society. I would like to share parts of it with you because I believe it speaks compellingly to the issue before us:

Information is a resource of great human, social, and economic value. Through the nearly 1,400 Congressionally designated libraries across the United States, the body politic has been guaranteed free and open access to information about its govern- ment. The laws establishing the federal depository library system are, in fact, among the oldest right-to-know statutes passed by the U.S. Congress and have ensured for the American public an integrated totality of federal information that is part of our national heritage. At the present time, federal information is being distributed both through libraries and a variety of other organizations, both for-profit and not-for- profit. All of these channels should be enhanced by public policies. As in all areas of public concern, societal and individual interests must be balanced, and nowhere is the need for this balance between the public and private sector more vital than in the context of open access to information. While we acknowledge the need for com- petitive private sector investment in large-scale data base and retrieval systems and the protection of private data rights, we must insist that the federal government has the responsibility to provide federal information together with the necessary bibliographic and locator tools to the public. Citizens must be aware and informed, regardless of their ability to use complex information systems and to pay for infor- mation services.

Accordingly, we would base public information policies on the following principles:

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(1.) The federal government is responsible for ensuring equitable and open access by the public to federal information. We accept the interpretation of “open access” and “open availability” as “making information available without prior restrictions (except those explicitly identified in the Freedom of Information Act) and without procedural complications.” [6]

(2.) Information is a national resource for improving the quality of life of citizens, raising productivity, alleviating social problems, and other aspects of the human enterprise, and thus it is in the national interest to provide information to the public.

(3.) The federal government should acknowledge the role of private initiative in creating a diversity of information systems directed at the commercial and industrial markets that can be well served by private organizations, but the federal government should maintain a leadership role in assuring an adequate level of free information flow to the public and should reinforce that role by integrated information policy development, research support, and manpower development.

(4.) Policies should be formulated, if necessary by coordinated Congressional and Executive actions, to assure open information access for the public at the same time that the private sector is encouraged to produce and market competitive information products and services.

(5.) The generation, development, dissemination, and use of information should be considered as phases of a system of information transfer; consequently, the federal government should be responsible for policies assuring that federal information is not only made available to the public, but that every effort is made to encourage and ensure its use at the individual citizen level. [7]

Our stake in the information transfer process is obvious. Positioned as we are between what increasingly may be the information-poor and the information-rich of our society, libraries will have to bridge the public sector/private sector chasm, and the next 5 to 10 years should determine whether and/or how libraries meet the challenge of the electronic informa- tion age.

Most of us come from traditional libraries where the pattern has been to warehouse great masses of print on paper; we have invested our resources in printed abstracts and indexes; we have existed in that state of bliss where reference staff time escaped budget analysis and where the only information costs we recognized were the photocopying charges. Then we blinked for a moment in time some 5 or 6 years ago and found ourselves awash in a flood of federal microfiche, with all its attendant equipment needs-readers and printers, cabinets and duplicators. We busied ourselves creating user friendly microform areas and in our static, passive ways, we made it all work and for free.

But “static” isn’t an adjective that applies to information-no one has even successfully defined the term. After commenting that attempts to define the word “information” have become a major preoccupation and pastime of the entire “information community,” the NCLIS (National Commission on Libraries and Information Science) Public Sector/Private Sector Task Force announced that “it was impossible to arrive at a generally agreed-upon definition” and the term therefore is to be “taken as a ‘primitive,’ to be interpreted as needed” [S]. I might add, however, that the task force report devoted a number of pages to an ex- planation of the attempts made to arrive at an explicit understanding of the “variety of forms, purpose, sources, and utilizations made of information” that may be covered by the term “government information” [9].

C. West Churchman really had it all together when he complained some 15 years ago that “Information in effect is a reproductive organism that has no morals and goes around generating offspring without any consideration of the effect of its own population explosion” [IO].

High tech is, of course, one of those inevitable offspring of the information explosion and

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its effect on libraries has been both immediate and overwhelming, at once exhilarating and often terrifying. Mistakes made in an electronic milieu can mean millions risked, not to men- tion careers ruined. Nothing in our earlier technology has so quickly separated the “haves” from the “have-riots... And here again is our stake and our dilemma. We may not be able to define “government or public information” but we know that it has the capacity to waft magically into our libraries on invisible waves or hard wires, as the case may be, displayed as little green squiggles on long lines of computer terminal screens or splattered out on com- puter print-out sheets at a dizzying speed. We have also come to know that the invoices for all this follow swiftly and surely.

And so the quandary. Surrounded by the promise and potential of computer technology, knowing, for instance, that with one micro we can download and create our own database, bemused by the prospect of optical disks that can store and retrieve 54,000 pages of full text per disk, aware that satellite communication has truly made this a very small planet, know- ing that there are tens of thousands of government machine-readable data bases still out of Title 44 reach, how do we in the public sector propose to monitor the methods by which our government manages this vast information reservoir so that sufficient funding is provided to meet the information needs of all our citizens?

What public good is served by a billion dollars spent in gathering census information if we in the libraries have to set up a dual system whereby the information is accessed- offering on one hand stacks of printed books and envelopes of fiche to one set of users while, for a fee from our more affluent friends, we can offer entry to the room down the hall where sum- mary tapes spin and software exists to reduce hours of manual drudgery to minutes on a print-out. We can all multiply this example a hundredfold- whether it be ERIC or Agricola, DOE or Labstat, Medline or TRIS.

What we in the library community must understand, and Bernadine Hoduski has ar- ticulated the case brilliantly in papers presented first at IFLA in 1979 [ 1 l] and more recently at the Second Annual Government Documents and Information Conference, [12] we must develop a strong political activist role across the whole range of information policy.

Let us state once and for all that government information management is much too impor- tant to be treated as a business and left to the accountants at OMB (Office of Management and Budget) to solve. And let us understand that we do not have to be mesmerized by Public Law 96-511, the ubiquitous Paperwork Reduction Act. Let us instead seize the opportunities the electronic revolution offers and bring all the information and persuasive power we possess to bear on our public authorities to convince them that the dissemination of public information is a sacred trust, that an informed democracy depends upon a free and unrestricted flow of information, that not only the effective functioning of our economic and political system is at stake, but the level of the nation’s cultural life as well.

Surely, we in the library and information community can demand no less than that our government fulfills this public trust.

REFERENCES

1. Congressional Record, March 30, 1984, S3509, 3510 (daily edition). 2. 48 Federal Register 40964. 3. Henry, Nicholas. “The Future of Information,” Future Journal (August 1973). Quoted in McHale, John, The

Changing Information Environmeni. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976, p. 25. 4. 45 Federal Register 38461. 5. Abrams, Floyd. “The New Effort to Control Information,” New York Times Magazine (September 25, 1983),

p. 23. 6. U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Public Sector/Private Sector Interaction in

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Providing information Services, Report to the NCLIS from the Public Sector/Private Sector Task Force. Washington: GPO, 1982, p. 23.

7. “Addendum 2-Policy Context,” New York State Plan for Federuf Depository Library Service. Albany, NY: The New York State Library, 1983.

8. Public Sector/Private Sector Interaction in Providing Information Services, pp. 16, 17. 9. Public Sector/Private Sector Interaction in Providing Information Services, p. 20.

10. Churchman, C. West. The Systems Approach. New York: Delacorte Press, 1968. Quoted by Pauline Atherton in Information Technology Society, ed. by Robert Chartrand and James W. Morentz, Jr. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979, p. 35.

11. Hoduski, Bernadine. “Librarians Can Influence Government Publication Activity,” Canadian Library Journal 37 (April 1980), pp. 79-84.

12. Hoduski, Bernadine. “Political Activism for Documents Librarians,” in Communicating Public Access to Government Information, ed. by Peter Hernon. Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1983, pp. 1-I 1.