Cool Toys pics of the day: Ann Arbor Area Government Document Repository
Ann Arbor Area Government Document Repository:
http://a2docs.org/
this being local and I know the folks involved. While that brought it
to my attention sooner than if it was in Vermont or Montana, that
isn't why it's cool. I've been working in libraries a mighty long time. (/me scratches my
head, thinking, oh, about 35 years last Fall?) Early on I started
asking questions of librarians who were no spring chickens back then,
and soaking up all kinds of librarianship classics. Oh, I picked up a
ton of tidbits that were cool then and archaic now. The engineering
design and construction of books, how to properly load a book truck,
and then the really weird stuff, like how you can look at a trail of
where a bug was eating a book and tell whether it was a silverfish or
a cockroach based on how their jaws move. Among the oddities I picked
up was how to read a SuDoc number. For those who are new to this,
SuDoc stands for Superintendent of Documents. Federal Depository Library Program: An Explanation of the
Superintendent of Documents Classification System:
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/pubs/explain.html Every library system I've ever worked in has been a Government
Documents Depository Library, lucky for me. Unluckily, this doesn't
mean as much as it used to. This gets back to Abraham Lincoln's "that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth" and Thomas Jefferson's "An enlightened
citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic.
Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated
sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight." Both of these
gentlemen affirmed simply that the people of the country need access
to both education and information, especially about their government,
in order to effectively practice their duties as citizens. You could,
in theory, get a full and rich education working solely from
government documents, and any citizen was supposed to have access to
these documents (barring those under delayed release for national
security reasons). Back when I was starting out in libraries the practice was to have
virtually every publication of any branch of the United States Federal
Government made available at a minimum of one library per state, with
additional depository libraries that received partial collections of
the more major publications. At least, that's what I recall from my
distant memory, and I may have misunderstood something or received
incomplete explanations, but you get the idea. The sheer quantity was
astounding. "The mission of the FDLP is to disseminate information products from
all three branches of the Government to about 1,250 libraries
nationwide at no cost."
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html Easier said than done, I assure you. As publishing has skyrocketed in
science, arts and literature, government publishing has kept pace.
Costs of providing free copies to over a thousand libraries, well, it
isn't cheap, even with a shift from print to microform, and from
microform to electronic. Ever smaller percentages of the universe of
US government publications are kept in even the largest depository
libraries. And that is just relating to the federal publications! States were never required to do the same thing, but usually the
federal depository libraries also had arrangements to receive
government publications, perhaps not quite as comprehensively, from
their state and local governments. Usually, the smaller the
government, the less funding was available and the less attention was
able to be given to verifying that copies all the significant
documents made it to the local libraries. We see this even at our
campus level, where I know too well that the archival library shows
wide differences in the official record from school to school within
the University. So, what do you think would tend to be the government documents most
sought and least available? Yes, the information from our immediate
local government for the towns and villages where we live. People want
to know about the streets they live on, the businesses they shop in,
the buses they ride, the schools their children attend, the parks they
play in. That information is incredibly difficult to find and access. Now, to put this in context, I'm sure you're all aware of the new
movement for transparency in government and the "Open Government" and
"Government 2.0" initiatives. White House: Open Government Initiative:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/Open Somehow, there is a poignancy and sense of fragile urgency when we
look at the question of access to local government in a world where
nation after nation are either creating and supporting participatory
government models or doing the reverse and tightly locking down access
to information and free speech. If we have open government and
transparency, it needs to be transparent all the way down, not just at
the glass ceiling. But to do so, ah, well, again, easier said than
done. What we see here is an initiative to engage the local citizenry and
political pundits and those who CARE about the local politics and
government documents and access to information in finding a solution.
Crowdsourcing of a critical and immediate problem in government at the
very root, with the solutions and archiving and access being managed
by the citizens themselves. Briefly, people can help locate, gather,
archive and share local government documents of interest to the local
community in an online public community forum. I must fiercely and
fervently applaud the vision that lead to the creation of this
project, and hope it will serve as a model for many similar
initiatives dotting the American ether and landscape.
