March 30, 2006
Nation’s ‘public printer’ to speak (and it’s more interesting than you think)
On April 2, the public printer of the United States will be giving a speech in Seattle. Before you say, “Who’s that?” or “Who cares?” Cass Hartnett would like you to know that the public printer has more relevance to your life than you might think.
Hartnett is the U.S. documents librarian for UW Libraries. Together with her supervisor Eleanor Chase (head of Government Publications) and a team of librarians, staff and student workers, she is the guardian of a collection that’s part of the Federal Depository Library Program. The public printer will be here as part of the Depository Library Council’s spring meeting.
Depository libraries, Hartnett explains, are designated by Congress to hold official federal documents in trust so that American citizens have access to information by and about their government. There are 1,200 such libraries in the country; more than 20 are in Washington State. You can get a list of them online at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html.
“The program has been in existence for over 100 years,” Hartnett said, “and it very quietly keeps a safety net on our democracy. You don’t have to go to Washington, D.C., to get official publications of your government. You can just come to the closest federal depository library.”
Prior to the advent of the Web, that library accessibility was crucial. You could (and still can) walk into Suzzallo Library’s ground floor and see, for example, the annual report of pretty much any federal department or agency you could name. In the 1970s a lot of those records shifted from paper to microfiche, and today, they are digital.
Which brings us back to the public printer. He heads up the U.S. Government Printing Office, which is one of the largest printers in the world. “We say they print everything except money,” Hartnett said. “They print your passport, they print tax forms, they print all manner of government publications.”
Except that these days, they print far less. Instead, by congressional mandate, the Government Printing Office now publishes library materials electronically, preserving the documents on a vast Web site through which citizens can find the records they used to go to their local library for. The current public printer, Bruce James, has presided over this acceleration of digital publishing. Two projects he launched after taking the printer post in late 2002 are the Future Digital System and the Secure and Intelligent Documents Unit.
The former is designed to make available online all 2.2 million government documents — a total of 60 million pages — by the end of 2007, tagged by keywords so they can be easily searched. It is a nearly $30 million endeavor and will ultimately include documents all the way back to the nation’s founding. Although significant progress has been made on its development, Hartnett says “It’s been like waiting for the Holy Grail and people are going to believe it when they see it.”
The Secure and Intelligent Documents Unit is working on authenticating digital documents so that the person downloading them can be sure they are truly government documents and haven’t been altered. “As they’re preparing their material, they can apply a digital signature to it so that even if it’s deposited in 1,000 different places,” Hartnett said, “the digital signature can be certified.”
How are all these changes affecting librarians? If all government documents are to be available online, is there even a need to have them in libraries? Hartnett says there are “essential titles” that will be retained in printed form — titles such as the U.S. budget, the Congressional Record and certain volumes of the Census of Population and Housing. She also believes that government librarians will continue to provide a valuable service in guiding citizens around the complex Web sites that contain the information.
“If you’ve ever tried to find something specific on the Web, sometimes you have success and sometimes it’s an exercise in extreme frustration,” she said. “That’s where a librarian can help.”
Many government librarians are also advocating a more decentralized system, with the digital documents residing on library servers as well as on government servers. Hartnett described a model originated at Stanford University called LOCKSS. That stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. The model has gained favor in the information science community, and has given rise to the LOCKSS Alliance, a consortium of universities and public libraries (http://www.lockss.org/).
“The idea is you have 1,000 redundant copies of this file on geographically disparate library servers and there’s LOCKSS technology that spiders out and within seconds checks all those 1,000 copies against each other and makes sure that they’re the same,” Hartnett said. “It’s a form of really fast authentication.”
The Government Printing Office is running a pilot project using LOCKSS, but Hartnett said their general approach has been to digitally preserve all depository federal documents on the Government Printing Office’s central domain (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/) and expect the public to rely on the stability of that Web site and its secure backups. Is that a good thing? Librarians are divided on the subject.
The April 2 meeting, which will be attended by about 300 librarians, is free and open to the public and will be held at the Madison Renaissance Hotel, 515 Madison Street. James’ speech (his title was not announced in advance) will be at 1:30 p.m. Joseph Janes, associate dean for academics in the UW’s Information School, will speak at 3:30 p.m. that day on The Future of Librarians.
For more information about the Federal Depository Library Program and the U.S. Government Printing Office, go to http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/history/
