Roles for Libraries Big and Small in the Digital Preservation of
Government Information

Elizabeth Cowell

University of California, San Diego

San Diego, CA

My name is Elizabeth Cowell and I am the Head of Data, Government and
Geographic Information Services at the University of California, San
Diego. I would like to thank the GPO and the Depository Library Council
for giving me the opportunity to talk to you today. While it might seem
like I\'m picking on the GPO, that is not my intention. I am advocating
for an alternative way to provide permanent public access to government
information, keeping in mind that the most important thing we do as
Federal depository libraries is protect the public\'s right to know.

# Outline

In my talk, I'd like to do three things:

Tell you why I believe that the depository system must work in the
digital age.

Outline the functions that are essential to maintain a depository system
and raise the question of who can best fulfill each role.

Explore practical steps that we can take today to achieve the FDLP of
tomorrow.

The two speakers who follow me will describe projects that incorporate
many of these ideas into action. Trisha Cruse from the California
Digital Library will talk about their project, Counting California, and
then Chuck Eckman will talk about the LOCKSS project at Stanford
University. LOCKSS meaning Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

#  1. Why...

While it may seem odd at a meeting of members of the Federal Depository
Library Program to explain the concepts of "depository" and "library,"
some argue that "deposits" are unnecessary, that we are in a
"post-depository era" and that the basic functions of libraries are
unnecessary or have changed or will change because of the shift of
publishing from print to digital.

Let\'s review some criteria for judging the success of a system of
public access to government information.

First, it must serve *multiple* communities of interest adequately.

Second, the government has the responsibility to make government
information widely accessible to ordinary citizens and to do so in a way
that permanent public access is assured.

Third, the government must not have exclusive control of access to
government information.

These criteria lead us to one solution: GPO should deposit publications,
regardless of format, with depository libraries.

*This conclusion is important for the public* because distributing
copies of digital documents will assure the public of several things. It
enables different communities of interest to have their own collections
of materials collected, organized, presented, serviced, and preserved to
meet their needs. It provides an immediate and workable way of providing
short-term public access to government information. Because it ensures
the short-term preservation of digital documents, it assures the public
that those documents will be available for long-term preservation when
more permanent digital preservation solutions are available. Finally, it
provides the public with a simple, understandable and workable assurance
of the authenticity of digital publications without giving over to the
government control of that information.

The model proposed by GPO doesn\'t meet the basic criteria in several
ways.

It proposes a single electronic collection rather than multiple
collections. No one-size-fits-all collection can adequately meet the
information needs of all communities of interest. This should be self
evident to us. Our libraries are not identical because we serve
different communities. A document that in my library may be essential
may be of no interest to your community. Lawyers require different
collections, organized in a different way, than K-12 libraries, or
environmental libraries, or agricultural libraries.

GPO cannot ensure permanent public access to public information because
it has neither the Congressional mandate nor the funding to do so. If it
did, such mandate and funding could be changed by Congress at any time.
Even GPO's very existence is not guaranteed. To state it as simply as
possible, no model that relies on a government agency can be considered
a permanent solution. Good intentions, excellent plans, and workable
policies are only as permanent as the funding that enables them.

The GPO model relies on government information remaining in the control
of GPO and other government agencies. This model even tells us that if
government information is obtained from any server other than a
government server, it cannot be guaranteed as "authentic" thus imposing
a new definition of authenticity. It is as if, in the print world, GPO
said it is OK for users to look at that government document on your
library shelf, but only one that the user gets from a government
bookstore is authentic.

Let me address the concerns of many that getting digital materials is
beyond the abilities of our libraries today.

The digital world is simply one more change in formats. We've had to
take on microfilm, microcard, microfiche, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and the
Internet. Acquiring digital materials in "non-tangible" form is our next
step. It is true that most of us are not ready to start a big project
next week, but what we can do next week is begin the process so that
next year we'll be better equipped than we are today.

The stakes are high. If libraries do not accommodate digital materials,
libraries will simply not have access to materials in the future. If we
cannot select and acquire, we will not be able to organize and preserve.
"Pointing" to materials that move around, change, and disappear is not
the job of a library. The job of a library is to help users identify,
locate and use information and the best way we have of doing that is
acquiring the materials our communities need and organizing and
preserving those materials for them.

Essentially, the choice we have is to remain libraries or not. Either we
take on the responsibilities of digital formats, or we become museums of
old technology and information. Either we ensure current and long term
access to materials our users need by acquiring and organizing and
preserving, or we abrogate that role, and hope someone else does it. But
if we do not do it, who will? The government with a single collection
for all -- subject to budget cuts and political influence? The private
sector that will charge us again and again for access to the information
we've already paid for as taxpayers? Who but libraries can fulfill the
function that libraries have always filled?

# Roles and Functions 

What are the different functions/roles?

-   Identify

-   Describe

-   Organize

-   Preserve

-   Provide service

Who best to do each?

-   ID, describe, distribute: GPO

-   Select, organize, preserve, service: Libraries

# How

Selection -- How would you select digital materials? An easy way to
approach this is to think of this as adding another format to your
collection. You have already done this work by setting up your selection
profile in the current environment. Think in terms of the size of your
depository. Depending on the percentage you are currently selecting, you
would receive and take responsibility for the associated documents
electronically.

Format choices -- We should think of "print" as a format choice whenever
appropriate. This would lead us to several possible actions when a
digital document is available as a printed publication (e.g., PDF
documents).

-   Buy it.

-   Print out the digital version.

-   Continue to lobby for a simple solution to this problem: If an
    agency sees the importance of a document being in print format,
    depositories should have the option of selecting the publication in
    print format.

When a digital document is not available as a print publication, but is
"print-like" (e.g., PDF), there are several options:

-   Store the digital publication on a Web server; link to it, providing
    an OPAC record that points to the original (or PURL) and to your
    local copy.

-   Store the local copy on a public service PC.

-   Print a copy

When a digital document is a complex HTML document, consisting, for
instance, of multiple chapters, embedded graphics, etc., there are at
least three options:

-   Print it.

-   Download it to a public service PC using "offline browsing"
    software.

-   Use digital library software to acquire the files and manage their
    location; provide an OPAC record that points to the original (or
    PURL) and to your local copy.

When digital information is totally dynamic and Web "pages" are actually
built "on the fly" by user request, query, profile, etc., there are at
least two options:

-   If the results of queries seem predictably static, capture the
    documents most often used by your community of users and save or
    print it as above.

-   If the results are too dynamic (change too fast or have no
    particular "document" as output), obtain the database that drives
    the site and integrate that into your digital library.

Hardware -- Questions of hardware and software are all questions of
scale: from printing out documents, to acting as a node in a distributed
system like LOCKSS, to large scale digital library projects like
Counting California. Do you need a double-sided printer, a workstation
that can handle the free LOCKSS software or a server to manage large
collections of digital information? It is likely that the more complex
and difficult a project is, the fewer libraries will undertake it. Not
every University library is running its own Counting California project.

Software -- We hear and read about all kinds of software. Greenstone,
eprints, icollect, getbot and more. It might be helpful to start
thinking about this issue in terms of what kind of project you want to
do in your library. Are you going to focus on single documents as they
come up or full agency Web sites? If it\'s the former, there is a whole
genre of software that allows you to grab documents off of Web sites and
store them on your desktop. They are similar to the software that is
used in canned Internet demos. Icollect and getbot are examples of this
type of software. Projects like the one described by Barbie Selby
dealing with documents from the Civil Rights Commission use this type of
software.

If it is the latter type of project, the other branch of software
focuses on server-based, digital library projects. Software like eprints
and greenstone are examples of this. Counting California uses greenstone
to grab information from Websites that is then stored, combined with
other data from other sources and manipulated for presentation to a
local community.

# Roles for the Government Printing Office

In this model, the GPO would focus on the roles that it currently
carries out, the identification, description and distribution of
government information. By distributing the digital publications along
with descriptive information (metadata) about the publications, the GPO
will have taken a huge leap towards protecting the public's right to
know. Without any other actions, just the multiple copies alone can
improve the odds that if one copy is damaged or tampered with, users can
go to other locations to find the same information. If the GPO goes the
extra step of adding a 'hash' or 'digest' to the metadata record, there
will be the additional level of integrity. Because the hash is produced
by the GPO, the source of official government information and maintained
by depository libraries, trusted repositories of government information,
this integrity check becomes an authentication tool as well.

# 

# Reality

The GPO is not currently distributing digital publications to depository
libraries. This does not mean there is nothing to do in the interim. In
fact, libraries can and have been doing things to preserve particular
documents for some time. Our assumption here is that an organized
dissemination method would allow more libraries to participate and
ensure preservation of this material in a more systematic way.

Libraries can identify publications they feel need to be preserved
locally. Tim Byrne's presentation[^1] at DLC last year and Raleigh Muns'
presentation[^2] in 1995 are both examples of libraries identifying and
collecting certain publications for local storage and use.

Counting California is an example of a more sophisticated presentation
of locally held digital collections of government information. Trisha
will give the specifics, but if Federal information (like the Federal
Register) were available electronically for deposit, this system could
be richer.

# Objections

*Authenticity/Integrity* -- This is a big concern in the digital
environment, so I\'m going to take a minute to go through some
definitions and clarifications. I would like to state up front that the
concept of authenticity is a social construct that relies heavily on the
notion of trust. It is also important to keep in mind that there is not
one great technical solution to this social problem.

Clifford Lynch states that "a verification of authenticity is the act or
process of establishing a correspondence between known facts about the
record and the various contexts in which it has been created and
maintained and the proposed fact of the record's authenticity."

-   Testimony by a trusted third party

-   Copies

-   Register/Digest/Hash

Trust is more important and reliable than anything technical or digital.
So, I would like to pose the question, who do you trust?

-   Government administrations subject to the whims of party politics
    and budget changes?

-   Corporate entities whose interest may go away as it is no longer
    profitable, whose focus is on short-term profit rather than
    long-term preservation?

-   Federal Depository Libraries

A hash or digest added by the GPO can help answer the following
questions:

Has the object been changed since its creation? If so, has this altered
the fundamental essence of the object? Integrity -- the digital content
has not been corrupted.

If its integrity is intact, are the assertions that cluster around the
object true of false? In other words is it authentic?

*Too hard*. - Yes it is hard. In fact there are more dire "up front"
issues with digital information. Things are not likely to be saved by
accident as they can be in the print world. Decisions have to be made up
front about what to save and how to save it. What is integral to the
document that must be saved? But, if we don't start now, experimenting
with digital collections and asserting our rights under Title 44, how
will we keep up with issues as they become even more complex?

*Why us?* *It's just another example of the GPO passing costs on to the
depositories*. -- This isn't true, we're just holding on to the roles
that we have as libraries. In fact if we don't demand that the GPO
distributed these files, the result will be a pass off in
responsibilities. If we allow the GPO to maintain the only electronic
collection, they will be focusing on that rather than improving their
record of identifying and describing government publications. As these
roles slip, we, as volunteers, will be required to do more and more of
this work. If the GPO does its work well, a locally held electronic
collection in DC is a good addition to the network of depository
collections around the country.

What about GPO mirror sites?

Mirror sites provide additional copies of publications, so they are
beneficial in terms of preservation, but they do not offer any variety
of collections. They do not address the issues of multiple collections,
customized presentation and service.

What about 'Partners'?

Can be a very useful part of the whole. Especially if they distribute
what they have including the documents and associated meta data.

*My administration won\'t do it*. - Libraries have come to provide
services for all kinds of new formats. This is going to change business
as we know it. We had to buy fiche cabinets and readers even microcard
readers that don\'t work anymore and new scanners that do. We\'ve been
dealing with format issues all along and none of our budgets have
increased to do so. It requires a rethinking of our budgets, repurposing
of staff positions and departments. Who had a full time systems position
twenty years ago in their library?

**Why??**

It's what libraries do. We select, acquire, organize, preserve and make
government information accessible.

It's how we provide the best service to our communities -- Counting CA

Risks of government control -- funding instabilities, changing
administrative priorities, sinister motives. In the current environment
of centralized access, innovation can\'t happen.

Risks of corporate control -- Where does the information go when it is
no longer profitable? Issues of proprietary software limiting access to
'free' information.

We don't have a choice. If we want to remain vital institutions
preserving the public\'s right to know, we must make the decision to
select, preserve and provide access to digital information for our local
communities. The one size fits all approach or access versus ownership
approach to library collections will make us dispensable institutions
and underestimates the value of locally selected and presented
collections.

Who else is going to act as a watchdog for the public's right to know?

In conclusion, the most important function we provide as depository
libraries is providing permanent public access to government
information. Any system must fulfill the criteria of serving multiple
communities adequately; fulfilling the governmental responsibility to
provide permanent public access to government information to all
citizens, and finally, the government must not have exclusive control.

I encourage all libraries to experiment with digital projects, remaining
vital institutions in your communities while advocating for a secure
system of distributing digital publications to depository libraries.

[^1]: Byrne, Tim, "The Regional Role in Permanent Access to Electronic
    Government Information," Proceedings of the 9^th^ Annual Federal
    Depository Library Conference, Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2001: 1-4.

[^2]: Muns, Raleigh, "Mining the Electronic Documents for Local
    Collections," Proceedings of the 4th Annual Federal Depository
    Library Conference, Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2005: 53-66.