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APPENDIX 15. SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION AGE PARADIGMS SHIFTS 

AND THEIR ASSOCIATED MYTHS, AND REALITIES 

Written by F. Woody Horton, NCLIS Consultant 

PREFATORY NOTE5

The Commission believes that in order for the President, the Congress, citizens, and stakeholder 

groups to make informed judgments as to the soundness of this study's findings, conclusions, and 

recommendations, it would be helpful to first identify some key "Information Age major paradigm 

shifts," some common myths and realities that are associated with each of them, a judgment as to what 

the reality is in each case, and suggestions for exposing the myths. These paradigm shifts, myths, 

realities, and debunking suggestions directly or indirectly shape the nature, the scope, the feasibility, 

and the timing of the reforms recommended in the NCLIS report. 

Some of these paradigm shifts, and their associated myths and realities, are technological in character. 

Others are socio-cultural, economic, political or philosophical. Individually they each pose one or 

more arguable assertions that are endlessly debated. Opposing stakeholders have often already 

polarized their public positions and staked out their turf interests in the halls of Congress, in the fight 

for public opinion in the media, and in the competition for market share. Together, these paradigm 

shifts, myths, and realities make up a formidable tapestry of attitudes and behaviors that are 

influencing the mindset of policy-makers, the media, academicians and researchers, the commercial 

information and communication marketplace, Wall Street, and the individual citizen. 

The Commission has tried to be as objective as possible by playing an honest broker role in bringing 

together the constituencies and the stakeholders in helping to identify these paradigm shifts, myths, 

and realities, and in undertaking the substantial scholarly research task of reviewing the literature and 

talking to experts in the various disciplines. 

Major Paradigm Shifts 

1. The Paradigm Shift. Government information for the public is increasingly and rapidly being 

discontinued in ink-on-paper, microforms, and other pre-electronic formats and mediums, 

and instead being made available in electronic formats and mediums—especially online, 

utilizing the World Wide Web and the Internet. There are both upsides and downsides to 

this initiative. One negative consequence is the erosion of permanent public availability of 

government information. Another dysfunctional consequence is the erosion of the 

government's ability to preserve its information holdings in formats and mediums that will 

remain functional indefinitely, even if the technologies used to create and store the 

information in the first place obsolesce. 

 

5

 Available at http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.appen15.pdf. This appendix was last revised on November 7, 2000. 
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The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has brought with it the concomitant advantage of 

enabling and encouraging federal agencies to increasingly create, store, transfer, make available and 

accessible their government information products and services in online electronic forms by bringing 

those products and services up on thousands of agency web sites which are directly searchable or 

searchable through portals such as FirstGov.6

 The website is inexorably replacing the pre-electronic 

repositories and depositories of hard copy documents. Currently, both traditional and electronic federal 

agency and federal depository libraries, archives, record centers, reading rooms, and information 

centers exist "side-by-side," but the fraction of the federal government's paper-based data, documents, 

and literature is very rapidly going down while at the same time the fraction of its electronically-based 

holdings are going up. This major paradigm shift is presenting enormous challenges to the established 

federal information infrastructure for housing and disseminating government information to the public. 

The roles, authorities, responsibilities, rights, and privileges of the government, commercial 

information providers, information handling intermediaries and specialists such as librarians, technical 

information specialists, and archival and records specialists, are all shifting and being redefined in 

order to cope with the new information environment. This study recommends various reforms in laws, 

policies, programs, and agency practices to help the President and the Congress, as well as the 

Judiciary, cope with the transition from paper to electrons. 

• The Myth: All of the Federal Government's public information holdings are universally available 

and conveniently accessible on the World Wide Web to everyone—citizens, students, job-seekers, 

government entitlement seekers, businesses, lower levels of government, or other kinds of 

individuals or groups, and they can find, verify the authenticity of the information, and download 

any or all of it easily, quickly, and free of charge, and remain confident that technologies will 

always exist to preserve the information in viable and functioning formats and mediums, so there 

is no longer any need for the government to plan, manage, and control government information, 

nor is there any need any longer for maintaining and preserving pre-electronic mediums and 

formats such as ink-on-paper publications or microfiche, so information in those obsolete 

mediums and formats can be deleted, archived permanently, or destroyed.

• The Reality: Only a fraction of the federal government's total data, document, and literature 

holdings are universally available online, and only a fraction of what is available online is easily 

identifiable, efficiently locatable, economically searchable, and conveniently accessible for 

viewing or downloading from the Web. Moreover, many citizens do not know where to find the 

government information they want and need, even if they are computer literate, know how to "call 

it out," or how to search for and retrieve it. Not all citizens have easy or affordable access to a 

computer or a telephone they can use. Nor are physically, financially, or otherwise disadvantaged 

individuals able to find, afford, or efficiently use such equipment, software, and detailed 

procedures to search for government information because it is often inconveniently formatted, not 

well customized to the special needs of the disadvantaged, or not understandable because of 

presentation barriers. Finally, information technologies are becoming obsolete continuously, thus 

rendering information holdings that were created and are being housed in obsolete technologies 

vulnerable to preservation requirements.

• Debunking the Myth: A careful, comprehensive, and authoritative analysis of just what 

government information is available on the Internet, how it is being searched and retrieved, who is 

using what kinds of information and for what purposes, and similar considerations, is required. For 

example, what classes of publications are available in full text form? How much of it is free on 

government sites and how much is on commercial sites for a fee? For example, very few NTIS 

reports are available for free on the Internet in full text form. There is a substantial amount of 

basic bibliographic information available for free, but most full text reports are on paid 

commercial sties. Can all of this be quantified to NTIS reports, for Superintendent of Documents 

 

6

 Available at http://www.firstgov.gov/. A preliminary analysis of First Gov is available in Appendix 19. 
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publications, or for other classes of publications? Based on current trends, how is the picture likely 

to change in the next few years? Based on the amount of content in "all government publications," 

what would it take in terms of initial and ongoing operating cost to put all government 

publications on the Internet? A combination of staff calculations of volume and experts roughing 

out costs could provide some useful estimates. Finally, the concepts of "Permanent Public 

Availability" of government information, and the "Technological Preservation" of government 

information must be statutorily based; Congress should therefore amend an appropriate existing 

law, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, as quickly as possible for these purposes.

2. The Paradigm Shift: The traditional standards and guidelines for bibliographically 

controlling government information were developed and used by librarians and other 

information professionals before the advent of the Web and the Internet. They are failing 

now because they are not being appropriately modified, updated, and adapted to electronic 

publishing, and/or they are starting to be modified, but are being applied haphazardly and 

ineffectively in the rush to bring volumes of electronic materials up on the Web as quickly as 

possible. 

Hundreds of years of development, testing, and refining traditional bibliographic tools that are applied 

to the creation, production, and publishing of ink-on-paper publications (whether government or not) 

have been put aside in the rush to bring more and more electronic government information materials 

up online. While it is true that substantially more government information is now available to the 

computer literate public than ever before, the problems of searching for this information efficiently 

and effectively are compounded immeasurably because of the failure of agencies to apply traditional 

bibliographic guidelines to organizing and making more accessible materials that were created in 

electronic form in the first place ("born digital" to use the argot of the day). The major functional areas 

of accessioning, cataloging, abstracting, indexing, and related areas are all involved. 

• The Myth: Modern website search engines, such as FirstGov, can find precisely, and only, 

whatever government information is available on federal agency websites that a user needs and 

believes is relevant. This can be done without expensive and time-consuming cataloging, 

abstracting, and indexing by librarians and other information professionals. The information 

databases are accurate, complete, authentic, timely, indexed, cross-indexed, searchable, and the 

information once found, can be delivered in the right format, at the right time, in the right place.

• The Reality: Success in searching for, finding, and utilizing precisely the information a user 

seeks, and only the information a user seeks, is only as good as the quality, the integrity, the 

timeliness and the accuracy of the federal information infrastructure which is searched. 

Haphazardly created and organized source documents and publications inevitably results in 

expensive, fruitless searches, with thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of "hits," but 

yielding little or no positive results and compounding the frustration and anxiety of searchers who 

are confronted with an even larger information overload problem than they had in the first place. 

• Debunking the Myth: Careful pilot tests must be conducted to evaluate and measure the 

benefit:cost performance ratios of using modern search engines, correlated with varying degrees 

and qualities of bibliographically controlled electronic materials. For example, if one million 

NTIS reports were on the Internet in full text form, how well would a modern search engine 

perform in locating only relevant reports and not identifying irrelevant materials? What would 

such a search engine cost to build and run? What if some of the content is available only as 

scanned images of pages that cannot be searched? What multiplier would have to be used to 

include all government information? If a search is limited to bibliographic, indexing, and 

abstracting material, instead of full text, what happens to costs and search results? 
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3. The Paradigm Shift: Information content is increasingly being severed from its information 

conduit (container), thereby greatly exacerbating the problems of understanding its full 

meaning and significance because its context (or provenance as the historian or scientist 

would say) has been lost. Attributing the information correctly to its true source and origin 

is sometimes impossible, and evaluating its credibility and authenticity is extremely difficult. 

Metaphorically, "information orphans" are increasingly being created with substantial 

burdens and costs to information users. 

More and more information is being put into online databases from which very specific information 

items may be searched for and retrieved "on demand," and "just in time." The traditional and 

conventional way to organizing large quantities of related information was to organize it all into 

discrete filing systems, recordkeeping systems, document collections, and publication depositories, 

which were often program-based, function-based, system-based, etc., and which would be revised and 

updated, often infrequently. However, these conventional information systems are difficult to crosssearch through and retrieve from because they are organized, indexed, searched, and mined in widely 

different ways. This has sometimes been referred to in the literature as the "stovepipe" phenomenon—

vertical systems organization with little or no horizontal search capability. Moreover, even if several 

items from different systems and files were located, it was often impractical or even impossible to 

earmark ("bookmark" to use the electronic term) items located in different systems into the same 

integrated "retrievable capsule." Online databases change all of that. Now many different information 

items from many different "vertical" information files or systems can be efficiently and effectively 

cross-searched and retrieved, and then viewed, downloaded or otherwise customized for delivery in 

whatever medium(s) or format(s) the user requires, economically and just in time, when it is needed. 

However, one "hidden" price to be paid is that the retrieved material is often retrieved without a clear 

indication as to its source, and origin. In short, its context has been lost. Then, when that same item is 

reused, re-communicated, or republished, say in an official government document, the author, if 

challenged, cannot ascertain its authenticity and attest to its reliability. 

• The Myth: Information content, and its source or origin (and therefore context), are always 

inseparable, and users can always easily discern and verify the authenticity of the source, as well 

as understand the context in which the information originally reposed.

• The Reality: There is an increasing danger as more and more agency information is organized in 

the form of online databases to facilitate the ability search, cross-index, and retrieve information, 

that the original source and origin from whence the information came becomes increasingly 

difficult to verify, thus creating the problem of attesting to the authenticity and official status of an 

information item that has been orphaned from its parent. 

• Debunking the Myth: New technical information attribution concepts and technologies, such as 

the Unique Object Identifier, offer the promise of "automatically" imprinting information so that 

its source, origin, and context are not lost when the information is removed from its original locus. 

However, these developments will require strong standards support and meanwhile the problem is 

exacerbated. The federal information community, under the aegis of the CIO Council, should 

ensure that such a development is afforded high priority. 

4. The Paradigm Shift: A recent National Academy of Sciences report says, "information is 

increasingly becoming an event to be viewed or experienced, rather than packaged as an 

artifact to be kept and archived." 

Of all the paradigms discussed herein, this one is perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. It 

accounts for a mindset that is becoming pervasive. For example, an MIT professor recently told a 
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library gathering "I haven't been to the library in the last four years," because, she explained, "research 

(in my field) is evolving so quickly that there is no use anymore in publishing in paper." 

In a recent meeting between NCLIS and a government official, a young recent computer science 

graduate, told NCLIS that in his field "everything I need to know is on the web or I can communicate 

with my colleagues on the web so I don't need to research historical information, so I don't see why 

libraries or other government depositories need to keep information for more than a year at the most." 

• The Myth: All of mankind is inexorably moving into a kind of real-time mode whereby the 

"present tense of the human record " is the only thing that will be really important anymore. The 

"past tense or historical record" is increasingly of limited value according to this theory, and will 

ultimately become the province of a few seedy historians keeping dusty electronic artifacts on 

remote Tibetan mountaintops. Sayings such as "learning lessons from the past," and "the past is 

prologue," are passé' in the Internet Age because developments are occurring too swiftly to allow 

time to review past experiences and the history of the human record.

• The Reality: It can be argued that this mindset was behind the Department of Commerce's 

announcement in 1999 that it wanted to close down NTIS and transfer its holdings and operations 

to the Library of Congress. In the public announcement there was a "concession" that information 

should be held for three years, but by inference, no longer. Yet statistics show that nearly twothirds of all requests for NTIS materials are for over materials that are over three years old, and 

one third is for requests for materials that are over 10 years old. This point of view, to the extent 

that it is apparently now beginning to drive government policy, could easily result in the 

dangerous loss of the historical record of the United States. While some scientists in extremely 

fast-moving fields such as computer science may take this view, certainly when it comes to the 

arts, to the humanities, to the social sciences, and even the traditional physical sciences of physics, 

mathematics, and chemistry, the knowledge base of past discoveries is absolutely essential to the 

forward progress of those fields, and the creation of new knowledge. Associated with this 

phenomenon is the increasing pressure to forego permanent records retention in favor of 

temporary records retention, thereby eroding the ability of the National Archives and Records 

Administration (NARA) to comply with its statutory mandate to preserve the federal record.

• Debunking the Myth: The irony of this situation is that modern electronic information and 

communication technologies are making the mass storage of, the searching for, and the retrieval of 

information from electronic repositories a technically feasible and cost-effective reality. So why, 

in the face of these technological advances, would one even want to "throw everything out that is a 

year or so old" if it can be held efficiently and cost-effectively in electronic storage? Moreover, it 

would not at all be difficult to arrange a controlled pilot test whereby a researcher was given a 

"bench challenge" but his/her access to information more than a year old precluded, while another 

researcher given the same challenge was given access to historical information. The results could 

then be compared. Can the U.S. government really afford to encourage and foster this mindset 

when the risk of a failed policy may well result in the irretrievable loss of the U.S. world 

leadership in science and technology in so many fields, not to mention all of the other disciplines? 

NCLIS admonishes national leaders to make it crystal clear that preservation of the human record 

is absolutely vital to our democracy, lest government officials get the mistaken idea that they can 

forget about yesterday's information with complete impunity. To return to the National Academy 

of Sciences report, NCLIS would amend the statement to read: "information is increasingly 

becoming an event to be viewed or experienced, but information must always be packaged as an 

artifact to be kept and archived in order to preserve mankind's record and hold leaders 

accountable."
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5. The Paradigm Shift: Information life cycle management authorities and responsibilities 

within departments and agencies are dispersed, fragmented, decentralized, and 

compartmentalized. Internal agency information management continues to be split from 

external agency information management, essentially by two different worlds. Moreover, the 

increasing movement to electronic publishing has exacerbated the problem of agency-wide 

oversight of electronic government information because no single office in the agency has 

clear, overall, lead authority for the life cycle management of both internal and external 

agency data, documents, and literature, although the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the 

public affairs office, and the printing and publishing office all have partial responsibility. 

Information having a life cycle is not a new idea, whether government information or any information 

for that matter. A useful analogue often mentioned is the concept of the product life cycle. That is, in 

the business world, as taught in business schools, a product is "born," "matures," "demand levels off," 

and then customer disinterest sets in and product sales decline and finally the product is taken out of 

production and off the shelves. Another analogue sometimes used is the biological life cycle. That is, 

an organism is born, grows, matures, declines, and eventually dies. 

Applied to the creation, handling, disposition, and archiving of information, the life cycle concept 

follows a similar circular path, which is both endless and continuous. However, the usual starting point 

is when information is first created, whether that is a document, an e-mail message, or anything else, 

regardless of format or medium. One useful portrayal of the steps in the life cycle follows, although 

the authors concede there may be many variations of this graphic: 

Government information is: 

• Step 1: Created and produced (by authors in all agencies, in all branches, at all levels, and in many 

different formats and mediums). 

• Step 2: Cataloged and indexed (metadata tools applied). 

• Step 3: Temporary and permanent availability and entitlement established (ownership and 

disclosure rights of creators, publishers, disseminators, licensees, franchisees). 

• Step 4: Published in the public domain or withheld from disclosure pursuant to a wide variety of 

statutes, internal agency policies, foreign agreements, and so forth. 

• Step 5: Put into files, databases, collections, holdings, and other storage repositories. 

• Step 6: Communicated, disseminated, and distributed. 

• Step 7: Searched for and retrieved (full text, abstracts, key words). 

• Step 8: Used for decision-making and problem solving. 

• Step 9: Archived. 

• Step 10: Re-used over and over again by government officials, journalists, archivists, researchers, 

citizens, and others (information recycled). 

• Step 11: Disposed of (temporarily or permanently).

• Step 12: Expunged or destroyed if permanent retention period exceeded.

• Step 13: Need for new information to replace old information established. 

Obviously the above steps in the Information Life Cycle could be expanded or compressed, depending 

on one's particular purposes. Moreover, there is certainly room for debate has to how we've framed the 

sequence of specific steps or stages, and depicted their inter-relationships, and admittedly rather 
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cryptically defined them. Nor do we mean to imply simply because the steps are schematically 

portrayed as a circle that all steps necessarily always occur iteratively in the same "prescribed" 

sequence. Oftentimes some steps may proceed in parallel, one or more steps may be "leapfrogged," or 

the consequences of dealing with the information in electronic formats and mediums are different than 

those used when the data is in pre-electronic forms. But, for working purposes, notwithstanding these 

caveats, we would like to move forward with our discussion using this twelve-step methodology. 

Perhaps one of the benefits of this paper will be to refine and improve the above construct.

• The Myth: Every step and stage in the information life cycle is completely independent of every 

other step and stage in the life cycle, both those that occurred before it, and those that will occur 

after it. There is no point in trying to link and interconnect the steps and stages in the life cycle 

because trying to specify the precise nature of those links would be so time-consuming and 

expensive that one would spend more time specifying the links than paying attention to the step or 

stage in question. Besides, each step or stage probably involves different people, with different 

skills and different expertise, operating in different divisions and units in the overall organization, 

with different authorities and responsibilities, and different goals and objectives, and all using 

different hardware and software and systems and networks. In short, "why should we mind 

somebody else's business when we can barely manage our own?"

• The Reality: Each step and stage in the information life cycle is interdependent with and on every 

step that preceded it and every step that will occur after it. If one ignores these interdependencies, 

and counter dependencies, one pays the price of recreating information at each stage of the life 

cycle, in a unique and customized format and medium that may or may not harmonize with the 

formats and mediums that preceded that step and will follow it. Many years ago, in the 1950's, the 

concept of Source Data Automation (SDA) was in vogue. But it was a concept many years ahead 

of its time. Essentially this concept was closely linked to the life cycle of information idea. It 

urged information creators (such as authors and publishers) to create information products and 

processes in formats and mediums that could easily and cheaply be converted and be made 

minimally compatible with, if not entirely consistent, to formats and mediums utilized for 

handling the same information later in the life cycle. At that time the pressure to automate 

processes was just beginning, and converting "manual" products and processes, as they were 

called in those days, to computer-assisted products and processes was so great that the SDA 

concept never got very far. But the reality today is that most systems and sub-systems that handle 

information are incompatible and inconsistent, and there is an entire industry "systems integration" 

that has evolved just to help pay the price of our failure to follow the source data automation and 

information life cycle precepts.

• Debunking the Myth: We need to return to the basic precepts of source data automation and life 

cycle management and ensure that they are adequately taken into account when new information 

products and processes are first on the drawing boards. It is too late to deal with the problem once 

products and processes have been designed, developed, tested, and debugged. Then the 

investments are virtually irreversible. To do this, the government needs to strengthen its policies 

and procedures, and demonstrate the practical applicability of the concepts to the bottom line of 

agency budgets and information use efficiency. To that end, revisions are needed in the Paperwork 

Reduction Act and OMB Circular A-130, in particular. Those suggested revisions are dealt with in 

the Commission's final report in greater detail. They are also spelled out in another NCLIS staff 

paper entitled "The Government Information Life Cycle Management Concept."

6. The Paradigm Shift: There appears to be a trend in federal agencies to replace a 

comparatively much more proactive policy to disseminate government information to the 

public, including reaching out to the public to notify them of what was available to them, 

with relatively much more passive policies that shift the burden of knowing what 
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government information exists, then trying to identify it, then find it, and then access it. The 

consequences of this shift in agency stance are far-reaching, especially in terms of 

exacerbating the Digital Divide. 

It is not surprising that as agencies realized the power and efficiency of the web enabling them to 

publish vastly increased quantities of information on their sites (as opposed to utilizing pre-electronic 

formats and mediums such as ink-on-paper and microforms) they rather naturally assumed that they 

had not only, in one fell swoop as it were, satisfied the need to provide access to public information, 

but also simultaneously had disseminated it as well! In short, they shifted the burden of dissemination 

from themselves to the public. This is a complex and difficult policy area, and certainly "the dust has 

not yet settled" on the debates that have, and will continue to occur both within the Administration and 

the Congress on the matter. The policy question is: Does providing electronic access to digital 

document images constitute dissemination within the meaning of the various statutes that provide for 

an agency to dissemination certain of its information holdings to the public? There are arguments on 

both sides. Certainly the agencies have a strong argument that they should not have to duplicate 

electronic accessibility with hard copy dissemination of the same information - - that is absurd. But, at 

the same time, there is a gray policy area in the middle. Dissemination in the pre-electronic era carried 

with it the idea that an agency would make a special effort to ensure that their public information 

products did, indeed, reach their intended audiences, both general and special. This was accomplished 

through the extensive use of distribution and mailing lists that were kept current. But in the electronic 

era, the use of distribution and mailing lists clearly defeats the purpose of broadcasting the 

availability of and accessibility to the information electronically, utilizing the vehicle of the website. 

And the possible use of "cookies" as a device for verifying whether or not a certain information 

product did or did not reach its intended audiences is in many cases at least controversial if not 

downright illegal and unethical. The one exception to this might be where the agency intends that its 

public information be available to all sectors of society, without regard to special, targeted subpopulations (e.g. the disadvantaged). Yet, it is an arguable proposition that all agency public 

information should be disseminated to all sectors of society. It certainly never was in the pre-Internet 

era. Has the mere fact that it can be disseminated in the Internet era changed that? 

• The Myth: Providing access to public information in electronic form on agency websites removes 

the obligation of federal agencies to ensure that the information which they have posted to their 

websites has, indeed, reached its intended audiences. Information dissemination, in short, is a 

passé' concept that has been completely supplanted by electronic information access in the Internet 

era.

• The Reality: Providing access to public information in electronic form on agency websites does 

not remove the obligation of federal agencies to ensure that the information they have posted does 

reach its intended audiences, especially in instances where the sub-population(s) to be reached are 

disadvantaged in some respect. The broadest definition of "disadvantaged" includes minorities, 

senior citizens, school age children, the physically and emotionally disabled, the economically 

disadvantaged, and the computer and information illiterate. It also includes Americans living in 

tribal areas and in relatively inaccessible rural areas remote from normal infrastructure services 

provided urban populations such as electricity, telephones, and so forth.

• Debunking the Myth: The Federal Government must rethink its public information dissemination 

posture in the Internet era, taking into account the disappearance or downgrading of the use of 

distribution and mailing lists, and other tools and techniques, for ensuring that information 

disseminated to the public did, indeed, reach the targeted audience(s).
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science 

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7. The Paradigm Shift: Increasingly, physical libraries and information repositories are being 

replaced with virtual libraries and repositories, but the consequences and implications of 

this shift have not been adequately assessed. 

Libraries have always had to cope with collections composed of a wide mix of mediums and formats 

in which their acquisitions came "housed." Maps, recordings, photographs, special materials for the 

blind and the handicapped, and old manuscripts have been a challenge to libraries for millennia, not 

just centuries. In the middle of the last century the advent of microforms - - microfilm, microfiche, and 

other related formats began to insinuate themselves into the library's collections. Libraries had to begin 

buying a variety of special readers and printers, and set aside special reading rooms devoted to their 

microform collections. When the earliest computers appeared in the late Sixties and early Seventies, 

they began slowly to develop online catalogs and acquire some early online databases, either public 

domain databases or on a commercial subscription basis. CD-ROM's introduction brought with it 

additional complications due to proprietary and more complex search and retrieval technical 

instructions which librarians had to learn and understand before they could train their patrons. Seldom 

did the library budget keep up with the cost of special equipment, special facilities, special training, 

and special (meaning in most cases higher) costs for acquiring, maintaining in peak operating 

condition, upgrading as untold new versions kept reappearing every month, for all of these new 

formats and mediums. The obsolescent technologies were never completely replaceable by the newer 

technologies. That capital investment became a sunk cost. Now, the Internet Age has arrived. More 

and more material is being made available in electronic forms, accessible via websites. 

• The Myth: Many futurists are having a field day predicting that the demise of the physical library 

is "just around the corner," "perhaps a little later," "if not much sooner." These old fashioned 

libraries, these Cassandras predict, will go the way of high button shoes and the surrey with the 

fringe on top, and be replaced by virtual libraries which require nothing more than a desktop or 

laptop to access their holdings since no physical institution of any kind would be required. 

Digitized collections become the name of the game. Anything that isn't digitized is passé'—

somehow second-class in the information world.

• The Reality: It is an economic impossibility to digitize everything. Even the richest endowed 

institutions must make judicious budgetary decisions on what they can afford to digitize based on 

a whole host of considerations, including the needs and wants of their constituents and clienteles, 

the condition of their materials and how much danger certain kinds of materials may be in, and so 

on. "Born digital," many are now saying, is the real answer to the challenge, and we must find the 

means to live with pre-digital and digital mediums for a very long time - -at least many 

generations. 

• Debunking the Myth: Libraries as physical institutions will not disappear for many moons. For 

future generations, they will remain as a repository of multi-media, multi-format, multi-platform 

information handling institutions. Public policies must be shaped to take that reality into account. 

Digitizing everything simply does not make sense, either from a preservation standpoint or from 

an economic standpoint. Moreover, many users of government information, for example, are 

disadvantaged and cannot use electronic materials for reasons cited elsewhere in this paper. 

Libraries as public institutions must never lose sight of the needs of all citizens they serve, not just 

those who happen to be able to afford their services, have easy access to them, and who have the 

requisite degree of computer and information literacy to search for and utilize electronic materials. 

8. The Paradigm Shift: Paperwork is being compounded by "Electronwork" which can be even 

more onerous and burdensome and costly than paperwork ever was. While the government 

is moving to replace paper-based public transactions with the government with electronicbased systems, pursuant to the Government Paperwork Elimination Act and similar 
A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination 

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legislation, there is a more or less blind assumption that "electrons are always better than 

paper." Although this controversy is not unique to this study's core objectives, nevertheless 

NCLIS has seen fit to alert the President and the Congress to a potential problem in the 

future. 

While most people seem to agree that paper will never disappear, even at the height of the electronic 

information age. As has been pointed out many times, desktop printers have proliferated at a rate that 

seems to have kept pace with the proliferation of desktop computers and modem connectivity. Big 

central government printing plants like the Government Printing Office may be becoming the 

dinosaurs of the Information Age, but the paper and pulp industries do not seem frightened at the 

prospect of paper ever disappearing, even as laser printing supplants ink printing. Quite to the 

contrary! It can be argued that all that has really happened is that the burden of printing has shifted 

from the front end of the information life cycle when publishers' had to worry about massive print 

runs, to the middle of the cycle when Internet users download documents from the web and print them 

on their local printers. Gradually it is dawning on people that "Electronwork" can be far more 

insidious than paperwork ever was! That is to say, the burdens and costs of working in electronic 

formats and mediums, and on electronic platforms, can be far more onerous than pre-electronic 

formats and mediums. In short, paper is not necessarily "all bad," and there are many instances where 

paper is still the preferred medium. The Government Paperwork Elimination Act and the Paperwork 

Reduction Act both recognize that, but the recognition needs to be translated into more concrete 

operational guidance for federal agencies. 

• The Myth: Paper formats and mediums are all bad; they should all be replaced as quickly as 

possible, depending primarily on economic considerations. The sooner we can shift from paper 

and microforms to electronic mediums and formats, the better. Only then will we be able to deal 

meaningfully with information preservation and permanent public availability effectively. Paperbased systems are almost always far slower, far more costly, and far more inefficient than are 

electron-based systems.

• The Reality: A family of pre-electronic and electronic information handling formats and mediums 

is a far more realistic approach for the government to take than a monolithic policy of "everything 

must go electronic tomorrow." Many citizens and disadvantaged populations are simply are not 

equipped to deal with computers or telecommunications connectivity. They either live in remote 

rural areas, are too poor to afford computers and modems, do not know anyone who has such 

capabilities, and are so computer and information literate that they do not even know how to find 

help. Moreover, history has demonstrated that as new mediums are invented and begin to spread 

into general use, they nearly always take their place side-by-side with existing mediums. This was 

true of radio when television came along, the telephone when faxes came into use, and broadcast 

when cable was invented. All of these mediums are still in use; we've simply added one more 

medium, albeit an extremely powerful one, to the existing family of mediums. Each medium has 

its own benefit:cost ratio depending on many variables, including convenience, urgency, 

capabilities of both senders and receivers (not just senders), cost, need for confidentiality, and so 

forth. Moreover, even many highly computer and information literate individuals who could 

convert to using the Internet almost exclusively, prefer to utilize all available mediums, even 

paper, couriers, and conversation over morning coffee!

• Debunking the Myth: Dissemination of government information to the public laws, policies, and 

programs must take into account the need for federal agencies to offer a family of mediums and 

formats for dealing with all segments of society. Users of government information are an 

extremely diverse class, ranging from the highly computer and information literate at the one 

extreme, to the computer and information illiterate at the other, including disadvantaged 

individuals from an economic, physical, or minority status standpoint. Individual laws, policies, 
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science 

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guidelines, and programs should be reviewed to ensure that government is not putting all of its 

eggs into the Internet basket, so to speak.