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DVD & the 3 P's: Preservation, Policy, and Public Access
Presentation by Judy Russell
Superintendent of Documents
DVD 2003 International Conference
June 11, 2003
It is a great pleasure to be here with you today to talk about the exciting new opportunities for improving public access to government information using DVD technology.
I am sure that many of you are familiar with the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). It is one of several programs administered by GPO to ensure broad public access to Federal government information.
James Madison's vision for the success of this nation rested on the ability of an informed citizenry to participate in the democratic process and to hold government accountable for its actions. He believed that for democracy to flourish there had to be a free flow of information to the people, with access to government information as a fundamental right.
In 1813, Congress took steps to implement that vision by passing the initial law requiring the deposit of Federal government information throughout the country for free public access. The program was originally administered by the Department of the Interior and later transferred to the Government Printing Office, which was not established until 1861.
In their wisdom, our Founding Fathers created a system that has lasted almost 200 years and has served this nation very well. Today it is the public's primary source of free access to the published information of the Federal Government, and that is why the enabling legislation is sometimes called "America's first freedom of information act."
More than 1,200 Federal depository libraries nationwide provide free public access to Government information in both print and electronic formats. Federal depository libraries are designated by Members of Congress or by law. Many are college, university, and academic law libraries, making the FDLP a key component of the Nation's education system.
Because the system distributes information to libraries throughout the country, there is no way that any natural disaster or terrorist act could ever wipe out the history of this nation and deprive the people of the information generated by their government over time.
However, the system was created before modern means of transportation and communication – before automobiles, trains, and airplanes changed our ability to move rapidly from one part of the country to another; before radio, television and the Internet transformed the way we obtain and share information instantaneously. And long before anyone conceived of small shiny DVD discs that could hold vast amounts of information, be replicated and disseminated cheaply, and protect valuable public data from hardware crashes, viruses, and unauthorized changes.
Initially the depository program was based on capturing documents as they flowed through the printing process and obtaining additional copies for dissemination to depository libraries. Once the documents were shipped to the libraries, the responsibility for preserving the documents and providing public access resided with the libraries.
Today we have a vastly different program. This year only 40% of the titles selected for inclusion in the FDLP will be shipped in paper, microfiche or some other tangible format such as CD-ROM or DVD. 60% of the titles will be made available on GPO Access or through links to electronic publications on agency or other websites. The trend is clear and the change is accelerating.
With the change from paper and microfiche to electronic formats, the responsibility for preservation and permanent public access of the information has moved from the libraries back to the government.
As we examine the next generation of software for GPO Access, we are also preparing to migrate all of our databases forward, add the appropriate XML tags, and digitally sign the content to authenticate it. Simultaneously, we are examining the need to refresh hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of CD-ROM titles that were shipped to depository libraries in the past 10-12 years.
On a recent visit to a regional depository library, I saw rack upon rack of CDs. Many of those titles are now aged and aging. Many run only on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. They are not forward compatible with today’s operating systems and networks. The data is often embedded in proprietary formats.
We are expecting our depository libraries to run museums, maintaining and operating obsolete technology in order to provide access to a wide array of government information stored on these aging CD-ROMs. GPO will work with the depository community and the publishing agencies to extract and preserve that data or we will lose a generation of important government information. This is a lesson learned from publishing CD-ROM titles that all of us should consider as we make decisions today and tomorrow about DVD publishing.
As popular as it is, DVD publishing in the Government is still in its infancy. One of the earliest government applications of DVD technology that I am aware of was a 1998 DVD published by the Navy for medical training in the event of chemical warfare. It runs a trainee through a series of video scenarios, and the trainee must look at each video for clues to help determine if a chemical attack has occurred, the severity of the injuries, and the proper way to respond. The Air Force also published a DVD in 1998 on the subject of government ethics. Other military titles have followed those pioneering efforts.
The flow of DVDs into the depository library program accelerated in January 2000 when the Patent and Trademark Office switched from CD-ROM to DVD for its USAPat product. The advantages of DVD were obvious. PTO was able to produce one DVD per week instead of 5 CD-ROMs. PTO has subsequently expanded its DVD publishing to include a number of other patent and trademark titles, all of which are included in the FDLP.
As a result of the PTO products and the announced plans of the Census Bureau to use DVD as a major part of its dissemination of the 2000 Census, GPO changed its minimum technical requirements for workstations in Federal depository libraries to include a DVD drive effective in 2000. Now there are over 1,200 libraries nationwide equipped with DVD players, ready to receive new titles as they are published.
We don’t keep separate statistics on DVD titles versus CD titles, so I can’t tell you the exact number of the DVDs that have been shipped to depository libraries since 1998, but I can tell you that DVDs are being produced by a number of agencies and provide a wide variety of content.
In addition to PTO, the Census Bureau and the military, we have distributed DVDs from the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. The North American Banding Council has issued a DVD on bird banding. We have DVD titles from US Geological Survey, EPA, and NASA. There is a training DVD for ambulance drivers issued jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the Department of Transportation and the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health of the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as a number of other Department of Transportation titles.
A number of these titles capitalize on the ability of DVD to deliver audio-visual presentations. All of them take advantage of the expanded storage capacity of DVD. Most of them offer the data with embedded software for viewing and manipulation, but many of them have addressed the concerns I raised with respect to the early CD-ROM titles and have left the data accessible in standard, non-proprietary formats, so it can be exported and manipulated by a variety of software.
The use of CD-ROM as a publishing media was accelerated in the early 1990s by the establishment of SIGCAT, now morphed into DVDA (the sponsor of this conference), which offered opportunities for government agencies and vendors of software and services to exchange information about best practices, successes and lessons learned. Jerry McFaul at USGS was the founder and host of SIGCAT and is still very active in DVDA. Another significant factor in the rapid adoption of CD-ROM as a publishing media was a series of classes that were offered by the GPO Institute for Federal Printing and Publishing. Jerry and I were part of the initial staff that taught those courses and they were extremely popular.
Now, Jerry and I are joining together again, along with several other agencies to establish a DVDA working group on government information preservation, which can help all of us understand and utilize the DVD technology more effectively. The initial participants, in addition to USGS and GPO, are NIST, NARA, the Library of Congress, and Census. The purpose of the group will be to address the longevity of the DVD media, standardization of logical structures for DVD publishing, and guidelines for access protocols to ensure that data published on DVD is accessible in the future. We welcome other agencies to join with us and become active participants in the group.
The first meeting of the working group will take place at NIST in late July. It will include a tour of the NIST DVD testing laboratory and provide an opportunity to discuss our goals and objectives. Working together, we can use this technology to facilitate government agencies' efforts to produce DVDs for internal agency use and, where appropriate, for public access.
I hope as the agencies represented here develop their DVD applications that they will work with GPO to make sure that as many as possible can be distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program. This is an inexpensive means to disseminate your agency's information and to place it in libraries with staff trained to assist users and collections of other materials to augment the content of your publications. GPO and our library partners are committed not just to current access to materials in the program, but to permanent public access, so we will assume responsibility for migrating the data forward when that becomes necessary.
As I said in the beginning, DVDs are ideal for dissemination of government information. They hold vast amounts of information, can be replicated and disseminated cheaply, and protect valuable public data from hardware crashes, viruses, and unauthorized changes. There are exciting possibilities for many types of government information to be published on DVD. If we are careful in our choices of software and data formats, we can ensure the availability of the content for current users and future generations.
I look forward with you to seeing the range of DVD applications expand over the coming year and become an ever more important means by which the government fulfills Madison's vision for an informed citizenry.
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The Federal Depository Library Program:
Current and Future Challenges of the Electronic Transition
Presentation by Judith C. Russell
Superintendent of Documents
Canadian Library Association AGIIG and
American Library Association GODORT Joint Program:
How is Federal Government Information Reaching the Public
in the 21st Century?
Toronto, June 21, 2003
Susan [Tulis’] history of the Federal Depository Library Program stopped short of the most recent legislative change for both GPO and the FDLP – the 1993 GPO Access law, which mandated that GPO establish an online service. In 1994, GPO offered its first databases, the Federal Register and the Congressional Record. By the end of the first year, GPO was offering a number of other titles and had added the PDF files so that users could view the equivalent of the printed pages.
The train that left the station in 1994, moving toward a more electronic Federal Depository Library Program (as the 1996 GPO report was entitled) is gaining speed. GPO Access now has over 2000 databases available for free public access and we provide approximately 32 million downloaded documents per month. We have had peak months with downloads in excess of 37 million documents.
All year we have been talking about the fact that this is the year that the FDLP crosses the Rubicon. We projected that more than half of the documents added to the Federal Depository Library Program this year would be electronic online titles, available through GPO Access or by links to electronic publications on agency or other websites. In fact, at the Depository Library Council meeting in Reno in April, we forecast that 60% of the new titles added this year would be online electronic titles.
What is the reality? From October 1, 2002 (the beginning of the fiscal year) through May 31, 2003, GPO has added 26,441 titles to the FDLP collection. 10,545 of those titles are available online through GPO and an additional 6,898 are links to publications on agency websites, for a total of 17,443 new online electronic titles. During the same period, GPO distributed only 8,998 tangible titles: 4,582 paper titles, 3,037 microfiche titles, 265 CD-ROM/DVD titles and 1,114 USGS maps. So far this year, 66% of the new titles added to the FDLP are electronic online titles, even more than we projected.
But there is more. In May 2003, 7,402 items, of which 86% were online electronic titles, were added to the program. The trend is clear and the speed of our transformation is accelerating.
What does this mean for the Federal Depository Library Program? We are rapidly approaching a critical time in the program. The FDLP has always been a delicate balance between the self-interest of the library in obtaining publications without cost and the public interest in access to the information. The balance on the scales is tipping dangerously. Within a few years, perhaps as few as three or as many as five, there will be very few tangible products distributed to depository libraries, other than those that we collectively decide to preserve in paper or other tangible format.
Practically from the moment GPO shipped the first CD-ROM to a depository library, the community has discussed and debated the future of the program and how we would meet the challenges of a more electronic FDLP. Susan listed a number of the reports and study groups that addressed this issue. We cannot delay any longer. Together we must re-examine the services that GPO provides to the public directly and through the depository libraries. We must define the services that are required, now and in the future, to support the mission. We must address the fundamental question that we have been asking each other since 1995: Why be a depository library when you can obtain "everything" (or virtually everything) free on the Internet without being part of the program?
Recently we had some management training at GPO that described how successful businesses identify their "strategic anchors" – the fundamental, guiding principles that can be used to evaluate every option and make every decision, large and small. For example, Southwest Airlines strategic anchors include on time arrival and low cost fares. If a decision improves on time arrival or reduces airfares, it is a good decision. If an option is proposed that increases fares or delays on time arrivals, it is easy to make the decision to choose some other path. Together, we need to identify the strategic anchors of the Federal Depository Library Program. Then GPO can evaluate every decision we make to see how it affects the future of the program and the quality of services that we provide to the public, directly and through depository libraries.
Bookstore Closures
This spring we made the painful decision to close all of the bookstores, other than the main bookstore in Washington. By September they will all be closed. It was not an easy decision, but it was the right decision. The walk-in traffic in the bookstores has dwindled to a trickle. The public has already embraced online ordering of publications, as shown by the enormous popularity of Amazon.com. We project that 85% of our sales orders will come through the online bookstore by 2005.
As the press release says: With nearly a quarter of a million titles available online and free of charge, and with public retrievals exceeding 32 million every month, GPO Access <www.gpoaccess.gov>, a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has become one of the principal tools for providing public access to official U.S. Government information. In part as a result of increased access through the Internet, the overall volume of sales has dropped dramatically, from 24.3 million copies sold in FY 1993 to 4.4 million copies sold in FY 2002. Ten years ago we sold 35,000 subscriptions to the Federal Register; today we sell 2,700. At the same time, we are now downloading over 4 million Federal Register documents each month from GPO Access. Revenue has plummeted as a result of these changes, while costs have dropped less rapidly, resulting in losses that must be stopped.
Publications on Demand
Even as we are closing the bookstores, we are seeking to restructure the sales program so that the costs are in line with the achievable revenues. We continue to make every effort to stabilize the sales program at a sustainable level and to expand the range of titles and services that are available to the public through the sales program.
We know that we need to create less inventory and we have begun an experiment with print-on-demand services. We see two ways to use this technology.
- One way is to buy far fewer copies in the initial press run – just enough to meet the initial short term demand – and then print a small number of copies, perhaps 25 at a time, to keep a small inventory. If sales dry up, we have very little wasted inventory and we can reduce our warehouse space substantially. As sales volume diminishes, we can allow the title to go out of stock, but not out of print, and print copies only when there is a sale.
- Secondly, we can take many, perhaps even most, of the titles that are selected for the Federal Depository Library Program that historically would not have been included in the sales program and make them available strictly as print on demand titles. With minimal costs to add these titles to the database of items for sale, and no actual expense to produce the publication until someone orders a copy, we can significantly expand the titles we offer – and these titles will never go out of print.
We believe we can guarantee shipment of print on demand titles within 48 hours or less and that we can do some print on demand at the main bookstore within an hour after an order is received.
This print on demand capability offers advantages to publishing agencies and to depository libraries as well as to sales program customers. Agencies will be able to keep their titles "in print" indefinitely without the usual guesswork about how many copies will be needed over the life of the publication. Depositories will be able to order paper versions of titles that are included in the FDLP only as electronic files if they need a tangible copy and don’t wish to print one locally.
One future benefit that we are considering for the FDLP is the ability to allow each library to define specific titles they wish to receive in paper, so each library may be allocated a certain number of pages or titles that can be received free through print on demand and then purchase additional titles once the allocation of free services has been used up.
OMB/GPO Agreement
GPO is working on a number of pilot projects to test various services that GPO may offer in the future. Perhaps the most exciting one, and certainly the one that has received the most press, is the agreement between the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and GPO. This agreement is truly a win for all concerned. It is an innovative approach to contracting for Executive Branch printing that is completely within GPO’s statutory responsibility under Title 44 of the US Code. Under the agreement an agency may choose its own commercial printers using standard contracts issued by GPO. The publishing agency will pay GPO, and GPO will pay the printer, less a modest 3% fee to cover GPO’s contracting and administrative costs. However, the printer will not be paid until my office has received two print copies and one electronic copy (in a format that I specify).
This will give GPO an electronic copy of each publication for dissemination to the public, directly and through the FDLP. It will also give us two copies of last resort so GPO can, if necessary, create a new digital copy in the future if the electronic copy can no longer be used due to changes in technology or other problems.
The agreement also preserves the right of the Superintendent of Documents to purchase from the printer, at its own expense, additional copies for sale or depository distribution. And, as if that wasn’t enough, OMB will limit agency use of in-house and other Executive Branch printing capability and seek to have all appropriate publications from such facilities provided to the Superintendent of Documents as required by Title 44.
This agreement will be tested with a single agency during FY 2004, which begins on October 1, 2003, and if it is successful, it will be extended to other agencies in FY 2005. The agency has not yet been designated, but we expect to know within the next few weeks what agency OMB has chosen for the pilot project.
The agreement should go a long way toward eliminating the fugitive document problem and bring many more titles into the FDLP. The Public Printer, Bruce James, deserves enormous credit for listening to the concerns of OMB and the Executive Branch agencies and making them an offer that addresses their concerns, stays within the legal requirements of Title 44, and improves public access to government information.
This is an example of the kind of innovation you will continue to see from GPO, and this agreement should give you every reason to be encouraged about our ability to work together to define a bright future for the Federal Depository Library Program and other services of the Government Printing Office.
Planning for the Future of the FDLP
I could spend hours talking with you about all of the initiatives that we are pursuing as we re-examine the mission of the Federal Depository Library Program and seek to ensure that there is a viable program for the next hundred years that acknowledges and utilizes new technologies to support democracy and inform our users. It is a lofty and ambitious, but achievable, goal and one that is well worth the effort that it will require to shape it.
Each of your institutions has an important role to play in the process, even those of you who represent Canadian libraries. Each month, there are thousands of GPO Access visitor sessions from Canada and referrals from websites using the country code for Canada. At present it is only about 1% of our total traffic, but it is growing – and obviously, there are very likely many more sessions and referrals that cannot be easily identified as Canadian in origin. We are very proud that GPO Access is a worldwide resource, delivering an average 37 million government documents per month to its users. We welcome input from all of our users as we re-examine our services and plan for the future.
We are not going to redesign the Federal Depository Library Program in Washington and impose a new structure on the depository library community. GPO administers the program on behalf of the participating libraries and the public we jointly serve. That community must drive the decisions about what the program should be in the future. We cannot do it without you – and, even if we could, we do not want to, or intend to, do it without you.
Together we must re-examine the services that GPO provides to the public directly and through the depository libraries. We must define the services that are required now and in the future to support the mission. We must address the fundamental question that we have been asking each other since 1995: Why be a depository library when you can obtain "everything" (or virtually everything) free on the Internet without being part of the program?
To do this well, we must be like the two-headed Roman god Janus. We must look both forward and backwards. We must "get out of the box" and take a fresh look at the mission we share and determine the best means to accomplish it. We should not limit ourselves to incremental changes to the current system, but seek a new vision, which respects the foundation of the current program, but is not constrained by it, and that takes optimum advantage of the enormous volume of electronic resources that are, and will be, available.
At the same time, we must find creative ways to reduce the burdens of the large historical collections on our regional depository libraries and other large selectives, without losing the value of having a distributed system that protects these assets and ensures permanent public access. We want to work with the library community on expanded digitization, preservation, retrospective cataloging, and other services to better mange the retrospective materials and make them more accessible to users in and outside of your libraries.
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