The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 18, May 1, 2005, Article 22

LIBRARIANS WORRY OVER LOSS OF WEB PUBLICATIONS

The Chicago Tribune published an article on April 29, 2005,
discussing the pitfalls of online publishing, which should be no
surprise to most bibliophiles. Their prime example is the U.S.
Government Printing Office:

"At its peak in the 1980s, before the days of Web sites and
e-documents, the office printed more than 35 million documents
a year, sending copies to libraries across the country, some of
which kept everything the GPO produced and made it available
to anyone who asked.

But now to cut costs, government agencies are increasingly
putting documents online rather than printing them and do not
always provide an electronic copy to the GPO."

"Scholars and activists say that important government information
is being lost when an agency takes them offline.

For instance, librarian Constance Lundberg of Brigham Young
University's law library, said documents pertaining to operation
criteria for dams along the Colorado River and environmental
assessment reports, have gone missing after being removed
from government Web pages."

"And the printing office recently issued a report estimating
that half of all government documents bypass it and go
directly online, conceding, "therein lies the biggest challenge
for the Government Printing Office."

The report proposed that the GPO reinvent itself, creating
one huge online archive that would be available in late 2007
and would capture all federal digital documents.

Critics say this proposal would lead to the consolidation of
public information on government servers, where it is more
susceptible to deletion or alteration. They also warn of a
diminished role for GPO's partner libraries in preserving
the public record, and they are concerned the public won't
have broad access to free government information."

"We believe the GPO's proposed model will do more to
endanger long-term access to government information than
ensure it," three librarians at the University of California,
San Diego, wrote in an article in the latest issue of the
Journal of Academic Librarianship."

"The biggest question facing GPO may be the one of posterity.
Eternally preserving electronic data presents a huge intellectual
and technical challenge for the agency, as computers and
software evolve every few years and the agency's budget
hasn't grown to keep pace."

To read the full article, see: Full Story

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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