Government Information: a topic for all librarians

The first session I attended was a forum for librarians from many areas and specialisations about government information - how and why we access it, what training and guidance we need and provide to our users, discussion of concerns and just what we mean when we talk about government information. It was being run by the Council on Legislation and GODORT (Government Documents Round Table) with the intention of helping them produce a report to take to ALA about the needs of all librarians in this area. Representatives had been invited from all the various ALA subgroups, and the forum was also attended by people from the Government Printing Office and all sorts of interested parties.

We were divided into groups to discuss the topic, which meant that everyone got a chance to contribute. Because there were people there from all sorts of libraries, with all sorts of users and all sorts of reasons for needing to access government information, the discussion was wide-ranging and it was good to hear such a variety of perspectives and, as ever, to discover that everyone faces the same issues. One of the main concerns that people expressed was about the increasingly ephemeral nature of a lot of government information - more and more is 'born digital' and is not being recorded, catalogued, archived and preserved. Documents and websites are liable to move and even disappear, and, quite aside from the difficulties that presents for librarians and researchers, there is a great worry about the amount of information that is being lost to posterity. The feeling is that this is mostly due to neglect on the part of the producers - they often don't have a long-term interest in their information, and aren't thinking about who else may be interested in it, either now or in the future. This also affects the findability of information - the producers often aren't bothered about cataloguing/metadata for the same reasons, but this renders an awful lot of potentially very useful information valueless as it cannot be found. This is the dark side of the digital revolution as far as this area is concerned, that even while the internet has brought an enormous amount of information to a wider audience through digitisation projects and the negating of geographical barriers, it poses a great threat to new information that never has a physical form. It is an issue that I had heard quite a bit about in the UK, and I know that the British Library is looking into how to overcome this, so it was interesting (if not surprising) to hear about the same problems for the US.