To: Attendees at the CIC Virtual Electronic Library Conference, December 6-7, 1999, Northwestern University.

From: CIC Heads of Government Publications

Subject: Statement of Interest

The CIC Library Directors have proposed a strategy for extending the Virtual Electronic Library to encompass digital collections. The CIC Government Publications Task Force (recently re-constituted as CIC Heads of Government Publications) proposes to contribute to this initiative through continuation of joint projects already underway, and also through possible new cooperative projects.

The CIC Government Publications Task Force was established in 1997 The charge from the Directors identified six areas for possible exploration, with a goal of developing proposals for "joint projects that will provide networked access to government information." Of the six possible areas, these are clearly related to the Virtual Electronic Library:

• Providing better, networked, access to the information the federal government already supplies, or will be supplying, only in digital format.
• Finding alternative ways of accessing federal information.
• Addressing the twin issues of preservation and space through acquisition and use of existing digital information or through a digitization project.
• Support the instructional and research needs of the CIC institutions with regard to numeric and spatial data provided by the government.

Access to government information is essential to the teaching, learning, and research missions of the CIC institutions. As governments move toward more electronic distribution of information, all CIC libraries are faced with similar challenges related to the diversity of formats, standards, and discovery tools for this information. Collaborative efforts can increase the efficiency of access for individual institutions, and expand the universe of electronic government information for which permanent public access can be guaranteed.

Government agencies, the U. S. Government Printing Office, and the Depository Library Council to the Public Printer are looking for major partners in the long term preservation of and public access to government information. Data distributed in CD ROM and DVD format will require migration to more permanent formats, and information on agency web sites must be archived at sites which will guarantee permanent access. The development of appropriate standards and procedures will facilitate development of such partnerships.

For government information and data, obtaining current digital collections is not the problem, given the rapid increase in electronic publishing in various formats (floppy discs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, tapes, Web, etc.) by the United States and other governments. The problem which the government publications librarians are in a unique place to address is the access, maintenance and archiving of this information. We both seek help in addressing this problem and are willing to take the lead in a number of areas. To this end, the CIC Government Publications Task Force has initiated the following relevant projects:

• Developed an ftp site, housed at Indiana University, which provides access to information originally distributed to federal depository libraries on floppy disks (5 1/4" and 3 1/2"). Currently completing installation and testing of the site and actively working with GPO to develop a partnership which will enable all libraries to rely on this site rather than maintaining their own sets of material in superseded formats. This process could also be used to share access to other information which comes in floppy disc format, and thus is difficult to manage in libraries.
• Initiated a project to identify government CD ROM titles and the related technical documentation needed to make use of them. The project continues in cooperation with the Government Documents Task Force of ALA. The end result will be a single source of information on government CD-ROMs (annotations, technical documentation, user documentation, requirements, access restrictions, alternative access points, cataloging data). The database is currently being restructured; enhancement/addition of data will be an on-going process. This project is also providing data which is being used to identify CD ROM resources which are in particular need of permanent, networked access as the technology in libraries changes.
• Converted the text of the extensive technical documentation from several important CD-ROMs to HTML for access through the Web, so that users can consult the technical documentation easily before and after extracting actual data from CDs.
• Explored several possible digitization projects. Northwestern University is digitizing a large collection of League of Nations documents with an IMLS grant, and the University of Illinois, Chicago has investigated the possibility of using electronic files to begin an electronic collection of the Foreign Relations of the United States. The possibility of digitizing the annual United States Government Manual is currently under exploration, since this is a useful tool for studying the evolution of government organizations and functions.

The Task Force identified several other possible projects, which have yet to be implemented but which fall within the parameters of the current VEL discussions:

• Preserve and provide access to essential government data files distributed to libraries on CD-ROM. The first emphasis would be on Census Bureau files, and could involve providing front-end searching for large files via the web. This project could involve the ICPSR, and social science data libraries. The technical problems surrounding remote access to CD-ROMs have so far precluded projects to provide networked access directly to that format. New technologies might become available for this purpose, but an alternative is to load the government data from the CDs directly onto servers and create appropriate search interfaces for remote access.
• Provide permanent access for electronic government information through official partnerships with agencies and the Government Printing Office. While government agencies avoid the word archiving for political reasons, this would fall within the VEL digital archiving definitions. Assuring the existence or development of appropriate metadata would be an element of such a project. A current interest of the Task Force is investigating access to documents being provided as PDF files on agency web sites, initially the Census Bureau. Such partnerships would provide permanent access when agencies choose to keep only recent publications on their servers. Since such projects require large amounts of computer space and long-term commitments to access, they are well-suited to collaborative projects.
• Work with the GIS community to provide specialized databases of government information which can be identified and viewed spatially. Such databases, with appropriate metadata included, could provide access to data in many subject areas through an interface which allows users to choose a particular geographic area, then the required data. Much government data has a geographic component, so is well suited to such applications.

The CIC Heads of Government Publications would welcome the opportunity to work within VEL to develop some of these or related projects, with the help of others who could provide guidance in the appropriate standards, infrastructure, organization, and procedures to make major projects successful.

CIC Government Publications Task Force

Debora Cheney Pennsylvania State University

Jackie Druery Northwestern University

Carolyn Kohler University of Iowa

Lou Malcomb Indiana University

Mary Mallory University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

Charlene Mason University of Minnesota

Debbi Schaubman Michigan State University

John Shuler University of Illinois (Chicago)

Julia Wallace University of Minnesota

Lawrence Woods University of Iowa

Grace York University of Michigan