Governments within North America have been undergoing great change within the last decade, changes that are affecting the way they are conducting day-to-day business. Some very significant developments or trends have been identified in the arena of government information practices which are causing current concerns in the public access to information -- information that many believe to be the property of the people in a democratic society. This paper will look at some of the more prevalent issues and misunderstandings that are influencing society's ability to gain access to the myriad of publications and internal documents compiled with increasing fervor in this age of tremendous information explosion. As the pre-eminent futurist Paul Saffo has pointed out, "libraries were originally created in an era of scarce information ... librarians were sort of mad information hoarders, who were hoarding in the public interest" (Saffo 1995,294). Not so anymore, with the realization that the days when libraries could collect everything "just in case" are now over, and an increased necessity for librarians to visualize a rebirth that emphasizes a library connected to a network of electronic information. These new realities have been exacerbated by problems such as fiscal restraints within government departments, leading to outsourcing and privatization in order to keep afloat. The impact of these and other policies have caused an increase in the price of government publications, a decrease in the availability of others, and an overall concern about the threat that these trends have on the average person's privacy. Who, if anyone, is overseeing the confidentiality of information that is being stored in huge governmental databases? Other issues will become apparent as the essay unfolds.
Modern society is preeminently governed by technology: information technology that emphasizes automation and information services. Information has been collected about people since the beginning of writing and institutions, but the new information technology has greatly increased the speed and scale in the ways that the information can be used. There has been a quantum leap as a result of the computerization of society: no one had realized the consequences, nor the ways in which these machines would transform life as we knew it. The early uses were thought to be quite limited, such as specialized activities like census taking, and specific scientific applications. The breakthrough came when IBM developed affordable computers, and when it was realized that programming could be automated. The key was the development of the software, allowing computers to explode in the marketplace, causing an impact that was certainly not forecasted. How does this relate to access of government information?
Computers have fundamentally and significantly changed society, the way in which people live, and especially how governments are run -- "digital media transformed the business of government" (Harris 1997). There seems to be both a trend and a counter-trend affecting how governments are reacting to this new information society. On the one hand, there is the main trend that society has always shown and that is centralization, which is greatly increased by computers. Governments have ever more power and control over people since information can easily be pooled on one terminal from many different departments. For example, gone are the days when someone on welfare could go into several different offices in the Toronto area and collect money, which was commonly done before computers and Social Insurance Numbers cleaned up much of the user abuse.
There is also the simultaneous and opposite trend of decentralization under the pressure of the new information technology. Information is now not exclusively in the hands of powerful governments, but also in many organizations. The Post-modern/post-industrial society is one typified by the rise of multinational corporations, the decline of the nation state, the dismantling of social services, and the commodification of everything, including government information. All is being networked, and an enormous dispersion of information has become accessible to those who compete with one another for information about people. One of the world's leading cybergurus, Don Tapscott has pointed out that with new media communications, new laws and modes of government are needed for "governance in an age of networked intelligence ... possibilities such as the electronic town hall to break down the walls that divide us as a society" (Harris 1997).
Things are happening so quickly, with speed and the speed of obsolescence being the hallmarks of modern
society. In this electronic world, people are 'electronic nomads', surfing here and there, with government leaders who can
exercise their authority anywhere in an electronic environment (Harris 1996). In Technology and the Government, Blake
Harris writes that governments must hurry up and figure out how to operate in an electronically digitized environment,
and learn "how to govern a people who are completely nomadic" (Harris 1996). However, are speedy decisions
something the public wants in this age of 'quicker is better'? This is one of the major trends discernible in government
practices today -- rapid change in the structure of government departments and policies: changes that have had an
incredible influence in our access to information. So much so, that Paul Saffo says,
The real problem with electronic technologies today is that they create tremendous stress on governmental systems because they leave no time for reflection by elected representatives, expected to keep up with the pace of today's society (Saffo 1995,290).
These are strange utterances when one remembers that governments are usually associated with no change, or change that comes only after great lengths of time have passed, under extreme outside pressure. Certain questions need to be answered before too much time passes, questions such as whom has network access? The average Canadian? One thing that we as Canadians must understand is that our access to information is different from our neighbors to the south, who have laws that guarantee them that information flows from the powers that be to the citizens (Monty 1996,492). Not so in Canada, where elected officials have no legal requirement to make information available, and have the right to decide what and how much is released (Monty 1996,492). Currently, many things are happening simultaneously that contribute to a complication of the process.
With a large national debt and pressure to reduce it substantially for the generations to come, Canadian political
leaders and economists have tried to decrease spending on a departmental basis, privatize some agencies operating under
governmental programs, or at least to outsource some operations to save money (Nilsen 1994,191-192). The
privatization of the governmental printing services came as a surprise to many Canadians, since it has always been a
mainstay. Its new owner is St. Joseph's Corporation of Toronto. The same thing has happened in Britain with Her
Majesty's Stationary Office being privatized. What will happen to the general publications division and depository in
Canada will be more evident as time goes on, however, the overall mentality is that private companies can bring services
to the people more efficiently. They are not under the heavily stringent regulations that governmental agencies are and
do not have to answer to the people. In addition, the government gets to take advantage of some of the latest
technologies being developed by private companies. Along with this was a realization that if information is power, then it
must be worth something, thus, bringing about a strong commercial component to the information regularly stored in
governmental databases. By the mid-1980s, there was no longer the same emphasis on the rights of the average citizen
to information sources, and rather, a radical shift to the commodification of it was evident (Nilsen 1994,192). As Kirsti
Nilsen has concluded,
The advent of computer technology ... government restraint initiatives, and the cost recovery requirements have
encouraged government managers to see information as a resource that can be commoditized and marketed to generate
revenue. Government's desire to support a strong Canadian information industry has encouraged the view that
government information should be marketed via the private sector (Nilsen 1994,206).
This is certainly the case with Statistics Canada, which has historically been relied upon for their wealth of detailed statistics information that was regularly and freely passed on to research and depository libraries and used by a multitude of people. As Vivienne Monty points out, "Statistics Canada was the first agency to engage in a widespread cost-recovery policy, since cost-recovery is now mandated wherever the government believes data have market value" (Monty 1994,495). Strangely, this was just shortly after the Access to Information Act was passed in 1983, which was considered a milestone for the quality of communication between the Canadian government and the public. However, the government decided to generate revenue from those who needed the information regularly. More important, the forces of economic restraint and the commodification of information, with privatization and deregulation, provided the inspiration and justification for government to limit the amount of information that it makes available and to increase prices for that information that it does provide" (Nilsen 1994,199). A future trend seems to be that instead of providing access as such, government policy seems to be toward the development of tools that will provide lists of documents that can be purchased, not direct access to the information itself, with expectations that the full costs of the publications will be realized (Nilsen 1994,206). Can it be said that in effect, Canadians will be paying twice for the information -- once with their tax dollars, and again out-of-pocket? The same sorts of occurrences can be seen in American and British political arenas.
The Information Superhighway is the phrase coined by the political and cultural leaders of our time, and has been heralded as an important link by which information can travel between government and the citizen. The Canadian government has also established PubNet, an internal Internet for members of the House of Commons that enables them to stay on top of all the issues, without the costly expense of circulating paper copies of all the parliamentary publications (Desramaux 1995). Since 1992/1993, parliamentary publications have been reduced by 60%, in large part because access is online and only printed off on demand (Desramaux 1995).
The government was certainly one of the first significant organizations to have a strong presence on the Net, but it must be recognized that being online is not a commonality that exists between the Canadian, nor American citizenry, and one that the government must keep in mind as it continues its digitization of information. Statistics show that 24 percent of Canadians are functionally illiterate (Rennie 1995), with those illiterate, much higher. User-friendliness must be the order of the day for online government sites, nor should these avenues be the only available, since, for all intensive purposes, this creates an elitism that the government breeds. There are also a significant number of people who find this kind of technology offensive, with a recent American study quoting one quarter to one half the population being anxious about computers (Foran 1995). Nobody would say that the government should not use the Internet to make information accessible and available to many people, twenty-four hours a day, but if it is intending to use it exclusively, then that is going to be problematic. As Anita Cannon points out, it does help the government by reducing printing costs and postage, and ever more departments are turning to the technology as a means to provide needed information (Cannon 1997). However, one has to wonder if these sites are completely stable, and can always be found in the same place, and how long the information will be online before it is archived or if it will be archived at all.
This writer also believes that there may be a kind of misconception going on: there is the belief that there is an enormous amount of government information currently online, and that we as Canadians have access to so much more because of this new technology, but when compared with the Americans, our access is simply minuscule, and apparently much less when compared with the paper-based resources that were commonly available through local libraries or by request. Just because there is information that seems novel on the Net, one should not be fooled into thinking that the floodgates have opened. The other major concern of government's preoccupation with online service to constituents is what happens to the person living in outport Newfoundland or on a small British Columbia island, living no where near a library with computers having online access? What if they do not have the money nor the communications infrastructure to be 'online'? How are their communications with government going to fair? Why should one or two media forms make others obsolete?
In an interesting article, Bernadine E. Abbott-Hoduski cautions the government about relying too heavily on electronic dissemination of information. For instance, besides demanding that the public and libraries continually upgrade to allow access to the latest CD-ROM products, or Internet connectivity, how long a storage life can be expected out of CD- ROMS? What if they get broken, can they be replaced? The other question she poses is what happens when the power goes off? (Abbott-Hoduski 1996,249-250). We all know that the whole infrastructure collapses, and business cannot be carried on. Finally, even if most of the people in this country had the money to purchase a home computer and Internet service provision, how many would have the training needed to search databases for the information they need? What most will require is a specialist such as a librarian to sift through the databases for specifics, and who will probably require the patron to pay a user fee to cover the costs. That is if the library is connected to a network and has computers powerful enough to load the latest CD-ROM versions released by the government. The other problem is not having access to a library. Many do not.
Depository libraries were set up to provide free access to government publications, and have been an integral link in the communications chain between government and the public. Now it is being threatened by the government pushing agencies to privatize, reduce spending, recover costs, and the ideology that, all publications will be in electronic form to save money, despite systems requirements (Monty 1996,493). Simply because a library is a depository depot for government information, does not mean that they receive everything published. The Depository Service Program is given funds to pay for the distribution of government documents, but only a small portion. For instance, the last federal budget was released on diskettes that cost $500.00; there were not enough funds available through the DSP to buy them for the depository libraries, nor were many local libraries able to buy them (Monty 1996,493). Therefore, not many Canadians had the opportunity even to look at their own federal budget. As earlier mentioned, even mainstays of the DSP such as the census information, are now electronic, and cost thousands of dollars to access - a price tag that is quite significant for depository libraries, to say nothing of ordinary public and research libraries (Monty 1996,495).
Other problems include an inability to run some of the most recent CD-ROM products because of system inadequacies, and the reality that although there are literally thousands of CD-ROMs released by the government, they still need to be loaded one at a time, and can only be used on an individual basis (Maxymuk 1996,328). As Bruce W. McConnell writes in New Wine in Old Wineskins, electronic resources are problematic, and "as for availability, technological obsolescence in this rapidly changing industry makes acid-based paper seem like a simple problem" (McConnell 1996,219). Nevertheless, he does point out that electronic storage can be quite attractive for saving shelf space and removing the need to bind and repair paper-based publications, stressing that it is what is in the publications that count, not how they are packaged (McConnell 1996,222). Certainly CD-ROMs are useful to have, especially for libraries that are not connected to the Internet, but staying upgraded with shrinking library budgets is costly, and helping the numbers of people that rely on depository libraries is difficult.
With the Internet, libraries have the problem of slow modems and Internet traffic on the more popular government sites (Maxymuk 1996,332). As Prudence S. Adler points out, there is an important role in all this for depository libraries as 'electronic gateways', which can move more toward a 'just-in-time' philosophy for information access (Adler 1996,438), but who will pay for the expensive printers and paper needed to download government information? This is especially problematic in this age of information explosion, and a "rapid growth in the amount of government information and the formats in which it is delivered" (Massant 1994,386). Should there be charges made to the patron, such as a user-fee? Is information then only something the rich will be able to afford?
As governments rely more on outsourcing and privatization, and everything is being stored in computers that can
transmit information quicker and cheaper than anyone thought possible, there is a growing concern over the public
access of information. As Brian Foran so eloquently puts it,
What has happened is that the vulnerability of the information and the consequent loss of privacy have been seen by
some as the inevitable trade-offs against this greater speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Privacy is often at the top
of the list of rights to be traded off for other perceived benefits, usually because it's not recognized as an issue until it's
lost. But once lost, there is no remedy - you can't get it back. So while we are tempted with technology's benefits, we
often overlook its vulnerabilities (Foran 1995).
There is not only the deregulation of government to be concerned with, there's also the consolidation across departments, or in effect, a centralization of information (Foran 1995). Information that is often at the fingertips of private companies, and sold to the highest bidder for a myriad of reasons. In this world of electronic dissemination, governments must put secure encryption measures in place, and make sure that personal information goes only where it is supposed to (Foran 1995). The amount of information concerning our finances, personal preferences, including our spending habits, and health statistics stored in databases is apparently phenomenal, but paradoxically, the public really knows very little about these systems because many are already controlled by private interests (Yerxa 1995). As Yerxa and Moll point out, Canadians are not even given the choice to decide who or what controls the sending and receiving of information, and do not have to give consent (Yerxa 1995).
As databases become more widespread and compatible, millions of records that are "collected for one purpose will be used for multiple other purposes" (Hernon 1994,24 1). This goes hand in hand with the government seeing information as a commodity to be collected and sold to generate revenue (Hernon 1994,243). This makes more and more people uncomfortable about who knows what, and conjures up thoughts about the development of a mass surveillance system behind the scenes, reminiscent of Orwell's Big Brother. The same sorts of things are happening in countries such as the United States, and there has been a real cry around the world for legislation to protect the general public.
Where does all this leave libraries and librarians? In a waiting game of sorts, unless there are some brave and fearless information specialists willing to spend the time and make their concerns known to the government. If government information is becoming a trickle instead of a stream in libraries, then we must fight for access on behalf of our public. Libraries are one of the only common grounds left in this world of those who have and those who don't, and the information must be available to those who need it, regardless of financial status. In today's environment of information overkill, it will also be the librarian's job to help their patrons muddle through it all to find the pertinent data they need. At the same time, librarians must teach these new technological advancements, or they will be the ones with the ability to censure, even inadvertently. Finally, librarians must stay abreast of the politics of the day, keeping track of policy concerning the world of information, and continue to fight for change and improvement.