Access to Government Information in a Digital Environment

The Web was supposed to make government more transparent, but faculty will need new skills and expertise to navigate the online thicket of information sources

By Peter Hernon, Harold C. Relyea, and Robert E. Dugan

Since the inauguration of the federal government in spring 1789, the United States has continued to develop and expand its policies promoting public availability and responsible management of government records. Today, the U.S. federal government is the largest producer, anywhere in the world, of information intended for public use.

Increasingly, the government is looking at the World Wide Web as a means to disseminate information and provide citizens with services. Growing use of the Web has contributed to the phenomenon of electronic government, or "e-gov." Polls taken following the September 11 terrorist attacks showed that the public views e-gov as a mechanism to communicate with elected officials, hold the government accountable, and stay informed about issues and fast-breaking developments. Businesses see electronic government as a means to find resources and comply with regulations, while the government itself now looks at e-gov as a tool to report on potential terrorist activities and to coordinate emergency responses to possible homeland attacks.

Many people, however, remain puzzled about how to gain access to the wealth of information the federal government produces. Complicating matters, access to much of the information the government has developed over more than two centuries is incomplete and fragmented, and the information collected has not necessarily been preserved. Although the Web cannot solve this problem entirely, it provides a way for federal, state, and local governments to disseminate information so that faculty and others may not need to visit repositories. To expand the resources available, the government, at times in cooperation with the private sector, is making the contents of its Web sites more robust. Taking advantage of these new opportunities from an office or home computer will depend, however, on understanding how to navigate and acquire resources in an increasingly complex information environment.

Government information, regardless of its format, documents the formation, implementation, and operation of programs; it covers issues of importance to each of the three branches of government and often guides subsequent government policies and actions. The information may appear in a print or digital form and include the text of reports, photographs, satellite imagery, statistics (perhaps linked to an interactive map), proceedings of symposia, or Webcasts of congressional hearings. (A Webcast is an audiovisual presentation, such as a lecture or news conference, that can be viewed online in real time or archived for later viewing.) The documentation may also cover agency press conferences or news briefings, legislation, and the like. Thus faculty interested in any number of topics—demographics, American history since colonial times, economics, education, environmental studies, health care, public policy, popular culture, social and behavioral sciences, medicine, the physical sciences, and so on—may well find information useful for their teaching, research, or consulting.

Although digital information relates mostly to the current activities of the three federal branches of government, historical resources can be found at Web portals like Thomas <thomas.loc.gov>. (A portal is a multifunctional Web site that usually includes Web directories, indexes, and links to other appropriate Web-based resources.) Named after Thomas Jefferson, who sold his personal library to replenish the Library of Congress, Thomas provides access to legislative branch resources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in addition to current legislative information. Similarly, the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library <lcweb2.loc.gov> offers a wealth of historical resources, including, for example, a home page for historical maps from 1500 to 1999.

Paper Trail

An informed citizenry is essential for democratic government, and the public availability of government information has long been a cherished principle in the United States. Until the early years of the twentieth century, the federal government disseminated information through an ambitious publications program, depository libraries, and direct assistance to those who queried government staff. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the rise of the administrative state and greater government intervention into, and regulation of, various sectors of American society was creating more information. When the United States entered World War I, regulatory activities further expanded, and the number of administrative agencies increased. In the postwar era, growth momentarily slowed, but began again with the onset of the Great Depression and the arrival of the New Deal.

The rise of the administrative state also saw the arrival of an expanding cadre of civil service professionals, well trained and expert in developing and implementing federal regulatory and service programs. Many of these civil servants held a proprietary attitude toward unpublished agency records; they saw little reason to share information when members of the public, the press, or even Congress requested it. In the mid-1950s, Congress and the press began to question the unwillingness of federal agencies to make information available. This scrutiny resulted in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966 and, thereafter, a series of information access and open government laws, some of which have been refined and adapted for the new digital environment.

The thousands of U.S. government Web sites that exist today are rich in information content. They may, for example, (a) make available specialized application software to permit the public to access, view, and download information such as databases; (b) enable users to create, modify, or customize information to meet a specific need, such as making maps function interactively within a user’s Web browser; (c) allow users to personalize

their interactions with a Web site (by, for example, creating "My TradeNet" on the site <www.tradenet.gov>); or (d) relay Webcast announcements, news briefings, or training sessions by sending archived or "live" audio and video files through the Web to an individual’s workstation.

Technical Issues

The ability of faculty and others to surf the Web to view this information depends on the hardware and software installed on their computers. Government Web pages may require additional programs, often referred to as "viewers," "players," or "plug-ins." These software applications, such as Adobe Reader, extend the capacity of the Web browser to present information. Unfortunately for the Web user, the federal government does not have a government-wide recommendation for each type of viewer or plug-in; each agency makes its own recommendation. As a result, different Web sites may recommend different viewers for the same format. For example, one agency may ask visitors to use Real Player software to view a movie image, while another agency may recommend QuickTime to view a similar or identical image. Federal government Web sites do, however, try to meet the needs of individual users by providing them with choices for viewing information and downloading files based upon the speed of their Internet connection and installed viewer.

Complicating matters, most government home pages link to many other Web sites within the three branches of government, including those of subunits within executive departments and agencies, those of Congress and the agencies that support it, and those of the judiciary—each court and the agencies affiliated with the judiciary. These links do not, however, remain stable; they often change, and some may become obsolete.

The portal FirstGov <www.firstgov.gov> was designed to help browsers navigate numerous Web sites for information on specific topics. A unique feature of FirstGov is that it searches sites not only of the federal government, but also of state and local governments. The weakness of the portal, however, is that it misses some relevant resources and mixes together others of varying quality and importance. A search of a general topic such as "campaign finance reform," for example, can result in more than a thousand hits.

Two agencies in the Department of Commerce, the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and STAT-USA, offer numerous resources, but they do not necessarily disseminate them free of charge. NTIS, a provider of print and nonprint materials, such as magnetic tapes of datasets, operates mostly on a cost-recovery basis. It maintains an archive to ensure that its older documentation, including coverage of aerospace issues, never goes out of print. STAT-USA <www.stat-usa.gov> provides business, economic, and international trade information. Fortunately, libraries participating in the depository program administered by the Government Printing Office make most of the resources of STAT-USA freely available on selected work stations.

Caveats

Users of a government Web site might assume that the information it provides represents the official version of that information, with the government standing behind its authority and reliability. Yet that is often not so. A government agency may consider a version other than the one placed on its Web site as the authentic version or the source of record. And if no or different paper versions exist, which one does the government recognize as official? Users of a Web site may not be able to tell, and the government agency itself may not have a satisfactory answer to the question.

Another concern is surveillance. Some government Web sites use persistent cookies—software that attaches to your computer, remains there, and enables the agency to track your Web travels. The Office of Management and Budget and Congress have set qualified prohibitions on the use of cookies and the information deriving from their use. But further congressional examination of this matter and related privacy issues concerning the Internet seems warranted as the World Wide Web and the information technologies supporting it rapidly change and develop.

Those who have disabilities and who seek information from government Web sites may worry about access. But section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 provides access to, and use of, executive agencies’ electronic and information technology by individuals with disabilities. The section applies to agency Web pages containing ".pdf" files, requiring the pages to include a link to a plug-in that complies with specific software demands. The .pdf viewer enables users to view a Web document as originally formatted, including fonts, page margins, and graphics.

Information Shutdown

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, some previously available government information was rescinded. The Defense Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies reviewed the content of their Web sites and removed maps and other documents deemed useful to terrorists wanting to attack the United States, its interests, or its allies. The home page of the NRC, for example, was quickly redesigned. Information began to reappear slowly, but much has been omitted.

Last fall, Congress passed antiterrorism legislation (the USA Patriot Act) that, among its provisions, expanded the ability of law enforcement officials to monitor Internet activities. Recently, the White House directed government departments and agencies to review their Web site offerings with a view to removing information about weapons of mass destruction, including their strategic use, and "other sensitive documents related to homeland security."

In a move unrelated to the terrorist attacks, a federal judge shut down most Web sites of the Department of the Interior (DOI) in late 2001 because of concerns about the security of financial accounts held in trust for American Indians. The shutdown is linked to alleged government mismanagement of Indian trust accounts and to the money the government collected for Indians from oil, gas, and mineral leases on their lands. The judge ordered the DOI to disconnect from the Internet all computers that had access to trust fund information. The suspension of Internet access affected not only communication between the DOI and the public, but also conduct of department business. Faxes, regular mail, and the telephone replaced use of the Internet. Although select DOI Web pages are now available to the public through a private Internet service provider, the page for the Bureau of Indian Affairs remains closed as of this writing.

Some people fear that, over time, changes in technology will cause information to be lost. They worry that the electronic documents and data of today will become unreadable once new hardware and software systems are developed and old ones are discarded. That is exactly what happened to data from some of the past economic censuses conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Right to Access

The Freedom of Information Act set the ground rules for, and establishes a presumptive right of, access to unpublished records of executive agencies by any person, regardless of citizenship. Amendments in 1996 mandated the creation of electronic reading rooms—Web pages with links to records of high public interest that can be retrieved electronically and read on the computer screen or downloaded to a personal computer. Individual agencies can, however, decide which documents to make available in these electronic reading rooms, how long they will remain available, and the method by which the materials can be electronically retrieved from archival status. It is difficult to determine how agencies make these decisions and what criteria they use.

Moreover, even though FOIA establishes a right of access to government information, knowledge of specialized terminology and a good understanding of how the government operates are often needed to locate information. For example, seekers of legislative documents will discover "committee prints," "hearings," and "reports." Each of these items has a precise meaning and role in the legislative process. In addition, certain agencies, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office, play unique roles in government, and it is a good idea to check their Web sites for policy documents affecting the entire executive branch <www.whitehouse.gov/omb> or the results of investigations conducted on behalf of Congress <www.gao.gov>.

Presidents establish policy by issuing executive orders, national security directives, and, under the current Bush administration, homeland security directives. They also issue administrative orders, presidential interpretations, announcements, military orders, presidential findings, proclamations, and so on. Not all of these documents can be found on the White House Web site. National Security Presidential Directives, for example, are often "security classified" and therefore untraceable. Furthermore, the different types of communication are not linked to one another.

Within a brief time—largely the final decade of the twentieth century—the federal government, with a view to improving the efficiency and economy of its operations, has produced e-gov. The benefits of the government’s use of information technology, however, extend beyond economic considerations. E-gov has resulted in the broad dissemination of information collected and produced by the government. The information represents a fertile resource for faculty and students exploring many different topics. A quick glance at the Statistical Abstract of the United States <www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html> shows how wide ranging and potentially useful such information is.

Since the initial publication in 1999 of the biennial U.S. Government on the Web, the government has expanded the number of its Web sites and the resources placed on them. But locating these new resources is not necessarily straightforward. To take advantage of electronic and online resources, scholars, teachers, and students need to understand the factors that may limit or complicate access to government information and data.

Peter Hernon, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, is founding editor of Government Information Quarterly and coauthor of U.S. Government on the Web and U.S. Government Information: Policies and Sources. Harold Relyea is a specialist in American government with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. Robert Dugan is director of the Mildred F. Sawyer Library at Suffolk University.

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