 I'm going to introduce the panel briefly, we're going to go more or less in the order that we're sitting except that David Ferriero, who is the Archivist of the United States will go first. You all have programs, the programs speak briefly to the accomplishments and virtues of the members of our panel, so I'm not going to repeat very much of it. The basic setup is that I've given each of my colleagues 10 minutes, whereupon I will be ruthless, and that will leave then about 20 minutes or maybe a little more. Each of them, by the way, has assured me that he will use nothing like 10 minutes, so you can monitor that. And then we will have an open discussion of the issues. The question of the role of getting, obviously, government documents and government data as part of the DPLA is, I think, one that is energizing and exciting, but I'll do no more editorializing for the moment. It's my pleasure now to introduce David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, longtime wonderful and valuable career in libraries. One of the few people in the business that everybody both likes and respects, and with that, David. Good afternoon. Sorry I'm not with you. Brewster, congratulations on that church. That was my first view of it. I can just see you in the pulpit there. Nice to see it finally. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, good. Okay. Good. Let me start by just reminding folks that I have, as Paul said, I've been in libraries for a long time. So my entire career has been spent trying to connect people with the information that they need. I was attracted to Washington to the National Archives because of the open government initiative in this administration, which is trying to create a climate of transparency, participation, and collaboration. And that translates for me into figuring out ways of getting my records, which at this point we estimate at around 12 billion pieces of paper, not to even mention the electronic content. But to get as much of that content into the eyes of the American public in any way that I can. So the DPLA, my interest in the DPLA began when Bob Darden started talking about it when I was at the New York Public Library, as a trustee of the New York Public Library. And he got very interested in creating something like a massive digital library that had the content of the American culture. And I got very interested at that point, and so my interest has been sustained and peaked as I've taken on my responsibilities at the National Archives. It's an opportunity for government players, not only the National Archives, but the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Agriculture Library, all of us, the GPO, and to don't forget the Federal Register, which is part of the National Archives, to collaborate in a way that we have never collaborated before to ensure that the American public has access to all of this wonderful information. I see in terms of the, if this is, if we play our cards right, that we have an opportunity through the DPLA to actually change government. We have an opportunity to create a common portal that gives American people access to the actions of their government for the first time. A better informed citizenry, more transparency, but most importantly, more citizen engagement in the government process. And that's something that this administration has committed itself to, and we have the opportunity to actually concretely support that, that initiative through this work. And that's the reason that I am so, so passionate about this and so excited about it. Now, we've had a couple of really good, what I would call demonstration projects, some glimpses of what that might look like thanks to the work of my friend Karl Malamud, who has in the two and a half years that I have been the National Archives has been pushing us in directions that we probably never would have taken if we didn't have his support. But it's a good example of the citizen engagement in making government content recognizable and usable by the world actually. So I'm higher than a kite about this. And as I promised, Paul, I'm not going to take 10 minutes. I'm more interested in the conversation that we can have as a group. So I'm going to turn it over to Karl. Okay. So next up is as Mark Sandler, who runs the cooperative library project, which isn't exactly what it's called at the at the CIC. And therefore, I have to pay close attention to everything that he says. He's also been in the library business for quite some time. Mark? That I have members, so I'm going to be careful here. And I can't do what David just did. I don't think I can do a five minute talk without moving my looks. I was watching carefully there. That was a pretty good trick there. I'm using traditional PowerPoint and I snuck this slide in here. It's really just a little like a Google ad for the CIC universities that sort of ranked high on my slide stack, just because I was rigging the algorithm here. But this is just a reminder to you all about what or who the CIC is, a group of 13 universities conveniently and pleasantly located in the Midwest. The CIC actually stands for something, but I'm not going to tell you what that is, because a friend of ours wrote an article. He described it as the Grimly Names Committee on Institutional Cooperation. So anyway, that's who we are and where we are. And the library directors of the CIC universities have actually agreed to put their collective shoulders to the wheel to try to digitize as much of the Federal Depository Library Project collection as possible. Those resources that have been distributed by GPO since somewhere back in 1813 in some cases and then sort of a revamped effort in 1895 and then revamped again in the early 1960s. So gone through several iterations, but the really primary distribution system that government has developed in partnership with libraries to make government information broadly accessible to the citizens of the U.S. So we have sort of set out to do as much digitizing of this legacy collection as possible, working in partnership with Google and the fruits and results of that digitization being deposited in the Hathi Trust digital library. The numbers involved and I don't want to bore you with this and it's not whatever David said 12 billion or something like that that he was looking at. So this is small potatoes by contrast but to date we've done about 250,000 volumes that are that have been digitized, scanned and ingested into Hathi Trust and those are accessible now to the public. There's about another 250,000 or so that are catalog process barcoded and ready to go. In other words they're in queue for scanning at a point where we can develop enough capacity or throughput through Google or other scanning possible partners as possible to get that material out of the way. Beyond that 500,000 things get a little dice here. There's something like 762,000 records in OCLC for unique government document titles held by one or another CIC university. Some of those are available to us for scanning, some of them not so available to us for scanning. So 500,000 I think we can do 762 gets a little more difficult not impossible and then there's a mysterious number. It's amazing how little we know about this corpus given that we're sitting on this 1200 times over across the country. We don't know probably within a half a million about the overall size of this collection or what libraries are holding and how easy or difficult it'll be to get them catalog processed, digitized and ultimately accessible. So overall we've seen numbers like 1.5 million print volumes, 2 million, 2.2 million, some guesses up to 3 million but it's a little dicey because we're trying to strip out microform, micro copies, we're trying to strip out maps, we're trying to strip out CD-ROMs and other formats at this point. The work that's currently going on scanning is going on and continues to go on although not at the robust pace that we would like or most of you would like to see. Cataloging, projects going on, University of Minnesota doing fast track cataloging of some 100,000 or more of documents that had never been cataloged. Purdue University working with the University of Iowa to catalog the serial set at the item level. Penn State University dedicated a cataloger to doing department of commerce work. So a lot of that slog work and it's always you know you come here and you look at it and you go oh my god there's young people here how fabulous and not only that they're bright and they have vision and they're doing exciting things and I gotta admit the work that we're doing is kind of like shlepper work you know where it's a slog. It's really we're trying to I guess sort of create the landfill that DPLA and others can come in and build some you know fabulous planned community on or Disney World with all sorts of exciting rides and colorful architectural statements and you know whatever. So you know there is not a big punchline to the work going on in the CIC but it is a substantial number of volumes and ultimately we do believe it will be significant a significant improvement for users both in terms of providing them with convenient access giving them opportunity to do different kinds of work than they were ever able to do in the print world it will certainly improve discoverability which has always been a challenge in the documents world. We think it will be a big help to libraries in terms of allowing them to do a better job of managing their resources and preserving content with which they've been entrusted and ultimately we do believe it will allow for some efficiencies in government and in government's relationship to the citizens of the country that it will as David said it will foster engagement around this content it will give people more of an opportunity to interact with it. Now our attention is primarily primarily on legacy materials and overwhelmingly we assume that most people are most engaged most of the time with current content and that opens up all sorts of questions about born digital information that government that QPO has available and how they distribute it how they make it accessible and how we integrate that with the legacy collection that our libraries and others are trying to help develop so you know that that's an interesting question I think the the whole just question about well you know what is this information anyway and how valuable is it in the absence of the analysis in the absence of context without historical context or or an opportunity to view it you know and where do you sort of draw the line between the purposes of government and the and our interest in creating that informed citizenry and I guess the faith that we would all like to have the government shares that interest in having a truly informed citizenry but certainly not every every document that government chooses to publish and share is really aimed at that purpose of information there are lots of other reasons why government decides to talk to people or act people so we don't want to turn this into an occupy occupy the internet archive meeting but you know someone could certainly step back and say what has to be done with this information to put it in a context that really does add to the public dialogue and create a true body of information as opposed to just an onslaught of disinformation propaganda marketing pieces for various government agencies etc so I'm gonna get down I don't know how my time went there Paul how'd I do you got a whole minute left to go I'll take this with me I think well since Mark isn't going to take his minute I am I'm since I'm in a church here and thank you Brewster for making the church available to us I'm going to say that in answer to Mark's fairly dystopic questions of a moment ago I would say that one thing that's required in order to put this work into context to make sense of it is to have it and that is a strong argument for for digitizing and making broadly available the record of the United States government whatever the government might have thought it was up to we're much more likely to find out what it was up to if we can find out what it said um and that's actually a very good note on which to introduce Carl Malmad who's been saying similar things in many contexts um for for some time Carl Carl is by the way the president of public resources dot org um and that's it Carl go thank you very much Paul Mark congratulations for doing that gpo work um that is actually there's been I would not say opposition from the government printing office but certainly stonewalling and so the fact that CIC has gone forward with that I think is a real testament to what they're doing um there's a risen a bright line between government and the rest of our country it's a line or you might call it a wall or a ditch or a moat or an ocean and it's a feeling that government is only relevant to those inside the Beltway the feeling is that government is only relevant to lobbyists from large interest with offices on K Street or only relevant to government bureaucrats and that's somehow not a part of our country and not in touch with the rest of us and I think that rhetoric is wrong there's also a bright light that's arisen between the capabilities of our government and those of the private private sector it's a bright line that has led to a reliance on private contractors to do the real work of government to an outsourcing of democracy to some spectacularly bad deals take the government accountability office they maintain a legislative history of every law they pack those 50 million pages of paper and they sent them at government expense to the Thomson corporation which digitized them and turned them into a product Thomson sent those valuable papers back to the government now what did the government get for their consideration they got a couple logins from a couple staffers but even members of congress must now pay to access this Thomson product this is based on a perception that government can only spend money and it must rely on profiteers to do the real work of government and that rhetoric is also wrong the question i think that's before us today is whether government is relevant to a digital public library of america whether the works of government are relevant to americans whether we can jump that wall whether we should jump that wall take the regulations that are promulgated by our executive branch the edicts of government this is the code of regulations it's 170 000 pages of dense text the regulations of our 50 states are another million pages or so now these are rules that are relevant to every person these are the osha safety regulations that every business owner or every factory worker must obey these are the hazmat storage and transport regulations these are the product safety regulations for hearing aids and baby strollers and propane tanks and elevators are these edicts of government available to citizens to inform themselves are they available for publishers that wish to make them more readable are they available for the businesses that must obey them are they available to students that wish to learn at the state level stanford university and the american association of law libraries did a national inventory of legal materials they found that the regulations of the 50 states are a paragon of unusability and abomination of bad html and atrocious graphics they found that 26 states assert copyright and prohibit reuse of their regulations at the federal level the federal register the official newspaper of government is only available going back a few years although kudos are absolutely due to mr ferrio for the amazing transformation he's made in that publication since he took office the code of federal regulations the codifications of our rules is only available in very bad unformatted text or even worse sgml a technology that became old in the 1970s now there is an xml version of the code that was created by cornell with considerable cooperation from the government printing office but those parties agreed that the xml would not be made available to any outside parties so cornell could monetize their investment making money on this valuable part of the public domain the theory is government has no choice because why would anyone want to make government better unless they can make a profit that rhetoric is also wrong it hurts democracy and government should not condone this and i don't think the american people should there's one more consideration the cfr is a hundred and seventy thousand pages but that's only the visible part there are many tens of thousands of pages that are incorporated by reference they're made part of the official law of the land but only available by paying money to private parties we're not talking about trivial amounts of money a mandatory safety standard from underwriters laboratories cost eight hundred and fifty dollars to purchase a four-page document about how one must test for lead paint cost sixty four dollars the i triple lead dictionary of electronic terms cost five hundred dollars and that vocabulary forms the basis for many government procurement actions much of the cfr is hidden behind a cash register and it's a poll tax on access to justice you can't read our fuel and gas code or our life safety fire code or the firework safety standards or the water hygiene guidelines without an american express card and i brought samples for you i have spent about thirty thousand dollars on some of these privately produced standards and by the way they're produced by nonprofits by 501c3 nonprofits and many of them pay their ceo's a million dollars underwriters labs pays 2.2 million dollars to their ceo and so if you want to make the law available and read it you would need to spend 60 dollars for the safety requirements for window cleaning you'd have to spend 72 dollars for the standard for disinfecting water mains you'd have to spend 217 dollars for the safety requirements for wheeled child conveyances from the british standards institute the american national standard for power operated pedestrian doors is 40 dollars the performance requirement for hot water dispensers and household storage types is 45 dollars the performance requirements for pressurized flushing devices known as flush ometers for plumbing fixtures is 45 dollars the american petroleum institute for the welding of pipeline and related facilities and if you care about oil spills you care about this 125 dollars by the way these are shrink wrap they have a license agreement that by tearing the cellophane you agree you will not take this and do anything with it include giving a copy to somebody else even giving this copy that you purchase you give away your right of first sale the standard for the disinfection of wells is 72 dollars and my favorite the standard for the construction and approval for the transportation of fireworks novelties and theatrical pyrotechnics which you would think would matter a little bit on independence day is 60 dollars these regulations are one small part of the information in our government storehouses genealogy the law economy science the arts all this information is relevant to people in their day-to-day lives this is useful information it's vital to education just imagine if law students could see video of laurence tried arguing before the supreme court if engineering students could not only read the technical safety standards and these standards are not in the libraries because they cost too much but what if they could read them and make them better government information is useful to people but the reverse is true people and institutions like a digital public library of america can help government make information available to avoid bad partnerships to find problems like privacy violations and documents people can make government better because we are the government and an informed citizenry is not just a desirable attribute to democracy it's a prerequisite john adams made that point so eloquently when he said that if we believe that truth liberty justice and benevolence are the everlasting basis of law and government then we must arm our citizens with knowledge this right to their knowledge is far more important than the second amendment government information shouldn't be a concealed carry privilege for the rich the knowledge lobby should be more powerful than the gun lobby john adams john adams said that we must let the public institutions become researchers into the grounds and nature and ends of government we must spread far and wide the ideas and sensations of freedom he said we must let every sleuths of knowledge be opened and set of flowing that is our job as citizens that's our government's job that's our society's responsibility for democracy and that i put to you is the opportunity for a digital public library of america thank you you have energized the citizenry nice move um our last speaker is abhi namani who is director of strategy and communications headcode for america and who's been working on transparency in local government abhi you're up i'm not sure how i can top that though so uh set expectations really low right now i don't know props so sorry um well i wanted to start with an admission um so i spent some time in oxford studying and as you all here probably know they have some of the greatest most magnificent most historic libraries in the world um but here's the thing it's actually really cold there and so i didn't go to any of them uh with my time there actually with most of my time doing my research online so i'm really thrilled about this idea of a digital public library um for some context i work with a company called code for america um what we do is we're kind of like a peace corps for geeks we give the technical talents some of the great people who work in the city for instance who've changed our private world give them an avenue to use their skills their talent their passion give them a way to use that for public service and uh and carol asked me to come here because we focus on cities and unlike the other guys here i'm just to remind you that cities matter so i'm going to talk to you a little bit now about local government about the data there and how that i think is really important for the digital public library i was also told that some of the context for this conversation was imagine 10 years from now and you have the ideal cities you have the ideal government with all the data available as possible and you have a digital public library what does that look like what does it look like 10 years from now so i thought i'd give a little bit of sense of what we're seeing and how we see that might inform 10 years from now but i thought i'd start with yesterday so one of our cities that we're working with is the city of philadelphia and philadelphia has actually been sitting the bar high for openness and for an engaging city and just yesterday their mayor passed an executive order for openness that everything that the city does now has to be open that they have to have a data catalog that catalogs all that information that they have to have a chief digital officer and a chief data officer and an assembly board of citizens corporations and government officials all collaborating on the standards and the way that data should work think about that right government and citizen collaboration and a commitment to openness coming from a mayor and i think that's just the start that's sad that you guys are laughing but i think that's just the start we're seeing this happen city after city so using that framework i think 10 years from now if we do our job well other people in this space do their jobs well you're going to have this amazing opportunity you're going to start between we're having cities and states and hopefully the federal government if the archivist does his job having all of their data out there and open so the question then for the digital public library is what are the services what are the benefits that that kind of institution can provide and i think it's three things i think it's standards i think it's context and i think it's collaboration so let me talk a little about those one at a time so standards so let me tell you about an app that we built last year this was in the city of boston um so the way the program works is we send a group of fellows out in the city they talk to anybody they'll give them time and based on that research they decide what apps to build and one of our fellows was talking to a fireman asking hey what's the pain point in your job what's something that you wish was done differently and he said well it snows a lot here in boston and these hydrants that we have get covered with snow and every time there's a snow storm they have to go out there fireman and start shoveling these things out and you can imagine how much of a burden that is you can imagine how much better it would be if they were spending up there spending their time say putting out fires so this guy did what any good web developer would do he built an app so he built adoptahydrant.com which is just a simple way for citizens to say like hey that hydrants right in front of my house and i want firemen to be able to come into my house quickly if there's a fire and he was able and people can adopt them and it's great like the the hydrants jump up and down and you adopt them you can give them a name it's a nice little application but how is that application possible because the government had the data they could give our developer of where the hydrants are but here's what's even cooler about that application um a couple months later we had a conference we brought together all of our city partners and our future partners and this year we're working with the city of Honolulu and uh the representative from Honolulu Guiding Forest comes up and he's like hey guys i love that app adoptahydrant we're using it in Honolulu what are you talking about of course we don't think it's nosy we're happy for you but uh what are people going to do but he said they have storm sirens and when there's tsunami when there's when there's strong weather those sirens help people near the coast be prepared and leave but those sirens are powered by batteries and people tend to steal those batteries so they don't work so they're rolling out adoptah siren so what i think is powerful here and and i think the opportunity for a digital public library is what if data about each piece of civic infrastructure was cataloged and what if turning on adoptahydrant was just as easy as clicking play or pressing go on a wordpress.com site and once a library or an institution can catalog all of that civic information can pinpoint where that civic infrastructure is there's a really exciting opportunity for building interesting and useful applications that change the way the government work so i think that's the first opportunity is providing standards and then i think the second opportunity is providing context and this is going to run a little bit afoul of what i actually just said so sorry but this is another application that we were building in boston it was called discover bps the so for some context the city was getting a lot of a lot of political pressure because when parents want to go choose the schools that their students want to go to they were handed this 35 page pdf not unlike i'm sure the documents carl just showed you that no one could read even if they wanted to and parents got understandably pretty upset about this and the boston globe ran an expose criticizing the school this the city so the city came to us and they said hey can you help us with this and so our developer is like all right we'll give it a shot so we got the data about where the schools are and built an app discover bps it's like yell right but for schools great and the school use a thing that's like you can go to a school within two miles of where your home is right um but the problem with that data is that sometimes that two miles is just landlocked right you can walk there but sometimes that two miles has a river in between it or the ocean so it's challenging for that app to say that school is actually in your walk zone and so where's the the opportunity here then is for libraries for people local people to provide context around what that i think the stuff no i can try speaking loudly hello hello okay there we go thanks sorry about that so i okay let's try that for a little while and then when that stops working i'll just stop shouting um but that's the kind of context that you need people and that you need people who are local to provide to say actually that school district is within the walk zone because you can walk there quickly because you can get there and i think as you build an institution as you build the dpl a you need to create situations i think now they both are on okay you need to think about how you construct it in a way where people can provide that feedback can make the data even better and then finally i'll say there's an opportunity for collaboration so when i was growing up the only time i'd really go to the library was during the summer because they had a fishing class you could go to the library and get a fishing pole and they'd teach you how to fish you'd meet other kids and you'd go out and fish right so there's a there's a powerful thing there i think there's an interesting opportunity where you're bringing people together the library is doing that and i think it's interesting in that it's distinct from government right because so we run into this problem where the government provides data it's not always complete how do you make that data better and how do you verify that that data is right and we've seen and frankly for a good reason a lot of hesitation from the governments to take citizen provided data right there's a hydrant here well what if there's not and then the fire department goes out there to put out a fire that's somewhat dangerous but i think that's an interesting role intermediaries can play particularly libraries in particularly a digital library of saying we can take that data bring people together and provide services on top of it and i think there's an amazing role here in civic life the dpl a can play in that promoting activity on top of that data so in february we have this program called the brigade which is a way to get local citizens engaged in making their cities better themselves not just our fellows and we host a set of hackathons hackathons if you don't know our ways that people come together and spend a day building technology and so we thought what if we could get a dozen plus cities doing this at the same time on the same day and getting them working together and so we did this in february we called it code across america and we had 16 cities doing this on the same this is really fun we had 16 cities doing this together on the same day and what if the dpl a had a hackathon where they had this people doing this everywhere on the standards with the context they needed i think the opportunity there is immense and we're just starting to unlock some of that potential so in closing what i'll say is what we're seeing a lot of is a transition of government from the role of saying just providing a service but instead becoming more of a platform providing information right and then letting other people take advantage of that information it's government becoming moving from if you think about network theory from the key piece of the node as moving is just one piece of it right the key element of a node to just one piece of a broader network if you can imagine if you can imagine the dpl a fully fleshed out with great data with people taking advantage of it i think you can see a role with the dpl a is playing a governance role where it's playing a role where it's providing services to the citizens that government was conceived to provide itself and i think that's really exciting and we're excited to see where that goes thank you thank you um david are you still with us david may or may not still be with us yes yes yes there you are good um so i think we're open for questions now just remember that the archivist of the united states is on the other end of a phone and if you ask him a question he'll probably answer it questions comments really i have one good it's it's for mark mark on one of your slides you um there was a kind of a question about funding and the government i interpreted it as a suspicion that the government isn't going to step up to this speaking for my friend mark yeah well i i do think for um universities or the dpl a or other centers sort of playing in the sandbox there is that that always that question about um should gpo be doing this should we defer to library of congress is narrow just going to do this and do it better than we ever could and um and have created a more authoritative uh official um corpus of uh us federal publications and you know david i'd love to put this question back to you is what you think that the potential either the politics or the the economics of that look like in dc and in this day and age well this day and age um is uh a little bit iffy um and will be until elections but um i can tell you that the mood in washington the mood on the hill and this this will not change is very much in favor of public private partnerships and i and coupled with um i a an emphasis on the k through 12 community and i think um i'm confident that if we market this dpl a correctly that we're going to be very successful on the hill and in the white house in attracting support because of those two factors the public private and the k through 12 link can i ask a brief question if c i c wanted to give a copy of those 250 thousand volumes they've already scanned to the government should they just send them to the national archives is that a no mr farrell oh are you asking me absolutely you're the only government official in the room isn't susan hildreth there she had to leave i'd be happy to entertain such a uh request i'll pay for the disk drives we have volunteers here david great is there a question i thought i saw one there we go as probably one of the few government documents librarians here today my name is k wingerson i'm at sfpl one of the things that concerns me on two sides well gives me faith on one side and concerns me on the other is the decertification that so many libraries are going through and the depository program one i'm concerned that this is the digitization is going to give plenty of administrators plenty more excuses to decertify um depository libraries but it also gives me faith that at least while these libraries are decertifying and um parceling out their collections that we're going to see them hopefully you know digitize at some point and still have access locally to those collections so how do we balance that so that we're not seeing more decertification and less access to the physical copies themselves uh well i'm not an expert in this area but i i do believe that the question of the federal depository library programs which i believe were created in 1964 the current program is really ripe for a little bit of modernization and thinking about the program it costs a million dollars a year to be a federal depository library and many places simply just don't have that extra million dollars particularly given um what appear to be some very outmoded practices in the government printing office and a resistance to looking at creative solutions and so i i think it's important that gpo maybe step up to the plate and help these libraries either stay in business or figure out how to get some of this digitization to happen and so far there's a big impasse um there's actually a whole set of letters going back and forth between the government printing office and various state librarians and it's a pretty ugly situation right now and that probably needs to change i guess i'll just add to that for those of you who don't uh follow the inside baseball of the government documents community or didn't aspire to be government documents librarian to your entire life um there are uh 1200 um depositories across the country and you know at at at a point in time when something on the order i think of 96 percent now of government publications are made available digitally right upon publication as well as in print um there is is certainly a concern that that 1200 may not be the right number um so i you know i and we're decertified a little you know i i just think it's uh right a slow um malting or shedding of of uh depository libraries every year uh a few more sort of um uh just can no longer shoulder the burden and and drop out of the programs it's not so much that they're decertified is that they're just exhausted David uh steven abram uh is there any consideration in uh nara or the uh US government to follow the canadian model that was announced two weeks ago to go 100 percent digital for all documents going forward today we've been talking about retrospective conversion but moving forward and then is there uh consideration around the principles of uh locks and keeping things safe to avoid having a central repository that could have rogue employees making abortion a stop word or uh changing all the words for global warming to climate change internally to documents so how do we make sure that the the original copy is safe and is there any consideration of uh digital only publishing to ensure that there is a widely available archive so um the president issued a historic memorandum at the end of november on um records management it's the first time since the truman administration that the white house has gotten involved in records management and it basically um uh requires every agency to do three things um to name a senior officer not the records manager a senior officer any agency who has responsibility for records management it requires them each agencies to submit a report to me and the office of management and budget that spells out what the barriers obstacles are to going digital and the final piece of it is that I working with OMB create a plan for the government to go all digital so there is um a lot of a lot of um investigation work going on right now we've we've gone through the first two phases of the mandate in this memorandum and we will be issuing a report in august we've got about 750 suggestions from the 250 agencies about what's what's what the obstacles are and what some of the solutions are so I'm I'm optimistic we're going to have a plan it will probably require changes in the federal records act which hasn't acknowledged if you can believe it in 2012 hasn't acknowledged electronic records um so I'm I'm optimistic that we're going to have progress the Canadian I'm Danielle Carone who is the you know my counterpart in Canada is a good friend so this um mandate um in Canada was actually announced about three years ago just before I arrived um and it has been um there's been a great deal of controversy in Canada and I'm watching it closely to see how this is going to uh play out um I guess that's all I'll say on that front um on the locks uh long term acts of security authenticity uh guaranteeing authenticity of the records we have um one of the things I inherited when I became the archivist was a a project known as electronic records archive um a partnership with Lockheed Martin to create a facility that would um ingest electronic records being created by all the federal agencies by the White House in a separate instance and congressional records also so three different kind of instances of electronic records archiving um long term preservation is the the um the design feature of this migra- translating and migrating um records over time to ensure that they're available in perpetuity um identification of um dated outdated um means of creation of records kind of a hit list of those records electronic records at at risk at highest risk and we've um just completed some work on our epsidic files most people probably never even heard of epsidic but it's a language that IBM used NASA used it quite extensively during the 60s um we've um been able to create translation programs that will enable us to migrate those those records over time so there's a um a fair amount of thinking and work going on not only just at NARA but with our international partners on this front coming hi david it's julie young from mississippi how are you how are you i'm great how are you we're sorry you're not here i just would encourage dpla to save place for born digital records from the very start because all of the government records are born digital these days and it's not just publications it's you know hailey barbers email about pardons um so we need to have public access to that information from the get go couldn't agree with you more um yes i've had a series of conversations with the what are known as sdo standards development organizations the the vast majority of them are 501c3 nonprofits many are extremely distinguished engineering bodies and national fire protection association does an amazing job of fire safety standards and their big question um and i've gotten this for 20 years as i try to put things online it's like well okay but who's gonna pay for this um what are we gonna do to make up for the money that we lose now there there's a couple answers to that um if the standards that have been incorporated by reference um into law are made available for reuse as we believe our constitution requires um we have to remember that's not all the standards they make these bodies make many many others uh they intend for these standards to be made into law and they are nonprofits and so perhaps they have an obligation um these are 40 to 50 million dollar a year operations in many cases under writers labs is 873 million dollars a year in revenue million dollar salaries so maybe they could maybe i don't know look at their executive compensation um they have a series of revenue streams so rather than selling the standard maybe they sell the annotated version of the standard maybe they charge for conferences and membership and training and certification and other things and maybe the government hasn't taken um its responsibility seriously enough so that when the government says we're going to incorporate this standard by reference they don't go to these bodies or at least not officially and say we're going to pay you money or they don't put it up for bid and say gee can we use this for free and if we can't use this for free maybe we'll use another standard and many organizations w3c for example gives away their standards because they feel it's part of their charter and their obligation um so i've talked to these standards bodies they think i'm being very unreasonable because they're they've come to depend on these revenue streams um i think they're gonna have to change their business model but you know what we've all had to change our business models because of the internet and this is one of the few industry segments that has not and i think maybe they need to face up to the responsibilities and i think the government i think the office of the federal register has an open comment period out right now as to whether they should change their policies i know cast sunstein and office and management and budget has raised this issue i don't have a lot of hope that the white house is going to come down on the right side on this but they're beginning to have that dialogue um and i think they need to have it but however for the standards that have already been incorporated by reference we believe that due process equal protection and a variety of other constitutional considerations including decisions by the fifth circuit means that we are free to go ahead and publish those and we are in the process of purchasing and getting ready for publication uh the vast majority of the technical standards in the code of federal regulations yeah over here uh these are executive branch regulations so the procedure is an agency says we wish to incorporate this by reference and then the um executive director of the office of the federal register approves that incorporation so this is executive branch incorporation well so there's a very interesting question and that actually has come up with people that have scanned the congressional record and there is a worry so what if you take a picture of mickey mouse and as part of your testimony you include it in the congressional in your testimony um does that information have copyright um it is my position and not everybody agrees with me that the edicts of government and this goes back to Wheaton v. Peters in 1824 and a whole series of decisions that edicts of government have no copyright um that doesn't mean you can take that picture of mickey mouse and sell it um i believe that would be and i'm not a lawyer but i believe that would be a tort in which you are unfairly taking advantage of something but i don't i do not believe that congressional record congressional testimony or any other executive branch legislative or judicial branch edicts of government have any copyright and i believe those should be free for copying and for commercial reuse in in many cases you ought to be able to publish the annotated testimony to the congress um and make that a service at bloomberg or whatever but i'm not a lawyer i play one on the internet though i i'm just gonna jump in and add to this and i i think carl could um probably gloss um my comments because he he's going to know a lot more about this but there was uh recently a report that came out of a government organization named sendy um which is even more grimly named than the c i c apparently and i didn't even know what sendy stands for if anything but it's a cooperative interagency group and um and i think the the estimates there were something on the order of 15 percent of government publication um as we think of it has one or another degree of copyright protection and yes indeed this is a very contentious issue for all of us as we look at it and i'll jump in and say um you know for those of you well who've been watching this google has been the primary scanning partner for the c i c they have made very little of that information that they've scanned available through book search um they have put up almost none of these government documents certainly nothing beyond 1923 whereas hotty trust has been much more aggressive in um in taking that information and certifying that indeed it is a government publication because there's a lots of things that our catalogers um uh incorrectly attribute as government publications uh you know national academy press or you know almost anything with the word national in it or so uh they are somewhat careful about uh going through and trying to screen this and have criteria for looking but have been much more aggressive in making that information available than um google is willing to be but there is certainly contention around the copyright status of some categories of government publication um so the federal government um does not own copyright in materials on the other hand if you give something to the smithsonian if you give an andy warhol to the smithsonian they are able to hold copyrighted material so government could make a film and license a soundtrack and that might have copyright but the original productions of the government do not uh there is a corollary to that so states for example can hold copyright but the corollary to that is that the law the law does not have copyright at any level edicts of government municipal code state regulations and i would submit to you congressional testimony and laws uh judicial opinions and as well as briefs submitted to courts and there have been some lawyers that have have maintained that their briefs are copyrighted and therefore you could not take and publish them and put them online in your library let alone reuse them in your law firm um that has not been litigated if you read the law carefully there is a strong presumption that the law must be available to everyone um you know it's ultimately up to a judge and many of these issues simply haven't been litigated yet so i want to make a point here they're talking about two related but quite different things carl's talking about edicts of government and you know if the government's telling us to do something they're all to be a way we could look it up duh and mark is talking about more difficult cases where there may well be things in documents that the government has produced which which are not copyrighted because the government produced them but the but stuff in the documents might well be which causes at least caution uh on in the way that we would use it if you imagine the digital public library of america going forward wanting to make um available a great deal of the record of the united states government well care is definitely going to have to be taken there but care taken is quite different from giving up on the project and i for one now being an immoderate moderator would say we should not give up on the project david you have any last comments for the uh for the group i agree with what you said um and um as one of the send the agencies i'm gonna actually look into this issue of 15 percent where they came from so i'm taking that one on thank you for taking the time with us thank you all thank you everyone for making it to the end of the day this is the last session on next steps bruce this is your house so would you like to say anything before i'd say just a few no you haven't i've been the one on stage too much in your in your house so i realized that uh many of you would like to get out into the sunshine or go have a drink do something else at the end of this day and uh thank you to all who have hung in there with the webcast as well um this has been a wonderful uh energizing day energizing two days in fact for those who have been at the work streams i want to just to say two things in closing um the first is one big aggregated thank you people have worked for many months to get to this point the harvard law school uh innovation lab team that's been doing the coding the sfpl team that's been doing the organizing of the work stream a whole variety of people at the bergman center worst scouts are the executive director and the entire team have worked so hard um today i'm just struck by the great av team that you have here bruster and the heather and norah who've been the graphic artists um and in particular to you bruster and your team let's have a big round of applause thank you my big takeaway for the day is really just a sense of gratitude and momentum these twin uh notions i think uh at this moment we have a huge amount to be thankful for which is a combination of a shared vision that's coming into play uh something that is marked by the soaring rhetoric of people like bob darnton uh like the archivist the united states like susan hildreth like carl malinwood louis herrera this is just an amazing set of uh thinkers and people who are leading us forward and thank goodness these are people in positions of leadership in this country and also the great pragmatic can do spirit of san francisco and silicon valley and the sense of all of us uh here trying to roll up our sleeves and figure out what to do it is this combination that makes me hopeful uh that this is going to come together uh between now in april 2013 and and much beyond uh from there uh in the work streams and today i have a sense that we have a lot of practical guidance in terms of where to go as a community i know those of us working in the secretariat and uh coding away have much grist for the mill what you can look forward to in the coming months is much work toward another plenary in the fall and then of course the kickoff uh a year from now and we're looking now for venues and homes for these events so if you have ideas please come forward as well as uh suggestions for people uh to be involved um and i think what we can also see and look forward to um is the growing of the community of people who are working on this i am struck by the number of people who have come forward during these two days to offer help from uh library students and hackers and coders and ordinary individuals seeking to get involved um to booksellers and publishers who have offered uh their help and engagement um to libraries and lots of kinds of nodes the latino digital content working group that has come forward and said um they are just getting off the ground at the same time and want to participate um and ultimately i think this is a story of uh vision and practicality and a great deal of momentum so i am buoyed by this event and want to say thank you to everyone who's here and everybody who is watching um and to say we are concluded for this plenary session in the west coast of the dpl a and onward thank you so very much