The GAO is responding to a congressional request for information on electronic documents dissemination, and ends up discussing the GPO, LOC, and FDLP in great detail. Apparently they considered transferring the FDLP from the GPO to the LOC.

Also, the report lists the essential documents which must continue to be printed, regardless of how digitized we become.

Organizational realignments are often the reactionary responses to scandal (Credit Mobilier, Watergate), political struggle (the Cannon mutiny, Committee Chairs and civil rights), or changing technological expectations (1993 Committee on the Organization of Congress).

Congressional reform efforts are often contentious, political, and limited in participation, jurisdiction, and duration, which shouldn’t be a surprise, given the importance of legislatures’ independence generally.  Congress’s tendency to adapt in fits and spurts does lead to what can seem to be a shortsightedness, or deficit of attention (perhaps not a deficit, but a sporadic intermittent quality) which is filled in by the knowledge of long serving members and staff, legislative support agencies, lobbyists, and non-profits.  In short, the infrastructure of political knowledge and influence.  Some perennial challenges demand specialized knowledge and sustained attention, even if they require frequent legislative attention, as do the subjects of full committees or subcommittees.  For a full background on congressional advisory commissions, check out this CRS report, RS22725.

The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress is one of these special congressional bodies, made up of political appointees, administrators, archivists, historians, and academic figures. They’re been meeting since 1991 to coordinate between the various agencies with a hand in the preservation of congressional records, under the authorization of Public Law 101-509.

Having grown out of a series of conferences, events, and speeches throughout the late seventies and eighties, the committee seems to have come of age just as the Internet was becoming congressionally relevant, making the commission an important counterpart to other agencies with technological jurisdiction, such as the Committee on House Administration, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, GPO, LOC, the CAO, Architect of the Capitol, or the Senate Rules Committee.  While their function is largely the advisory oversight and planning of Congress’s archival activities, the distinction between preserved archive and public database is only a matter of digitizating records and creating public access.  (“Only” may be an unfortunate phrase here, the National Archives and Records Administration’s yearly budget is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.)  While archiving may have been something that used to be directed at future generations or researchers, the Internet is transforming the struggles for effective archiving into the struggle for meaningful public access.  Among other things, an archive is the physical aspect of what should also be a public database.

This public database is being built.  The National Archives is building the Electronic Records Archives as discussed in today’s meeting by the Director of the Center for Legislative Archives, Richard Hunt.

Much of today’s meeting focused on different agencies’ reports on their outreach strategies for convincing members to take archiving their records seriously, by designating a repository for their records upon their retirement, adopting good documents management practices, or even by hiring an archivist (which was also a concern in their 1992 report.)  One committee chair reportedly responded to an attempt at archiving guidance by asking “what, am I dying or something?”

The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate also reported on their recent endeavors, especially on the fifty percent increase in committee hearings during the first session of the 110th Congress, and on the challenges of implementing the requirements of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which they endearingly referred to as “HLOGA” (pronounced huh-low-guh).

The main lesson of the morning for me was that disclosure and public information access are wrapped up with issues of records management and archiving. We’re working through the same administrative, political, and technological circumstances, on largely the same sets of information, and we have a great opportunity in the well coordinated work of the Advisory Committee, and the surprising receptiveness of its members.

The status page has a fascinating run through the project’s expected development, including user profiles, file conversion, customizable alerts, and even a “collaborative working environment”. I wonder if this is directed towards the work of GPO, or towards the creation of government-wide documents that end up archived by the FDLP?
The GPO’s mission statement lists 3 main functions: (quoting)

“To provide the agencies and organizations which make up the three branches of the Federal government with expert publishing and printing services, on a cost recovery basis… To provide, in partnership with Federal Depository libraries, for nationwide community facilities for the perpetual, free and ready access to the printed and electronic documents… To distribute, on a cost recovery basis, copies of printed and electronic documents…to the general public.”
I wonder to what degree this is coordinated or overlaps with the functions of OMB or the GSA? (this may be another example of negotiated terrain.)The strategic vision suggests that the “digital information system” will “[catalogue and authenticate] all known Federal Government documents within the scope of FDLP, whether printed or born digital.” ( p.4)

This reworking of the FDLP may require new authorization, as envisioned, as page 9 says “GPO will also ask Congress to review proposed changes to the FDLP to determine whether or not new legislative authority is required.”

I also wonder about overlap between the new GPO envisioned FDLP and NARA, although I guess that depends on FDLP and NARA’s guidelines on what they preserve and maintain access to. The GPO vision also suggests the creation of “two collections, on in the East and one in teh West, which will hold all known tangible and electronic FDLP documents withdrawn on a controlled basis as a last resort when no circulating copy is available.” Is this a departure from the LOCKSS model of preservation (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and model of FDLP function outlined in FGInfo’s report Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program?

I don’t know. But there’s a lot of information about coordinating resources and understanding government agencies’ jurisdiction to process here.

The preface describes it as a “study of the archival sources that document the operations of Congress.”  The “archival sources” described in this document comprise the entire body of public congressional information, the substance of both administrative minutiae, and legislative substance.  Just as we are interested in the capacity of the public to be conscious of its legislature, we should be interested in the legislature’s capacity to take stock of itself, to engage in constructive introspection.

I came across this document being repeatedly cited while reading the yearly reports of the Advisory Committee on the Preservation of the Records of Congress, and still find rich irony in the fact that the document itself wasn’t available in a digital form.  That’s not to say anything against the Advisory Committee, which seems to be an outgrowth or a result of the task force that wrote S.Pub 102-20, and also inspired H.R. 5241 from the 101st Congress, a bill reorganizing the National Archives, among other things.  The Advisory Committee seems to be among the very best of examples of an organization created to meet an emergent need, cutting across jurisdictions and what one of its members recently described to me as “negotiated terrain” (a description I very much liked).

The complex problem of coordinating congressional information is difficult, but not for the usual reasons.  As far as preservation goes, the administrative coordination is already in place, and it seems that the research (and even enforcement ) about disclosure mechanisms has been in place for quite some time.  What has been lagging is not administrative will, but the digital culture and popular expectations that make IT investment a real priority.

This is clearly changing, as new staffers expect to represent their members of Congress online without encountering arcane restrictions, as citizens expect to encounter government information and services through the same search engines they use for research and shopping, and a new brand of journalism is springing up that depends not on cultivating trusted sources through personal relationships, but on careful consideration of primary sources–exactly those “archival sources” this document so comprehensively describes.

While some disclosure will be resisted for as long as the benefits of secrecy outweigh the outcry over obstruction, and privileged access will always be at odds with the broader public interest, it is good to see that a detailed anatomy of congressional information has already been constructed in great detail.  The question that remains is how well will Congress adapt to new expectations of information access — a question that necessarily comes along with a digitally empowered citizenry.

The collection seems well organized and easy to peruse, with solid explanations of their methodology and disclaimers about what’s available based on the crawling.

My main suggestion is that the archiving happen with greater frequency, perhaps coordinated in order to capture the greatest amount of material possible, and for those responsible for the Web Harvest to coordinate with the CAO, systems administrators, and vendors to be sure that the digital records management practices used in organizing member sites encourages easy crawling and archiving by NARA and CLA.

The House has a document laying out best practices for documents management for House offices; I wonder if the digital materials management should be expanded to include digital materials availability, perhaps including standards like sitemapping, in order to ensure the preservation of member sites?

My other suggestion is to increase the exposure of the captured sites, perhaps encouraging links from the bioguides, or current member sites, and to ensure that the collection itself is crawlable through search engine indexing practices.

I found Appendix A particularly interesting (page 24), laying out their guidelines for partnerships with businesses and non-profits who will be taking on some of the immense digitizing. The guidelines deal heavily with public access, intellectual property, metadata, and document certification issues, many of which I have only basic familiarity.

I assume that others will have opinions on how they’re proceeding, given the likely enormity of the project and the sheer importance of its subject matter. That they’re welcoming public input is heartening:

NARA takes its stewardship responsibility very seriously. We recognize that we are entrusted with the care of America’s documentary evidence, and that these materials are an invaluable public resource. We are seeking written comment on this draft through a Federal Register notice and announcement on our website, and will hold a public forum during the comment period. We will revise this plan as appropriate to incorporate public comment. The approved plan will be posted on our website at www.archives.gov.

While the majority side of the Senate Appropriations committee did include a brief review of their bill (as did their House counterpart), I’d like to give my impressions of the appropriations from the perspective of an advocate for public access and transparency, using the Senate report as a guide. (The Republican websites don’t feature any press releases, which isn’t surprising, given the minority’s smaller staff and budget, comparative lack of clout in controlling committee functioning, and their opportunity to add dissenting views to the report, as I discovered in reading the House report.)

Reading the actual report yields much greater detail about how our federal government views its own functions and prioritizes. Committee reports are carefully structured documents, largely in response to the specific requirements of House Rule XIII, governing the explicit disclosure of legal wording, and the production and availability of reports. Aside from raw statistical details comparing spending to the President’s budget requests (which the Leg. Branch subcommittees managed to stay below), the reports also afford an intimate view into the priorities and inner functions of the government.

The Senate report contains a similar admonishment against legislative branch waste, explaining the creation of an Inspector General for the Office of the Architect of the Capitol. (p. 3, page numbers as numbered on the report).

The report similarly touts the passage of S.1, defending their spending power while asserting the benefits of transparency:

The Committee believes trongly that Congress should make the decisions on how to allocate the people’s money. In order to improve transparency and accountability in the process or approving earmarks (as defined in S. 1) in appropriations measures, each Committee report includes, for each earmark…[the Member's name, the location of the recipient, and the purpose for each earmark.] (p. 4)

The report lists budgets and priorities for offices throughout the Senate, including the Office of Captioning Services, as authorized by Public Law 101-163. I wonder if the likely public domain status of these captions could be leveraged to help provide a text stream to accompany internet based legislative video, to help with section 508 (accessibility) concerns for members posting videos of themselves on their websites?

Budgets for each Senatorial office are posted, ranging from about $2 million to about $4 million, depending on the size of the population of each state and the increased travel expenses associated with more distant states.

Each separate committee and administrative office has a detailed budget; within these estimates one can see that one year of utilities for the Capitol costs about $64.4 million.

The Library of Congress gets about $577 Million, and also gets castigated for apparent poor budgeting (p. 35)…

The Committee continues to be concerned with the Library’s budget development process… The Committee recognizes improvements in the Library’s strategic planning efforts, but believes a better job needs to be done of setting priorities, recognizing budgetary constraints, and linking the budget to performance-based metrics.

The LOC is an essential American institution, controlling and maintaining much of the information and knowledge that permits Congress to function. The Congressional Research Service also gets singled out:

It has come to the Committee’s attention that CRS has been holding annual management retreats at expensive off-site locations… The Committee is also concerned that the Congressional Research Service often acts as if it were an independent agency, separate from the Library of Congress. CRS is in fact part of the Library of Congress, and its policies and procedures should reflect this fact. (p. 39)

Many of the report’s admonishments suggest strange issues or struggles whose origin is unclear to the observer. For example, the restriction of public travel and occupancy of the LOC “to the sidewalks and other paved surfaces” is rescinded (p. 49). I can only imagine what resulted in that particular rules change.

The Office of Technology Assessment come up in the Senate report again as well…

The Committee recommends funding of $750,000 and four full-time equivalent employees to establish a permanent technology assessment function in the Government Accountability Office. The Committee has decided not to establish a separate entity to provide independent technology assessment for the legislative branch owing to budget constraints… (p. 42)

The report goes into further detail about their plans for a revisited OTA (which was disbanded in the Gingrich revolution. Background about the Open House Project and the OTA is available here.

The report also mentions the FDLP program under the Office of Superintendent of Documents, describing the distribution process of government documents. (p. 42)

The amount of detail in appropriations reports is staggering, and Congress does a great service to anyone looking to understand where the government’s money is spent in providing detailed appropriations reports in human readable (non-legal) language.