I admit it. I'm a card-carrying library junkie. Consequently, you can find me perusing my local library once or twice a week. In this respect, I'm not much different from other Americans--two-thirds of us visit one of our 115,000 libraries at least once a year; nearly half of us use one on a monthly basis. Yet even after countless visits to dozens of libraries, I'm still amazed at the amount of information at our fingertips and the open access we have to it.
I doubt that any other country has made so much information so conveniently available to so many people. From the subscription library Ben Franklin set up in 1731 to today's vast Library of Congress, libraries have been one of the great equalizers in our country. Whether it be by bookmobiles or modems, everyone--urban and rural, young and old--has access to information.
Unfortunately, as we enter the information age, the times are a'changing. What's ironic is that just as we're bombarded with more and more information and as new technologies come online to help us sort through it all, our access to information is being restricted. (If you don't think so, take a look at the American Library Association's Less Access to Less Information, an 11-year chronology that documents bureaucratic efforts to stifle the free flow of information. The 1981 through 1991 index is available for $17.00 from the ALA, 110 Maryland Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20002.)
Restriction comes in various guises. Budget cuts, for instance, have shut down more than half the school libraries in California, forced the Brooklyn (NY) Public Library to close branches most the week, and caused Massachusetts libraries to lay off nearly a quarter of their staffs.
At one time, technology was the great hope of libraries. Database services, BBSs, PCs, audio tapes, video cassettes, and CD-ROMs were going to make it easier to find information, give us access to fragile documents, provide information to the handicapped, and more. But libraries can't afford to buy books, let alone PCs with CD-ROM drives.
With its proposal to slash the 1993 federal library budget from $148 million to $35 million, the federal government isn't helping things. (Let me get this straight: The government prunes the library budget by 75 percent, while spending about $140 million a year to store the helium necessary to keep dirigibles aloft. The legislators say we need to "provide sufficient helium for essential government activities"--as if there isn't enough hot air in Washington to do the job.)
Another form of restriction is the government's efforts to "privatize" information access. In this case, information generated at taxpayers' expense is given to private corporations who add value and sell it back to taxpayers. This is fine--as long as that information isn't av ilable only to private firms and as long as "value" is truly added. Among the examples of privatization are Hughes/General Electric's lock on LANDSAT image data, Westlaw's copyrighting of information on the JURIS online system, and the EDGAR project managed by the Mead Data Central (owners of the LEXUS/NEXUS service).
Beginning in 1993, the Security and Exchange Commission will require companies to file data electronically through the $90 million EDGAR (short for "Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval") system which taxpayers paid for and which Mead Data will operate. As a result, EDGAR is perhaps the most valuable database of corporate activity in the world. The cost for the you and I to access EDGAR information ranges from $340,000/year for real-time, high-speed broadcast of SEC filings to $30,000/year for subsets of the current day's filings on magnetic tape. In neither case will historical data, cumulative filings, and the like be available to us. Incredibly, the SEC will receive back from Mead microfiche versions of the data--the government won't possess electronic versions of the data it owns and which it is requiring companies to submit electronically.
One ray of hope is House bill HR 2772 (the Senate version is called the "Gore Bill"). HR 2772 proposes that the Wide Information Network for Data Online (WINDO) be set up by the Government Printing Office so that anyone--private citizens and commercial businesses--can walk into one of the 1400 federal depository libraries and, for a nominal fee, access hundreds of government databases: economic statistics, federal court cases, SEC disclosure documents, U.S. and foreign patents, congressional testimonies, and more.
Commercial database vendors aren't happy about this proposal, nor, strangely enough, is the Office of Management and Budget which is trying to differentiate between hardcopy and electronic versions of the same information, proposing that the federal depository libraries receive only the paper copies. (Ironically, this "push for paper" seems to run counter to the Paperwork Reduction Act which seeks to make the government "paperless" by the year 2000.) Electronic versions presumably would be given to commercial vendors.
What's at stake is our right to know and make informed decisions on things that affect us. Any barrier to our access of information is a step towards our disenfranchisement as citizens; the result is a two-tiered society of the "information haves" and "information have-nots," where the privileged get the information and everyone else gets Geraldo.
By the way, I found out yesterday that starting next month my local library has cut back to three days a week.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal