Group 42-Sells Out! - The Information Archive/Group 42 Sells Out (Group 42) (1996).iso/internet/acceinfo.txt

Text File | 1996-03-10 | 212KB | 3,888 lines

 <This is the ASCII version of a printed booklet distributed at the
American Library Association conference in July 1991. The program was
sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association. Details
follow on ordering the full print monograph.  This document has been
reformatted to fit on a standard display screen. It is available in a
single 210 kb text file (elec.rights1-4 and in four 50-60 kb chunks
(elec.rights 1,2,3, & 4)Page numbers in the table of contents have been
deleted. Steve Cisler, [e-mail]>

[In this archive, only the 1-4 version is present, as elec_rights_ala.papers.
[e-mail]]



                         CITIZEN RIGHTS
                          and ACCESS to
                     ELECTRONIC INFORMATION


                A Collection of Background Essays
         Prepared for the 1991 LITA President's Program







                   Dennis J. Reynolds, Editor








          Production costs for this information packet
        were underwritten by Innovative Interfaces, Inc.



         Library and Information Technology Association
                     Chicago, Illinois  1991

       This "information packet" is being distributed only
          at the 1991 ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta.



 --------------------------------------------------------------



LITA plans to publish these papers plus those from the President's
Program itself in Fall 1991.  This monograph will also be titled
"Citizen Rights and Access to Electronic Information" edited by Dennis
J. Reynolds.


If you wish to receive an announcement and ordering information for the
monograph, please send your name and address to:


                  Citizen Rights Monograph
                         LITA Office
                     50 E. Huron Street
                     Chicago, IL  60611

                     fax:  [phone]



--------------------------------------------------------------














Copyright by the Library and Information Technology Association,
    a division of the American Library Association, 1991.
                        Table of Contents


Introduction . . . . . . .  ii

OVERVIEW PAPER

The Bill of Rights and Beyond:  Citizen Entitlement and
Information Access in an Electronic Age, by Dennis J. Reynolds

THE ISSUES

Techno-Fallacies of the Information Age, by Gary T. Marx

Freedom and Privacy in Electronic Libraries, by Steve Cisler

Electronic Intellectual Freedom, by Gordon M. Conable .

The Public's Right to Know and Electronic Government
Information, by Nancy Kranich

THE IMPACT

"Powershift" and Scholarly Communication, by Sharon J. Rogers

A Bill of Rights for an Electronic Society:  A Public Library
Perspective, by Susan Harrison

Information for All People: The Role of Local and State Libraries in
Overcoming Geographical Barriers to Information, by Howard F. McGinn

Information Access and an Electronic Bill of Rights:  A School
Perspective, by Stephen L. Matthews

Electronic Records and Intellectual Freedom in Schools of Library and
Information Science:  A Historical Essay, by Frederick J. Stielow

LEGISLATIVE UPDATE

Electronic Privacy and Data Protection Legislation in the 102nd
Congress, by Frederick D. King

POSITION PAPERS

Principles of Public Information, National Commission on Libraries
and Information Science

Information Technology & Libraries:  Federal Roles, Library and
Information Technology Association

A Short List of Really Good Readings



                         ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



    This Packet has been made possible through the dedicated
efforts of many people.  Mary Alice Ball has done a superb job in
planning the 1991 LITA President's Program by recruiting a group of
speakers with considerable stature in the world of information
technology policy and implementation.  Production of this Packet was
graciously funded by Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and our thanks to
Jerry Kline and the folks at III for their support and assistance.

    In preparing the Packet, there were a number of people
who I relied on for advice, feedback, and help of all different kinds.
I must first and foremost thank Jo-Ann Michalak, this year's LITA
President, for offering me the opportunity to take on this exciting
project and for supplying me with a steady stream of ideas and articles
and other documents relevant to the topic of this year's Program.  LITA
Executive Director Linda Knutson was indispensible not only in working
with me through all the logistics but also in sharing ideas for the
Packet.  And on more than one occasion, Carolyn Gray, Chair of the LITA
Technology and Access Committee, served as a sounding board and
invariably came up with suggestions that made the project go much more
smoothly.  Also, there were several other people whose advice I sought
on one aspect or another, particularly Lois Kershner, Janet Bruman, and
Carol Henderson. Thanks also to the CAPCON staff for their patience
during the home stretch, and to Terrie and Lori for their help.  A very
special thanks to Tahi and Dennell.

    Most of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude
to the authors who have contributed to this Packet.  Each responded
promptly and enthusiastically, and gave generously of their time.  It
was an "all volunteer effort"; a labor of love, or perhaps a love of
labor, for all who contributed.  There are some people in our field and
certainly many outside it who say that we should not be so generous with
our time, that we should measure the success of each of our tasks by the
amount of the check we receive as compensation.  They are probably
right.  But for many of us, we simply cannot resist the reward of an
interesting challenge and the opportunity to contribute something we
hope will make a difference in the way things are done and how they are
thought about.  My thanks to these authors who have made a contribution
and a difference.


                                                                    D.J.R.
                         Introduction

    Last year, Carol Parkhurst put together a packet of background readings
and other material into what became known as the LITA President's
Program Packet.  LITA distributed approximately 2,000 copies of the
Packet at the ALA Annual Conference.  The venture was extremely
successful, and after the Conference, the contents of the Packet along
with the papers presented at the LITA President's Program were published
more formally as Library Perspectives on the NREN.

    The current collection of essays, Citizen Rights and
Access to Electronic Information is the 1991 LITA President's Program
Packet.  The title of this year's President's Program is A Bill of
Rights for an Electronic Society.  This is a multi-faceted topic.  The
speakers who are on the Program will focus on the citizen rights and
technology primarily in terms of existing and emerging
telecommunications networks.  As the speakers will no doubt illustrate,
it is crucial that we no longer think of telecommunications networks as
purely technical phenomena, but also recognize their important
political, economic, and social implications.

    The essays in this Packet are presented in part as
background papers in support of the focus of the presentations that will
be made at the President's Program, but they also explore additional
dimensions of the theme of interaction between citizen rights and
information technology, and the role of libraries in that relationship.
The Packet opens with a paper in which I present an overview of some of
the general issues in the interaction between citizen rights and
electronic information.  Many of the issues brought out there are
treated in the specific context of libraries in subsequent essays in the
Packet.  The next several papers are divided into two sections: The
Issues and The Impact.  This division of focus is not, of course,
absolute, and you will find impact being discussed in some of the papers
in The Issues section and vice-versa.

    The Issues section opens with a brief essay by
sociologist Gary T. Marx, who enumerates some of the common -- and, he
asserts, fallacious -- assumptions we make about technology.  Steve
Cisler then addresses several privacy, data protection, and electronic
monitoring issues as they pertain both to society in general and to
libraries.  Gordon M. Conable, Chair of the ALA Intellectual Freedom
Committee, then examines several of the challenges that modern
information technology presents to the library in its role as protector
and purveyor of intellectual freedom.  Nancy Kranich`s paper focuses on
a dimension of access to electronic information that is vital to our
democracy: the right to be informed about our government and by our
government.

    In The Impact section of the Packet, Sharon J. Rogers
examines the current tranformation of scholarly communication in terms
of trends identified by Alvin Toffler in his recent book, Powershift.
Susan Harrison then looks at several aspects of the role of the public
library in the electronic age in ensuring citizen rights of access to
information and in ensuring the right to privacy in pursuing information
needs.  Howard F. McGinn examines the role of local and state libraries
in providing information particularly in light of the evolving reliance
on telecommunications networks and the types of information that can be
carried over those networks.  Stephen L. Matthews looks at some of the
issues regarding opportunities for access to electronic information in
the context of preparing today's students for the challenges that will
lie ahead of them. If librarianship as a profession is going to view
technology in terms of the ethical implications of its use, it is
important that this become a part of our professional education
curriculum, and Frederick J. Stielow examines this relationship in the
last paper in The Impact section of the Packet.

    The remaining four items in the Packet include a
legislative update, two position statements, and a list of suggested
further readings.  In the first of these, Frederick D. King traces the
bills that have been introduced during the current session of Congress
having a bearing on privacy and related issues in a technological
environment.  The two position papers are the statement on Principles of
Public Information issued last year by the National Commission on
Library and Information Science, and LITA's recent position paper on
Information Technology & Libraries: Federal Roles.  The last item in the
Packet is a selected list of readings on some of the themes explored in
the papers in the Packet.  As editor, I hope that the materials included
here will help introduce readers to some of the current issues related
to a very important dimension of the interaction between technology,
society, and libraries.

                                               Dennis J. Reynolds
                                                 Washington, D.C.


"A quiet but crucial debate now under way in Congress, in corporate
boardrooms, and in universities has the potential to shape American life
in the 21st Century and beyond.  The outcome may determine where you
live, how well your children are educated, who will blossom and who will
wither in a society in which national competitiveness and personal
prosperity will likely depend on access to information."

       Roger Karraker, "Highways of the Mind"
            Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1991.




"[in Britain]...a family living on what we euphemistically call 'the
national average' would see half their weekly income flicker away in
less than 30 minutes of current connect-time charges to a remote
database, assuming that there was ever to be one that gave them
something relevant to their needs."

Trevor Haywood, "Electronic Information: The Withering of Public Access"
  New Horizons for the Information Profession





"Emerging technologies promise to provide individuals with opportunities
to increase their personal autonomy, enhance their sense of connection
to others and, in general, enable greater accomplishments and
self-fulfillment.  These same technologies, however, could produce the
opposite outcomes, contributing to personal isolation, increased
dependency, and loss of privacy.  How new technologies will affect
individuals will depend in part on the rules that Congress adopts to
govern access to information and the new communication technologies."

        U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. Critical Connections:
Communications for the Future.
THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND BEYOND:  CITIZEN ENTITLEMENT AND INFORMATION
ACCESS IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE

                       Dennis J. Reynolds

                     CAPCON Library Network
                        Washington, D.C.



    This year marks the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of
Rights. Though having roots in British law, these provisions as a
collective were unique and really quite extraordinary.  They delineated
not the obligations of the citizenry to the state, or the rights of the
state in the exercise of control over the individual, but the other way
around: these first ten amendments to the Constitution stipulated the
obligation of the state to the citizenry and delineated the rights of
its citizens in protection against interference from the state.

    Implied and sometimes stated in our legislative
documents and judicial decisions are rights regarding the way we as
individuals and as a society create, use, and disseminate information.
For the first few decades of the new nation, the technology of moving
things from one place to another -- whether material goods or ideas and
information -- remained fairly stable.  But since about the 1830s, our
history has been a stage upon which new transportation and communication
technologies have been tested, refined, and eventually incorporated into
everyday life.  The railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, the
airplane, radio, television, satellites, computers -- depending on the
definitions of revolution and evolution one might care to adopt, this
list could probably go on for quite some length just detailing the truly
significant innovations over the past 150 years that have changed the
way we gather and use information and the way we communicate it with one
another.

    This latest stage of this long progression has been our
entry into "the information age."  Information is being created today in
a quantity that is not only unprecedented, but remarkably so.  Trevor
Haywood in Britain was right, though, when he observed that the term we
like to use, "information explosion", is actually a misnomer in
describing the phenomenon we are experiencing with regard to the amount
of information entering our lives today.   An explosion is a sudden,
violent eruption that then rather quickly subsides.  What we call the
information explosion was not really all that sudden -- we have been
talking about it in the present tense for many years now -- and it
certainly does not look like it is going to subside quickly or
otherwise.  Information proliferation has become a permanent part of our
landscape. Our challenge is not to figure out how we can keep apace
until things become stable again, but rather how we can incorporate
flexibility and adaptability as constants into our approach to handling
an ever-increasing amount of information and the speed with which it can
be disseminated.

    In an essay on the electronic frontier and the
bill of rights, attorney Harvey Silvergate has pointed out that the
First Amendment in particular has been challenged by every major
technological development that has occurred in our history as a nation.
Computers and telecommunications are no exception.  Some activities like
the storage of increasingly vast quantities of personal data in
government and corporate computers have been occurring now over a period
of decades, but have only recently begun to receive the amount of
attention they have probably deserved all along.  Our belated
consciousness about these problems that have been longer in the making
is, at least, helping us ask to some of the right questions about
important developments of more recent vintage and even some that are
still unfolding, like the evolution of a formal National Research and
Education Network (NREN).

    Many of the questions we are asking now about our
information technologies are probably not so different than those our
forebearers were asking about other things 200 years ago as they were
grappling with what would become the Bill of Rights.  They are questions
having to do with defining the obligations the state has to its
citizenry  with regard to protection of individual freedoms.  Many of
the questions that are being asked have to do with "traditional" rights
such as freedom of expression, protection against unreasonable search
and seizure, and implied rights to privacy as they apply in an
electronic age.  But in looking at these, there are further dimensions
of the questions that may be fundamentally different than the framers of
the Bill of Rights were concerned with.  While these issues are of
enough concern with respect to the government's use of technology, some
of the greatest threats to our individual freedoms today reside in
companies using information technology in ways that, if used by the
government, would probably be considered gross violations of our
constitutional rights.  The first ten amendments to the Constitution say
much about the protection of the citizenry against the state, but very
little about protection from incursions by social and economic
institutions outside of government -- what we now call the "private
sector".  In examining not just an existing specific set of ten
amendments, but more generally a bill of rights regarding the use of
information technology, we must address protection against potential
excesses not only from our public institutions, but from our private
ones as well.

    The examination of individual rights in a context of
technology is very much tied to the uses and abuses of information.
Discussions centering around our conventional freedoms of expression,
protection from search and seizure, and privacy as they apply in a
technological context are concerned not with the technology in itself,
but rather with how it is employed in the gathering, processing,
storage, distribution, and use of information.  Given the heightened
degree of interest in the issues involved, we perhaps now have a unique
window of opportunity to broaden the discussion of the connection
between citizen rights and information beyond the conventional Bill of
Rights to include the right for individuals to have adequate opportunity
of access to information regardless of socioeconomic status and other
traditionally limiting factors.  In writing about the need for an
"Information Bill of Rights," Richard Rowe was right in asserting that
we must examine not only issues like privacy, but also rights of access.
We live in a place and at a time where the limits within which each of
our citizens can exercise options regarding "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness" will be determined in part by the limits of his or
her ability and opportunity to maneuver through the electronic mazes of
information that lie before them.  And in a global economy where our
competitiveness as a nation will depend on how well large numbers of our
citizens can access and use information and the technology with which it
is now interwoven, opportunity of access must no longer be just
philosophical wishfulness, but a concrete right for our citizens.

    The remainder of this paper will examine several issues
having to do with the interaction between technology, individual
freedoms, and access to electronic information.  Some of these are
discussed in the context of communications networking, some relate more
to electronically stored databases of information, and still others
touch upon the convergence of the two.  The common thread is that each
topic is relevant to a Bill of Rights for a society in which information
technology is becoming a large part of people's work, study, and
recreation.  The topics discussed are grouped into three broad
categories:  First and Fourth Amendment rights; data collection,
dissemination, and protection; and the right of access.


FIRST AND FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS


    The First Amendment to the Constitution is quite
explicit about protection of an individual's right to freedom of
expression, including speech, assembly, religion, and the press.  The
Fourth Amendment is likewise clear about protection from unreasonable
search and seizure.  The Constitution does not mention a "right of
privacy" per se, but legislation especially at state levels, and in the
courts at all levels, have established strong precedence that the First,
Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments all have
a bearing on the issue and collectively imply a right of privacy.

    There are four points about these rights that are
particularly salient to our discussion here.  First, there are some
ambiguities and very interesting twists to protection of these rights
when viewed in the context specifically of electronic information.
Secondly, the guarantees are not absolute. Thirdly, various rights may
at some times be in conflict with one another.  Finally, and extremely
importantly, these constitutional guarantees apply principally to
protection from government activities; they are less applicable to
private sector activities.

Electronic Communication and the First Amendment

    One of the most prominent examples of ambiguity about
protection of rights with respect to information technology is the
ongoing debate about whether textual and other information transmitted
over data communications networks should be treated more like print
media or broadcast media.  The answer to this question is crucial for
purposes of defining the extent to which First Amendment rights will be
protected over such networks.  There traditionally have been
qualitatively different principles applied to the two, with   broadcast
media like radio and television always having been held to stricter
controls than print media.  And the picture may very well get cloudier
before it becomes clearer; as David Lyon has described,

As voice, text, numerical data, images, and other forms of communication
are increasingly merged, using electronic means, so previous
distinctions between print, common carrier (such as the telephone), and
broadcast models become blurred.

    Given this obscuring of distinctions, it is possible
that the standard against which freedom of expression is measured in
evolving communications networks like the NREN will be something unto
its own, neither exactly those applied to print nor precisely those
applied to broadcast media or conventional communications media.  In
general, however, citizen rights advocates are urging adherence to the
print model with minimal restraint on full freedom of expression.

    Even with latitude, the rights and protections
guaranteed under the first ten amendments have never been absolute.
There have always been limits.  With regard to First Amendment rights,
for example, the restrictions revolve primarily around national security
interests, compliance with statutory law, and preventions of unwarranted
invasion of privacy.   With respect to unreasonable search and seizure,
there have been many rulings extending protection to the electronic
environment, but law enforcement has not always acted entirely prudently
in adhering to the spirit of these.  Just in the past couple of years,
there have been several major incidents in which law enforcement
agencies have appeared to be overzealous.  In 1989, for example, the
U.S. Secret Service confiscated microcomputer equipment of the publisher
of the online journal PHRACK for reportedly publishing a BellSouth
document outlining some of the technical details of how their 911
service worked.  The next year, the Secret Service confiscated the
equipment of a developer of role-playing games in Austin, Texas,
claiming that the person had compiled and was publishing what amounted
to a "how-to" book of computer crime.  Later in 1990, several online
bulletin boards were shut down by the Secret Service and more than 40
computers and 23,000 floppy disks were seized in Operation Sundevil, a
nationwide effort supposedly aimed at cracking down on credit card and
telephone access fraud.  In the first of these cases, the PHRACK
editor's computers were returned; in the case in Austin, the "computer
crime handbook" turned out to be a rule book for one of the developer's
role-playing game, and after four months, his equipment was returned.
As of the Spring of 1991, indictments were reportedly in the works in
relation to Operation Sundevil, though the investigation seemed shrouded
in secrecy.  In all three of these cases, an issue of great concern for
electronic rights advocates was whether due process was observed in the
confiscations, and most advocates feel it was not.

First Amendment Restrictions: The Example of Aggregate Sensitivity

    Another growing concern, one with major implications, is
the perceived expansion of the umbrella of "national security" as a
justification by government authorities to restrict freedom of speech.
A particularly ominous development has been the emergence of the concept
of aggregate sensitivity, sometimes also referred to as the mosaic
theory of information.  This concept is built on the premise that, when
taken in aggregate, a collection of individually unclassified and
non-sensitive documents can result in a product that is sensitive and
does constitute classified information.  If the origin of the concept of
aggregate sensitivity can be traced to a single incident, it is the
famous article that appeared in the magazine The Progressive in 1979
providing instructions on how to create an atomic bomb. While an
explanation of how to build an atomic bomb is classified information and
is obviously a vital national security concern, the instructions
appearing in The Progressive had been compiled using information
appearing  entirely in unclassified documents.  Thus, while the
individual documents themselves did not contain classified information,
it was felt that as an aggregate they did.

    In the early and mid-1980s, restriction of First
Amendment rights on grounds of aggregate sensitivity received further
attention when the Pentagon used it to justify barring several U.S.
scientists from presenting papers at international conferences in 1982
and again in 1985.  Aggregate sensitivity with respect to electronic
information has received the close attention of some government security
agencies.  NTIS and other scientific and technical databases have been
the primary targets of this concern.  It is held that while citations
and abstracts included in a CD-ROM or online bibliographic database
might not individually be security-sensitive, the totality could reveal
trends and areas of emphases in sensitive American scientific and
technical research, especially when computers are used to assist in
carrying out techniques like trend analysis, cross-correlation of
authors and subjects, and statistical plottings of publication data.

    While most would allow that matters of vital national
security are legitimate as grounds for restricting freedoms under
certain circumstances, on a specific case-by-case basis, what many First
Amendment advocates are finding alarming in the current environment is
the breadth of the government's interpretation of what might constitute
a "threat" to national security and the inclination to apply that
interpretation to such a wide variety of events, activities, and
products.

Privacy and the Freedom of Information Act

    National security is one example of the intersection
where constitutional freedoms and interests of confidentiality can come
into conflict. Another interesting area where those two concepts are
sometimes at cross purposes is in the application of the federal Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA).  Citizen rights advocates generally are
extremely supportive of a strong FOIA.  This Act, originally passed in
1966 and strengthened in 1974, helps ensure that citizens have a right
to inspect the information that government is gathering both about its
own activities and about the activities of its citizens and the groups
they belong to.  The difficulty sometimes is in drawing the line between
the right to be informed and the privacy rights of those about whom
information is subject to inspection.  An excellent example of this
dilemma was a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 regarding
the release of FBI records.  A decade before, a CBS news reporter and an
advocacy group called the Reporters Committee filed requests with the
FBI for release of criminal history records of four members of the
Medico family, suspected of having ties to organized crime but who owned
and operated a legitimate business enterprise that had been awarded
defense contracts.  The FBI dawdled, eventually releasing records on
three of the Medicos -- after each had died.  The disposition of the
FOIA request on the fourth Medico made its way through the courts all
the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the public has no
right to see FBI criminal records.

    This example and the issues it entails is a thorny one.
The Reporters Committee has voiced an unequivocal opinion that such
records should be available to the public under FOIA, especially when
those records consist as mostly a compilation of publicly available
state and local records. Privacy groups of a moderate bent might
question this; advocates of more extreme persuasion would maintain that
the wrong question was being asked in the first place: the debate should
not be focusing on whether such records maintained by the FBI should be
available, but rather whether they should exist as a compilation in a
central file in the first place.

    Computer technology has presented some interesting
questions in the applicability of the FOIA to government records held in
electronic form.  A strict reading of the Act would imply that
requesters are not guaranteed access to records maintained in any format
other than paper.  However, case law and the published fee guidelines
applying to FOIA have established that information in other media are
accessible under FOIA.  A grayer area, however, has to do with the
definition of what is considered an "existing" record versus a "new"
record in the storage of electronic data.  Under FOIA guidelines, a
government agency is not required to create a new record in order to
respond to a FOIA request.  Performance of any special programming to
extract computer-stored information, some agencies have argued, would by
definition constitute "creation" of a new record and therefore would not
be required under FOIA.  The courts have sometimes ruled in favor of
this interpretation, but at the same time urging Congress to examine
FOIA and amend the Act to address specifically issues related to
electronic information.


Constitutional Rights and the Private Sector

    The FOIA and nearly all other federal legislation
relating in any way to information access, privacy, and search and
seizure issues are concerned with the practices of governmental
agencies.  By and large, they do not apply to the private sector, apart
from government contractors in some cases.  There are, of course,
federal regulations prohibiting discrimination in certain areas on the
basis of race, religion, gender, or nationality.  But in regard to
freedom of expression and invasion of privacy in particular, federal
legislation protecting citizens in contexts other than their
relationship to government has been slow in coming.  The result is that
a very uncertain terrain exists in the relationship between individuals
and non-government organizations.  Some of the consequences of this lack
of regulation will be discussed in greater detail in the following
section of this paper, as many have to do with the collection and
dissemination of personal data. There are two examples that are
appropriate here, however, since they are concerned with very basic
freedom of expression and search and seizure/privacy issues.

    The first deals with freedom of speech in communications
networks, and an illustration is taken from a recent incident involving
a privately owned and operated electronic service.  For several years,
Sears and IBM have been collaboratively offering Prodigy, an online
network offering home shopping, news and weather, recreational games,
conferencing capabilities, electronic mail, and a variety of other
services aimed at the home personal computer market.  When initially
introduced, Prodigy was priced at a fixed monthly fee for which a
subscriber had unlimited access for any purpose.  A change in this
policy was then announced, targeted specifically at the electronic mail
component of the service, which had by that time become quite heavily
used by subscribers.  Under the new pricing structure, a certain number
of e-mail messages would be included in the basic monthly rate, but any
beyond that number would incur an additional per-message charge.  Some
Prodigy subscribers, upset over the new policy, used the electronic
bulletin board capability of the system itself to launch a protest.
Prodigy responded by removing the messages, and even canceled the
subscriptions of some of the more vehement protestors.

    The Prodigy incident is an example of how one privately
owned electronic service reacted to objections to its policies, but the
incident illustrates some of the broad implications of privately
controlled networks.  In discussions of the NREN, for example, one of
the structural solutions that has been proposed is to put development
and management of the network into the hands of the private sector.  As
the Prodigy case exemplifies, though, an important concern is the extent
to which the technical manager or owner of the network also acts as
policy-maker about the content of what is being sent over the network.
Electronic rights proponents generally are unfavorably disposed toward
the idea of a for-profit private company owning and operating NREN, and
in a more general sense, are adamant that even in privately owned
communications networks to which the general public is allowed to
subscribe, the content of what flows through the network must be
protected by broader principles like the First Amendment rather than
left up to the discretion of the owner.

    Another concern related to lack of constitutional
applicability in the private sector focuses on personal privacy issues
and protection against unreasonable "search and seizure" in the
workplace.  Methods of surveillance are being carried out in workplaces
in the private sector that our government would never legally be allowed
to get away with.  Modern information technologies have made undetected
monitoring of people's actions in the workplace far easier and more
sophisticated than ever before.  Positions involving use of technology
-- like data entry clerks and airline ticket reservation agents -- are
particularly vulnerable to electronic monitoring of performance.  We
have all seen the warm and fuzzy TV commercial where a single airline
reservations agent books flights home in a single call for what one
assumes must be practically the entire enlisted personnel of a military
base.  The agent's supervisor strolls by later in the day and asks if
the agent had answered any calls today, to which the agent
good-naturedly points out that she had only one.  In reality, the
scenario in such an office could probably have just as easily shown the
supervisor going into a back room, entering a special authorization code
on a terminal, and finding out exactly how many calls the agent had
handled, the number of reservations made and the total volume of sales,
and the number of minutes and seconds that elapsed between each booking.
Much more efficient and precise, but it probably would not have made
quite as nice a TV commercial.

    Electronic surveillance techniques are a seductive
possibility to employers and managers feeling pressures to increase
productivity, quality, and profits.  What the relatively little evidence
that exists shows in many cases, though, is that electronic surveillance
often achieves exactly the opposite of the desired results.  As Marx and
Sherizen have pointed out, employees can be ingenious in finding ways to
beat the system, and electronic monitoring can further lead to
sacrificing quantity for quality.  Reservations agents, for example,
might be tempted to disconnect calls if a request is appearing to become
too time-consuming, or to withhold information in an effort to shorten
the length of a call.  Electronic surveillance can also lead to a
general atmosphere of mistrust and poor morale, resulting in lower
productivity, higher turnover, and other problems that may be precisely
what the employer had hoped to avoid.

    While these are crucial issues in terms of human
resources management, the aspect that concerns us most here are that
intrusive measures like these pose serious questions about certain
fundamental freedoms that individuals should have a right to expect of
their employers just as they do of their government. Some forms of
electronic monitoring in the workplace verge on what can be called
nothing short of employer espionage, unreasonable "search", and
presumption of guilt before a "crime" is even committed.  Government has
historically been reluctant to interfere in employer/employee relations
until forced to do so by conflict of near-crisis proportion.  To date,
the workforce most subject to surveillance tends to also be the least
politically empowered, and there simply is not much evidence that
government is ready to address this aspect of citizen rights in truly
meaningfully proportion.


DATA COLLECTION, DISSEMINATION, AND PROTECTION


    Aided by computer and telecommunication technologies, an
enormous amount of data is gathered, stored, and disseminated about
Americans each year.  Even by the early 1980s, it was estimated that the
federal government had 4 billion separate records about U.S. citizens --
an average of about 17 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
This was several years ago, and the number is no doubt much higher by
now.  While the government is a fervent collector of data about us, its
efforts are rivaled by the private sector.  Several years ago David
Burnham gave the example of a single database in California to which
more than 10,000 merchants across the U.S. had access to information
about 86 million American households. This figure corresponds closely
with the number of American households for which demographic and some
personal data was included in a more recently announced (and then
canceled) product called Lotus Marketplace: Households.  Who is
collecting all this data about us and where are they getting it?  What
is it being used for, and what rights do citizens have regarding its
collection,  dissemination, and use?

The Who and What of Personal Data Collection

    Nearly every agency of the U.S. government collects data
about individuals.  It is not a grand covert operation; to the contrary,
we willingly, or at least knowingly, supply most of this data ourselves.
The Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of the Census are two of the
larger collectors of data that Americans supply about themselves.  The
Social Security Administration has very complete earnings records about
every legally employed individual in America, and even about some who
have never worked a day in their life.  (We supposedly do not have a
"national identification card" in this country, yet my 22-month old
daughter already has her social security card; she received it a few
weeks after her birth for some reason that no one has explained to me.)
Those who have ever been in the military, registered with the Selective
Service, received welfare payments, or applied for an FHA loan also have
records on file with the appropriate federal agencies.  Law enforcement
agencies have voluminous files containing information about those who
have committed crimes, and probably about some who haven't.  No doubt
the list of government agencies -federal, state, and local -- could go
on for some length.

    We as citizens also give out a great deal of information
about ourselves to a wide range of organizations and companies outside
government.  From the time a child begins pre-school, our educational
system collects records not only about the student but usually about his
or her family as well; and then when the student eventually graduates
into "the real world", employers take over where the educational system
left off.  When we start to earn a living,  we find ourselves filling
out applications for credit cards from department stores and for
mortgage loans from banks,  and as we begin to acquire appliances and
other material gadgets, we protect our investments by filling out
product warranty cards and sending them to the manufacturer.  We tell
insurance companies about our medical history or our driving records or
the contents of our homes.  We join organizations, we subscribe to
magazines, we contribute money to worthy causes.  This is all pretty
routine stuff, activities that few people stop to ponder as to the
consequences beyond the immediate purpose for which they are supplying
the information.  But in this age of the computer and advanced
communications technology, nearly every piece of data we supply to an
organization or bank or company is probably being added to a database
and transmitted from one place to another at some point in time.

    One aspect of personal information gathering activities
in our society today is the transactional nature of much of the data --
the recording of a specific event at a specific place at a specific
time.  With instant credit card verification services, for example, an
electronic record is established that shows exactly where a person was
at an exact moment in time.  On some highways in Britain, cameras
mounted on bridges scan license plates of cars passing under and record
them along with the exact time of day.  Probably the most prolific
collectors of transactional data are telephone companies.  Their records
can show who we talk to, when, from where, and for how long.  This has
been brought home in  court proceedings and other investigations, one of
the more widely known involving President Carter's brother Billy in his
dealings with the Libyan government during the late 1970s. Among other
details, a Senate committee's report documented the time and place of
sixteen telephone calls made by Billy Carter to the Libyan embassy from
at least ten different telephones in three different states during a two
week period in 1979. The Billy Carter incident illustrates another
aspect of much of the transactional data being gathered:  while the
event documented is very temporally discrete, the record itself often
becomes permanent -- it is not erased once the transaction has been
completed, but rather, becomes part of someone's growing record of
specific examples of our behavior.

    Most of the types of data gathering activities described
above have what many would agree are legitimate purposes.  We have
inherited from our forebearers what seems an almost instinctual mistrust
of government, so we are leery when it gathers personal data about us,
even if begrudgingly admitting that the rationale sometimes might
actually be reasonable.   Much more insidious, perhaps, are data
gathering activities in the private sector.  Of course it makes sense
that a bank would want a pretty detailed picture of our financial record
before lending us tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase a
home or start a business; a manufacturer asking that we establish the
date upon which we bought a particular appliance seems pretty reasonable
unless the gadget is guaranteed to work forever or not guaranteed at
all; and instant credit card verification probably has cut down on the
incidence of fraud and forfeiture resulting in losses which the credit
card companies have to recover by increasing annual fees or interest
rates to the rest of us who are conscientious, paying consumers.

Watchwords for Data Protection

    While much of the data being collected, whether by
government agencies or corporations, seems to fill a reasonable need,
there are four characteristics about data gathering activities of which
we must be particularly watchful.  The first is permanence.  Granted, my
long distance carrier may want to keep records of my telephone calls for
a while after I have paid for them in the event of a belated complaint
on my part, and as a business it needs to keep the records for a certain
time as required by standard accounting principles and maybe even to
satisfy the requirements of certain federal agencies.  But how long is
long enough?

    The second watchword is relevance.  It may be reasonable
for a credit card company to ask how much money I earn and how long I
have been employed in my present and maybe even in my immediate prior
position, but why do they need to know the highest educational degree I
have?  For purposes of qualifying for a credit card, if I make a quarter
million dollars a year, does it really matter  whether I have a PhD or
never even completed the sixth grade?

    A third concern and a logical extension of the relevance
issue is the purpose for which the data collected is used.  The reason
that my educational level might be useful to the credit card company is
that they might be able to sell that information to someone who is
interested in my educational level, like a magazine subscription house
or anyone else whose clientele tends to fit a certain profile. There are
almost no legal restrictions in the United States on the sale of
personal information within the private sector.  In fact, the sale of
personal data for purposes other than that for which it was collected in
the first place has grown into a major industry in itself.  Credit
reporting agencies are leading the way in this lucrative market.  To
illustrate the magnitude with which it occurs, an author writing on this
phenomenon several years ago requested a copy of his file maintained by
one of the leading credit reporting bureaus and a list of those to whom
it had been released.  The results were revealing: in the previous seven
months, information in his file had been released to him once, in
response to his current request; once to his credit union in connection
with a small loan he had applied for; and nineteen times to other
organizations and companies with which he had no relationship nor
necessarily wanted to establish one. A more recent event that brought
the sale of personal data into the limelight was the Lotus Development
Corporation's announcement of Lotus Marketplace: Households, a database
that contained a variety of information on virtually tens of millions of
American households, and which was targeted for sale on CD-ROM to mail
order and other direct marketing organizations.  The Lotus product
caused quite a stir and was canceled, but it was a poignant
demonstration of how information about our income, shopping habits, and
other personal behaviors has become a very salable -- and very available
-- market commodity.

    In light of the critical decisions about peoples' lives
that are made on the basis of personal information on record either with
the government or elsewhere, a fourth major area of concern is
accountability and quality control. This is particularly important with
regard to private sector uses given the current paucity of regulations
governing commercial use and distribution of personal records.

    On rare occasion, the lack of quality control in a
computer environment -- or perhaps more accurately the lack of applying
common sense -- can have humorous results.  In the mid-1980s, for
example, a Louisiana bank sent pre-approved credit cards to several of
the banks customers who happened at the time to be inmates at a state
prison.  According to programmed selection criteria, they were
considered employed and did not show bad credit ratings, and hence were
considered good risks.  Unfortunately, most reported run-arounds with
computer-stored personal information are not so harmless.  One
celebrated case -- it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court --
involved a construction contractor who, through a clerical error by a
Dun & Bradstreet employee, had erroneously been identified as having
filed for bankruptcy.  The report was distributed to several banks with
whom the contractor was negotiating for loans, and his business suffered
severe setbacks as a result.  The contractor sued Dun & Bradstreet and
was awarded $350,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, but Dun &
Bradstreet appealed all the way to the Supreme Court on the basis that
credit reports are a form of free speech protected under the First
Amendment.  The Information Industry Association filed testimony on
behalf of the company that credit reporting agencies should be immune
from liability for false reports unless actual malice could be proved.
The Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in favor of the
contractor.

    In the example above, the contractor at least had
discovered that an error had been made, and had the perseverance and
resources to pursue restitution. One can only wonder how many citizens
have been refused credit or worse on the basis of erroneous information
but have not had the knowledge, resources, or patience to uncover the
error and get it corrected.  And the private sector is certainly not the
only place where accountability and accuracy are concerns; as the
example below will show, the government has certainly been known to be
on the initiating side of some inaccuracies as well.

    As the numbers cited at the beginning of this section
demonstrate -- billions of federal records containing personal data, and
electronic records with personal information about tens of millions of
American households being maintained by the private sector -- there are
probably not very many Americans who can claim electronic anonymity.
Practices in the private sector have gone basically unchecked, resulting
in personal records being commercially exchanged so many times among so
many parties, and probably over such a patchwork of communication
networks, that once we do find out where some pieces of information
about us resides, there is little likelihood that we would be able to
determine its original source or who else has that same information.
Imagine the absolute horror, then, upon finding out that someone,
somewhere, sometime made a data entry error or read a report the wrong
way or received only partial information about a business transaction.
By the time the error is discovered, the fallacious information likely
will have already been redistributed many times over. The prospect of
such a nightmare is not the sole province of the private sector by any
means.  There are virtually thousands of federal databases that contain
information about individual citizens.  And in 1982, the Privacy Act of
1974 was amended to allow federal agencies to exchange personal data
with one another -- perhaps simply a legislative acknowledgment of what
was already going on anyway -- thereby opening the floodgate for the
possible widespread dissemination of erroneous information about an
individual.  There is little quantitative data about the error rate of
information held by private credit bureaus, other commercial sector data
gatherers, or public sector institutions and agencies. A decade ago,
though, Kenneth Laudon, working on a study for the U.S. Office of
Technology Assessment(OTA), was asked by OTA to check a small sample of
FBI arrest warrants for accuracy.  What Laudon found was that for about
11% of the sample, the warrants had already been cleared or vacated at
the local level, and in another 4% of the cases, there was no record at
all of an arrest warrant at the local agency.  If the 400 records were
representative of the entire FBI warrant file, this meant that on the
day the records were pulled for the study, there were about 17,000 U.S
citizens open to false arrest by the FBI on the basis of inaccurate or
outdated information in the Bureau's database.

Regulating the Use of Personal Data

    Most European countries have formal Data Protection
Commissions who are charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that
individual rights relating to the collection, dissemination, and use of
personal data are not trampled at the whim of the state or in the
interests of the marketplace.  Indeed, the purview of the Commissions as
well as data protection laws throughout Europe generally apply both to
government and to private sector activities.  While what seems to be a
fairly effective model for European nations would not automatically be
assured of success here, there is no question that data protection laws
in the U.S. leave much to be desired where they exist at all.  Michael
Rogers Rubin provided an excellent overview of existing federal and
state legislation in an article two years ago in Library Hi Tech, and
Rein Turn provided a comprehensive and still timely overview in ARIST a
few years before.

    In 1974, the U.S. Congress passed what is known as The
Privacy Act of 1974.  The Act addresses certain practices and
limitations regarding use of federal databases, including those related
to income tax, social security, census, federal employment, and a
variety of other types of records.  The Act has always been seen as
pretty weak.  It has no provisions regarding what types of data may be
collected, or any restrictions on how it can be collected.   There are
only nominal restrictions limiting use of records for purposes other
than that for which they were originally collected.  There is enough
ambiguity in the provisions to make them fairly open to interpretation
by agencies, there are relatively broad exemptions, and there is not a
strong direct enforcement mechanism.  What it comes down to is that the
Act does fairly unambiguously grant individuals the right to see records
that the government is keeping on them, and to correct the records if
warranted.  Of course, it is up to the individual to initiate an inquiry
to find out whether or not any records are being kept, and a separate
inquiry must be filed for each database maintained by the government,
which number by now somewhere over 7,000.  If a requestor does find what
he or she detects to be an error, it is up to that individual to provide
proof of the error, including shouldering any legal fees should the
person feel it necessary to get the assistance of counsel.  As Rubin and
Turn both point out, there are other federal laws and internal agency
directives -- such as one adopted  in 1973 by what was then Health,
Education and Welfare -- that grant more protection and privacy than
does the Privacy Act itself.

    The Privacy Act of 1974 and many other federal statutes
apply only to federal databases.  Its provisions regarding employee
protections are a bit broader, in that they must be adhered to by
private government contractors as well.  But applicable to the private
sector as a whole, there is really a dearth of legislation addressing
data collection, use, and privacy protection. Even the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act, which prohibits creditors from inquiring as to race,
religion, gender, or national origin, does not apply to credit reporting
bureaus themselves, and these are probably the most comprehensive data
collectors and disseminators in the private sector.

    Both as it applies to government and commercial
enterprise, federal legislation in the United States is just plain
inadequate when it comes to providing citizens with protection against
misuse of electronically stored or communicated information.  The states
do somewhat better, but still fall short of what most citizen rights
advocates feel is needed to ensure even minimal protections.  To
overcome some of the problems that have been described above, there are
three fundamental approaches that could be taken on a national level.
The first would be to take the tact that virtually any and all
gathering, distribution, and storage of personal data in electronic form
(or in any form for that matter) is a violation of basic rights of
privacy to which we are entitled.  This solution may be equivalent to
simply trying to wish the problem away.  Too many purposes of data
collection and use are probably too legitimate, and the practices too
entrenched, to make this a realistic option.  Barring a reaction of
unforeseen magnitude, the collection and use of personal data is going
to continue to grow and to become even more tied to computerization and
communication over data networks than it is now.

    Some of the greatest concerns about use of personal data
have to do with accountability, identification of the exact sources of
various pieces of information that are circulating about us, the
diffusiveness of its whereabouts both in the private sector and among
government agencies, and the lack of regulation over its dissemination.
An approach that would serve to bring under control all of these
problems would be treat personal data as a national resource and
establish one single authoritative database into which, and out of
which, all personal information gathered by anyone would be mandated to
flow.  Tabs could better be kept on where data originated and then to
whom it was redistributed; correction of erroneous data could be easier
and a centralized mechanism for distributing corrected data could be put
into place; and a central authority could be empowered to benevolently
administer the database, ensure reasonable confidentiality of the
information contained therein, and protect the citizenry against misuse
of data.  This solution could bring under tow much of the mayhem that
exists today, is probably  technologically quite feasible and
administratively possible -- and it stands absolutely no chance of
happening, at least not in any overt manifestation.  The thought of a
single, centralized, state owned and operated database of personal
information offends just about everything Americans hold sacred.  It
simply runs counter to our national psyche. However much the current
environment seems to foster conditions that make personal data
vulnerable to misuse, at least it is largely disorganized and
uncoordinated misuse, the result of clerical errors and financial greed,
not political espionage.

    This does not mean that the problems should be ignored,
nor left for self-regulation.  The third approach we can take is to
strengthen our data protection laws.  We as a nation must decide where
to draw the line between what constitutes reasonable data collection and
use by the public sector and the private sector, and where that crosses
the line into unnecessary and potentially threatening intrusion into our
lives.  Congress has not yet made data protection a high priority.  It
is unlikely to do so until the citizenry expresses a concern with
sufficient voice to make these issues grist for the campaign mill rather
than simply pet projects of a few concerned legislators.  It is when we
see the awareness among our citizens rise that we will see the awareness
among our lawmakers rise, and when that happens, we will begin to
protect personal information as an individual freedom and a right rather
than as a state resource and a marketplace commodity.


<Continuation of The Bill of Rights and Beyond, by Dennis Reynolds>

THE RIGHT OF ACCESS


    Citizen rights like freedom of expression and protection
against search and seizure are constitutionally guaranteed.  The right
to know how to read those rights for oneself, however, is not.  Nor does
the Constitution guarantee that the government or anyone else has to
exert effort, quantitative or qualitative, in teaching citizens about
what those rights mean or how to apply them.  While public law has
something to say about access to governmentally produced information, it
is less clear about the obligation of the government to produce that
information in the first place, and while freedoms of speech and the
press by implication guarantee the right of individuals to have access
to certain information created outside government, there is nothing said
about the conditions under which that access is assured.  In a year in
which the themes of literacy, democracy, and productivity will highlight
the Second White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services,
it is important that we begin to look at access to information more as a
right than a privilege.  If we are to tackle the full complexities of
literacy, and to hold forth the tenet that democracy requires an
informed citizenry, and to compete more effectively in a global economy
by capitalizing on productivity, then we must be prepared to view not
just information, but access to information, as a national resource upon
which no price tag can be placed.  In terms of the implications for a
society heavily dependent on technology as the conduit through which
information flows, it is important that we examine three aspects of
access to electronic information: electronic literacy, government
information, and universality of opportunity of access.

Electronic Literacy

    When A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, the report
of the U.S. Commission on Excellence in Education confirmed what had
long been suspected: the educational system was in serious trouble, and
among the problems was deficiency in the basic ability to read.  The
exact proportion of the American population that is illiterate depends
on definitions and on whose figures one chooses to cite, but the
dimensions are serious by anyone's count.  The issue of literacy in
America is further complicated when examined in light of our increasing
reliance on electronic media from which we retrieve information and
through which we communicate it.  In the process of acquiring print
literacy, the learner is relatively free to focus on the substance, i.e.
the printed page or card or whatever; the means of getting to the object
of learning is fairly straightforward with the chief requirement being
manual dexterity.  With information in electronic form, however, two
different kinds of skill are required, and we thus encounter two
different types of illiteracy.  The first is exemplified by the person
who can neither read nor operate the means, i.e. the technology, that is
required to retrieve or communicate the content.  A second form of
electronic illiteracy -- and the emphasis here is indeed on "electronic"
-- exists among persons who know how to read the printed word, but are
untrained in the technical skills required to access and use information
in electronic form.  These people may have only remedial reading skills
and minimal education, or they may be an accomplished scholar with
advanced degrees.  A person with the latter qualifications is more
likely to be able to readily master the technological aspect of
electronic literacy than is an individual with the former, but at least
at the outset, they are at the same level with regard to information in
electronic form -- they are illiterate.

    A third level could, arguably, be added to this typology
of electronic literacy/illiteracy, a level that might best be described
as technologically "marginally literate."  To persons in this category
might apply the axiom that sometimes a little knowledge is almost worse
than none.  These are the people who can read and who can use the
technology well enough to retrieve or use or communicate information,
though not necessarily very effectively.  The most potentially
counter-productive aspect of this level of literacy is that sometimes
the individuals think they have a mastery of the technology, when in
fact they have only very rudimentary skills in employing it.  And the
difficulty with this category, of course, is the subjectivity with which
it is defined.  Complete reading illiteracy can be pretty unambiguously
identified, as can the second type of electronic literacy where an
individual knows how to read but does not know how to use the
technology.  But the definition of this "minimal effectiveness" category
is far more subjective.  Each of us could probably be more skillful in
the information technologies we employ; but where is the line between
effectiveness and ineffectiveness, and whose value judgment is it?  We
have certain standards by which we measure print literacy and reading
levels, but to my knowledge we have no real equivalent by which to
measure levels of electronic information literacy. The irony is that,
while this minimal effectiveness category is the most difficult to
define, it may be the one most in need of recognition and attention if
we are going to truly increase the citizenry's collective productivity
and enhance individual opportunity.  We can identify those among the
adult population who cannot read and those who cannot use even the most
basic information retrieval system, and we can teach them how to gain
some basic skills in each of these areas.  Our schools, our libraries,
our communities increasingly have programs for accomplishing this.  But
what happens once an individual attains the basic level of skill for
which the program was designed, and what happens to those whose skills
are already slightly higher than the focus of the programs?  A premise
of most of our programs, whether teaching print literacy or computer
literacy, seems to be that at some point the individual is turned out to
fend for herself or himself in further enhancing their skills.  It is
exactly at this juncture, though, that an individual may most need
continuing support mechanisms through formal programs and "advanced"
instruction.  This is not at all to say we should abandon our emphasis
on basic literacy, both of a print and electronic variety.  It is,
rather, to say that we must not stop with the provision of rudimentary
skills, but that we must continue on in organized fashion, for it is in
this transitional phase that the individual may for the first time be
able to see the light of real opportunity, and we must develop
mechanisms by which to facilitate progress toward that opportunity.

Government Information

    The ongoing saga of the fate of publication and
dissemination of information by and about the federal government is
covered well by professional associations and in journals, and it will
not receive lengthy treatment here.  Concerns over government
information publishing practices fall primarily into philosophical and
economic issues.  On the philosophical side, information produced by the
government is seen as a precursor to an informed citizenry and therefore
a vital ingredient of democracy.  From the economic perspective,
proponents of strong federal publishing requirements feel that not only
should government publish information pertaining to its activities, but
that such documents should be available at or near the actual cost of
production, based on the premise that the citizenry has already paid for
this information through taxes.  Another side of the economic aspect of
government publishing is that strict marketplace principles of
salability should not drive the decision as to whether or not the
government publishes an item.  There is considered to be a societal good
served in publishing information that might appeal only to limited
audiences engaged in work that is intrinsically important to society or
even small segments thereof.

    The 1980s were not kind to government publishing, and
the 1990s are not starting off much better.  The last decade has seen
severe cutbacks in publication budgets at a time when the amount of
information as a whole being gathered is increasing, and when changes in
technology are presenting new challenges and new opportunities for the
government information infrastructure.

    Funds for federal agency publishing activities have been
dwindling in the past ten-plus years.  Already by 1982, the Department
of Education was announcing that it was considering rejecting 40% of the
requests to publish findings of education laboratories that were
federally sponsored, simply because it did not have the money in its
publications budget to do so.  Two years later, as part of the Deficit
Reduction Act of 1984, the publication budgets of most federal agencies
was cut by 30% for FY1986. Combined


with these cutbacks were constant pressures from the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) throughout the 1980s to turn more and more
of the publishing of government information over to the private sector.
The debate got so heated with respect to the National Technical
Information Service (NTIS) that in 1988 Congress felt incumbent to pass
legislation stipulating that no NTIS activity could be contracted out
unless approved by statute.  Nevertheless, many federal agency documents
are no longer published by the government, but rather are now published
by the private sector at substantially high prices.  The Federal
Election Commission, for example, has curtailed publication of
information pertaining to campaign finances, and this information must
now be purchased from the private sector at a cost of several thousand
dollars.

    Budget cuts and debate over privatization have been
further complicated by changes in the technology of government printing
and distribution.  The amount of government information now being
published in print form reportedly has actually been on the decline in
recent years, while electronic publication has been on the increase. The
need for economizing, the sheer amount of data in some of the documents
prepared by agencies, and other factors have led to decisions to publish
some documents only in electronic form, with no print equivalent.

    The publication of government information in electronic
form has presented some sticky territorial disputes over who should be
in charge of distributing what.  The Government Printing Office (GPO)
and NTIS have been historically bound to paper and microform publishing.
The OMB has been quick to interpret any statutes bearing on the question
of publication and distribution of alternate formats in a restrictive
sense, thereby taking the responsibility out of the hands of GPO in
particular and placing it elsewhere -- including in the hands of the
private sector.

    The upheaval in government publication policy and
practice, especially with respect to electronic databases, has carried
over into other programs such as The Depository Library Program.  This
program was established to ensure widespread dissemination of, and
access by the citizenry to, federal publications.  The program has
worked well.  But as more and more government information is being
published in electronic formats, and sometimes only in an electronic
format, new challenges appear.  The OMB has asserted that electronic
publications are not covered under the Federal Depository Library
program, and agencies are therefore under no obligation to see that
these are distributed to appropriate depository collections.
Fortunately, the Joint Committee on Publishing and other Congressional
committees have just as strongly felt otherwise.  Even when publications
in electronic formats are made available to Depository Libraries,
however, the government is not clearly under obligation to furnish the
hardware software, and other expenses that might be necessary to access
the information electronically.  The Depository Library Program has
become such a crucial vehicle for making government information to the
public that the Office of Technology Assessment's Informing the Nation
report noted the possible need for additional government funding to
address this issue.

    The production and dissemination of information by the
government about its own activities is in a state of uncertainty.  There
continues to be a widely-held opinion that information created,
published, and distributed by the government is a cornerstone of
democracy, and that open and free access to it is a right of the
citizenry.  There are some who don't see it this way, instead viewing
government information primarily as an easily repackagable economic
commodity whose distribution should be the responsibility of the private
sector.  While the objections to this line of reasoning by public
information advocates are quite often based in philosophical principles
about the relationship between the state and its citizens, there are
also some very practical concerns, as Carol Moody noted when she
suggested that "...relying on the private sector where companies are
bought, sold, and dismantled overnight, is not the way to provide the
public with critical information."

Universal Opportunity of Access

    There are several aspects pertaining to the question of
equal opportunity of access to information, not just by and about the
government, but also to information that is publicly accessible through
commercial electronic services.  The aspect that will be discussed here
is the socioeconomics of access to that information by the citizenry.

    The issue of the socioeconomics of access to information
has most often been stated in terms of a fairly simply dichotomy of the
information rich versus the information poor.  This is convenient, but
as with literacy, it is important to recognize more gradations when
viewing the problem in the context of electronic information.  At one
end of the spectrum there are those for whom the cost of access to
electronic information is a factor of no particular consequence; these
are the information rich, or perhaps more appropriately labelled, the
access rich.  At the other end of the spectrum are the information poor,
or access poor, who cannot afford to pay even nominal fees for access to
electronic information.  We tend to associate this latter group with an
overall socioeconomic class lacking not only in financial resources but
also fitting other criteria having to do with level of formal education,
employment characteristics, etc.  And this is where, in the electronic
environment, the simplicity of the dichotomy breaks down.  In terms of
ability to pay, the access poor includes not just the less educated and
the ranks of unskilled labor; it can also include graduate students and
professors in academia not lucky enough to be working under a research
grant, and it can include highly educated owners of small and even
medium-sized businesses.   The life options available to people fitting
these latter descriptions are a magnitude of order more open than those
available to the truly economically disadvantaged, but this middle group
should not be overlooked.  Trevor Haywood pointed out that, in Britain,
access to about thirty minutes of a commercial database would cost the
equivalent of about half a week's salary of a family earning the
national average income. The proportion might be a bit less dramatic in
this country, but the general implications are not: we have a large
number of citizens who simply cannot on their own afford to tap into the
electronic information structure in America as it exists today.

    The past two decades have seen ongoing debate in the
library profession about the appropriateness of charging fees to users
in order to recover part or all of the costs associated with
user-specific online searches of commercial database services.  The
arguments presented by both sides in this "fee versus free" controversy
have been delivered with equal eloquence and passion.  After all the
permutations on all the arguments pro and con are examined, the debate
is generally reduced to what is desired philosophically versus what is
practical economically.  The debates with respect to user fees are not
quite as prominent at our conferences and in our literature as they once
were.  A professional accord seems to have been reached, whereby most
librarians support the principle of not levying fees for service, but
the degree to which that principle can be implemented is recognized to
vary widely from one library to the next.

    While the controversy over fees for online access in
libraries has not been at the forefront of "hot issues" within the
profession during the past few years, it is merely dormant, not
resolved.  With developments like the emergence of the National
Education and Research Network, interest in the question of who gets
access, and how to fund it, is on the rise again.  In the specific case
of NREN, the consensus in the library profession seems to be that the
Network and access to it should be a national resource in much the same
way that our interstate highway system is.  The NREN will be as crucial
a means of "transportation" of information and ideas as the national
highway infrastructure was for the transportation of material goods.
The library profession is furthermore becoming fairly committed to the
concept of the NREN as a resource not just for scholars and research and
development firms, but for all citizens.  There is also strong sentiment
in favor of federal subsidy for access and use of the NREN, in much the
same way our interstate highway systems are constructed and maintained
through public monies.

    But even if the model that has the NREN serving as a
national resource with open and even subsidized access becomes the
reality, this in no way solves the question of "fee versus free" access
to electronic information -- it may, in fact, merely exacerbate it.
Communication across the telecommunications superhighway might turn out
to be free, but there remain the questions of who pays for the local
roads leading to it and for what lies at the end of the highway.  The
NREN is likely to, and in fact is being designed primarily to,
facilitate communication of research and high-end computing services,
but it will no doubt also be used as a vehicle to access many of the
commercially available electronic database services that now exist,
along with a host of new services whose founding will be spawned by the
growth of the Network.  Access, in the sense merely of
telecommunications, to some of the conventional online services and to
the new ones that grow up may become easier and less expensive than it
is now, but this does not mean that the information itself that resides
at the end of the road somewhere will in any sense be "free."  And once
we envision this scenario, we are back to where we started in terms of
the question of who pays.  Whether an individual travels across the NREN
from a home, an office, or a computer terminal in the library, this is a
vital question.  And it is not one simply for libraries to grapple with
in their provision of access to information; it is one that society as a
whole must confront.

    In the "fee versus free" debates of yesteryear, emotions
reached such a pitch sometimes where an author or a committee would
issue a statement to the effect that all people should have a right to
access all information, and on occasion the statements were left this
open-ended.  Obviously, it is impractical and not really a good idea to
imply that people should be able to access internal memos of every
corporation in America, each others bank accounts, etc.  But what was
important then, and what is still important now, is the issue of
opportunity of access to commercial databases and other electronic
information to which availability is public as long as the user follows
the rules set forth by the provider -- the most standard of which is the
ability to pay the established price.  And this is where not just
library policy, but broad social policy, must come into play.

    Libraries have too long tried to shoulder by themselves
the burden of subsidizing costs for access to electronic information by
those unable to afford to pay.  If our literacy, our democracy, our
productivity, and our general health as a nation depends in such large
part on our ability to access and use information in the most effective
and efficient ways possible, then is it not a responsibility of society
as a whole to ensure that the citizenry has the opportunity of access to
the full range of information that is available for public consumption?
And this concept in no way denies the right of the private sector to
sell access or to make a profit.  Public schools cost money to operate
and public roads cost money to build, and in the process, manufacturers
of school desks and construction contractors charge for their services
and make a profit.  The antagonism between libraries and commercial
vendors that sometimes was an undercurrent in discussions about the cost
of information services has perhaps always been misplaced.  Our real
focus should perhaps be on public policy surrounding the support of
access to information, rather than on whether or not someone has a right
to benefit financially from providing that information.  While libraries
will have to deal with the hard decisions of providing access to often
expensive electronic information in the foreseeable future, we might
also be wise to urge our elected officials to begin making some hard
decisions about how to ensure the citizenry's right to be informed, not
just by and about the government, but with access to all publicly
available information that would help them to perform their jobs better,
be more knowledgeable and more productive, and in the process ensure a
stronger democracy and a more vital economy.

    In a recent report on options for national
communications policy, the Office of Technology Assessment described
three primary models for development:  communication as a market
commodity, communication as a springboard to economic growth, and
communication as social infrastructure.  The latter of these, it was
noted, carries with it an emphasis on equity of access.  The report also
noted that, as of 1990, the "communication as social infrastructure"
viewpoint was not very powerful within the current communication policy
community.  But the report then went on to observe that proponents of
communications as a vehicle through which to accomplish societal goals
have historically grown in strength as technologies have developed, this
being the case with telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television.  As we
blend the goals of the social model with efforts to enhance the position
of U.S. competitiveness in a global economy, and infuse our strong
traditional values regarding individual freedoms and rights, we have
reason to be optimistic that more sound policies regarding the use of
information technology will evolve, and that those policies will assert
our freedoms and our protections, and will perhaps even view access to
information as a right of the citzenry rather than as a privilege.


              *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Dennis Reynolds may be reached at 202/745-7722 (voice) or 202/797-7719
(fax) or on Bitnet at dreynol@auvm.--
TECHNO-FALLACIES OF THE INFORMATION AGE

                          Gary T. Marx

                     Department of Sociology
              Massachusetts Institute of Technology
                    Cambridge, Massachusetts



    New information technologies are breaking the boundaries
of time and space, and are bringing with them far-reaching changes in
the way information is gathered, accessed, and disseminated.  While
holding much promise, it is also important to be aware of the background
assumptions that often accompany the advocacy and introduction of new
technologies.  In particular, it is critical to examine the broader
cultural climate, the rationales for action, and the empirical and value
assumptions surrounding the introduction and widespread adoption of a
technology.

    Academic analysts try to offer theories, concepts,
methods, and data, and also, hopefully, wisdom.  A part of the wisdom
arises in being able to identify and question the web of tacit
assumptions that undergirds action.  As an ethnographer, I watch and
listen.  When it comes to technology, I sometimes hear things that seem
empirically, logically, or normatively wrong, much as a musician knows
that certain notes are off key: "Turn the technology loose and let the
benefits flow"..."Do away with the human interface"..."When you choose
to make a phone call, you are consenting to have your telephone number
released"..."Only the computer sees it"..."Those of us who are involved
in consumer marketing are the best agents for protecting the consumer's
privacy"..."That's never happened"..."The public interest is whatever
the public is interested in watching"..."There is no law against
this"..."The technology is neutral."

    There are a number of assumptions underlying assertions
like these. If we are to use emergent technology to best serve human
needs in a democratic society, it is important we be on guard against
what can be called "tarnished silver-bullet techno-fallacies".
Following are a number of these information-age leaps in logic of which
we must be aware, and against which we must guard.

    1. The fallacy of assuming that only the guilty have to
fear the development of intrusive technology (or, if you've done nothing
wrong, you have nothing to hide).

    2. The fallacy of the free lunch or "painless dentistry"
in which it is assumed that information technology offers cost-free
solutions.

    3. The legalistic fallacy of assuming that the only
criterion that ought to guide the use of technology is whether or not
the law permits it.

    4. The fallacy of assuming that pragmatism and/or
efficiency should automatically overrule other values such as fairness,
equity, external costs imposed on third parties, and symbolic meaning.

    5. The fallacy of lowest common denominator morality, in
assuming that if the competition or others push moral limits, you are
justified in doing the same.

    6. The fallacy of assuming that personal information on
customers, clients, and cases possessed by an organization is a kind of
property, to be bought and sold just like office furniture or raw
materials.

    7. The fallacy of assuming that because our privacy
expectations are historically determined and relative, they must
necessarily become weaker as technology becomes more powerful.

    8. The fallacy of technical neutrality.  (George
Orwell's response to the assertion that technology was neutral--"so is
the jungle"--is applicable here).

    9. The fallacy of implied consent and free choice (For
example, some phone company officials claim that if you choose to make a
call you have consented to have your phone number released.  You thus
are encouraged to protect your privacy by not using the phone.  But
that's like saying if you breathe polluted air or drink contaminated
water, you consent to these).

    10. The fallacy of believing that because it is possible
to successfully skate on thin ice it is acceptable to do so.  We should
not have to wait for a disaster to occur before concluding that some
uses of information technology are simply too risky to be adopted.

    11. The fallacy of assuming that the means will never
determine the end.  There is a danger of starting with the technology
and asking what can it be used for, rather than starting with goals and
asking how can they best be achieved.

    12. The fallacy of perfect containment (or, technology
will always remain the solution rather than become the problem).

    13. The fallacy of assuming that if a critic questions
the means, he or she must also be against the ends.

    With respect to information gathering technology, we are
now in the twilight that Justice William O. Douglas wrote about when he
argued that the protection of our basic values is not self-executing,
and that "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly
unchanged.  And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of
change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of
the darkness."  One could as well argue that we are in a sunrise zone
and that we must be aware of change in the air in order to insure that
we all profit from the sunshine.  But for this to happen, the technology
must be bounded by increased public awareness, responsible corporate and
government behavior, and new laws and policies framed to ensure
individual freedoms and protect individual rights.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


    This essay is based in part on the author's article
"Technology and Privacy" that appeared in The World and I, September,
1990 issue, pp. 523-541.  Other recent publications by the author
touching these and related themes include "The Case of the Omniscient
Organization", Harvard Business Review, 90(March/April, 1990): 12-30;
Undercover: Police Surveillance in America, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988; and "Monitoring on the Job" (with S. Sherizen),
Technology Review, 89(November/December, 1986): 62-72.

FREEDOM AND PRIVACY IN ELECTRONIC LIBRARIES

                          Steve Cisler

                     Apple Computer Library
                     Cuppertino, California


    When you ask people what they like about the libraries
they use, the range of answers will include praise for the staff, the
various resources, and the attractiveness of the physical facilities.
Almost everyone has a sense of place about a particular library or
libraries in general.  For some, the library is a place to retreat and
relax; for others it is an important institution that binds their
community together; and for some it is an efficient center for the
dissemination of information and knowledge that meets the deadlines of
busy users.

    Whether you ask a librarian or library user, most of
these concepts are tied to a physical place. However, many people are
spending an increasing amount of time working, studying, and relaxing in
the realm of electronic communications.  When you begin exploring this
area (and many librarians are doing just that), it is hard to see the
edges of this virtual terrain.  It includes our telephones, televisions,
radios, the networks that connect our computers, pagers, and facsimile
machines, and ATM and credit card machines.  This realm has been called
Cyberspace, The Electronic Frontier, and The Homeland of the Information
Age.

    The library is a part of this emerging landscape.  What
are the qualities of our present libraries that will be valued in the
time when many more people will connect electronically to our services
rather than walk in to talk with a reference librarian and browse
through the books and magazines and CD's?  What will set the library
apart from other institutions that successfully take root in the
electronic arena?  One of the most important distinguishing
characteristics may prove to be a perception by electronic library users
that the staff is really trying to help guide them through the
intricacies of the information age.  If we can project the sense of
service we now have, support for the electronic librarian will grow.
While delivery of the requested information might continue to be our
primary indication that we have succeeded, we might do well to remember
that many people do not associate human beings with satisfactory
electronic transactions.  How many of us think warmly of the staff that
fills the ATM machines with money every day, or of the systems person
that tweaks the program that keeps your account straight?  Librarians
will remain intermediaries, but how prominent will we be to the average
user?  Another quality of what I'll call the library experience is the
trust that people place in the staff and the institution.  The
importance of privacy issues and society's increasing awareness of them
will make this a very important factor to consider in operating the
electronic library.

    In March 1991, I attended the First Conference on
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Burlingame, California.  Drawn
together was a strange assembly of computer hackers, libertarians,
librarians, law enforcement officials, network administrators, computer
consultants, writers, lawyers, public policy analysts, and employees of
the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI,
and the Secret Service.  It was a time to meet, to discuss crucial
issues, and to begin face-to-face discussion in confronting a variety of
problems.  Some of the discussion at the CFP Conference and in other
fora have explored social implications of technology that are likely to
reach new levels of relevance for libraries, too, as they become tied
into increasingly complex multi-purpose communications networks.  Some
of the more important of these include:

    1. First amendment rights;
    2. The practice of gathering, using, and selling personal
information;
    3. Monitoring of employees in the electronic workplace;
    4. Monitoring of citizens in Cyberspace;
    5. Security of personal information on networks.

FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS


    In Freedom, Technology, and the First Amendment,
Jonathan Emord traces the history of the government's stricter
curtailment of First Amendment protection for radio, television, and
cable broadcasters when compared with the more sacrosanct print media.
From early in the 20th Century, when the U.S. Navy sought to put the
entire wireless telegraphy industry under complete government
supervision, to Supreme Court decisions in 1940 that justified federal
controls over the broadcast media on the basis of spectrum scarcity,
these industries have not been afforded the same degree of freedom as
have print publishers.

    The early regulations of the Federal Radio Commission
and the more powerful Federal Communications Commission came about
partly from broadcasters asking the government to limit the number of
licenses, and partly from legislators and government officials trying to
legislate what constituted "public interest".  As Emord describes it:

The restrictions tempered the willingness of licensees to engage in
controversy, coerced them into offering certain kinds of
bureaucratically 'preferred' programming, and caused them to become
tools for the use of incumbent politicians and special interest groups
who desired to influence the nature of public debate.

    Even though libraries continually face one kind of
censorship battle or another, the restrictions placed on traditional
print media--and hence on traditional library services--have not been as
tight as they have been with respect to the radio, television, and cable
industries.  For libraries, what are the implications of these
disparities in the treatment of different media?  Libraries will be
hooked into a national network of electronic information sources which
eventually may even include entertainment on demand provided by radio
and television broadcasting companies.

    As various kinds of media are publicly accessible
through a single end-user source, it may become more difficult for
libraries to continue to enjoy as much freedom as they historically have
as handlers of print media.  The libraries without walls will open up
their collections, and what we provide access to generally, to scrutiny
by even more interest groups than we have known in the past.  We must be
prepared to confront the challenges of being part of a media-rich
information delivery network on which there may be more content
restrictions than we have been accustomed to.  What librarians do, and
what advocacy roles we assume, may help to define the extent to which
our users continue to view us as upholders of first amendment rights.


GATHERING, USING AND SELLING PERSONAL INFORMATION


    Recently, I served on a panel at a conference at
Stanford University hosted by the First Amendment Congress.  Most of the
people in attendance were from Stanford or from the radio, television,
and newspaper industries.  I was discussing the privacy of library
circulation records, and many in the audience had not even considered
the potential threats involved in not protecting that information.
However, in light of the case involving the disclosure of Judge Bork's
videotape rental records, most everyone there realized that personal
reading  and viewing habits are tenuously protected in the age of the
computer.  It was gratifying to be able to claim that librarians were
already on top of this issue and had been for some time.

    At the CFP conference John Baker of Equifax, the company
that supplied Lotus with data for its direct mail product, Lotus
Marketplace, discussed attitudes toward privacy by the American people
of whom 25% can be called Privacy Fundamentalists, 58% Privacy
Pragmatists,  and 17% of whom don't care about the issues.  The Privacy
Fundamentalists are the ones with unlisted numbers; they use personal
name variations to track the re-use of magazine subscription
information; they don't give out their Social Security number to anyone
but the IRS and their banks.  It is this group that will probably help
shape the way businesses, government agencies, and even non-profits
treat personal information gathered on individuals.

    The Bureau of the Census encounters a great deal of
resistance from libertarians, minority groups, and other segments of
America who distrust parts (or all) of the federal government.  Various
three-letter government agencies (IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, DOD) have mission
statements that allow them to spend huge sums on automated systems to
store, link, and search for patterns in vast files of personal
information about Americans and people living in America.  But
government agencies are not the only ones collecting large amounts of
personal information.  In fact, we should probably be even more
concerned about the private sector, and especially credit firms such as
TRW and Equifax.  It is commerce that will always want more information
about its customers or potential customers.  And it is also in the free
market where the existence of such information becomes a prized economic
commodity in itself.  A lot of the unexpected, often unwanted, mail and
telemarketing calls you receive originate in a computerized mailing list
bought from someone you sometime did business with.

    Most niche market direct mail promoters will tell you
that the recipients want to get that catalog of biodegradable hiking
boots, or the announcements about the latest concerts, or that credit
card where part of the fee goes to some worthy cause.  Using the
profiles of estimated income and lifestyles, merged with the
subscription lists of hi-tone periodicals, a direct mailer can target a
group with the assurance that the return rate on responses will be much
better than the average mailing list.  Book and grocery chains are
offering membership cards to regular customers.  In return for a few
benefits, the stores learn about buying patterns of the customers and
for the geographical area in which the store is located.

    Some people, I'm sure, advocate the use of marketing
techniques for libraries like those described above, and I'm sure there
have been a number of mailing list experts who have worked with friends,
groups or movements to support the passage of some library bond measure.
In the quest for more funds and more support, there may be a strong
temptation to use some of these tools and perhaps even to change the
rules on how circulation records are used, in order to seek supporters
in the library community.  Before taking advantage of such marketing
techniques, however, librarians will no doubt need to reflect on the
practical implications and on some very basic philosophical issues about
using these types of personal data for purposes other than that for
which they were originally recorded.

    Librarians should also be aware of information gathered
in the library that could even potentially be collocated with other
databases through standard personal identification numbers.  Many
universities, for example, use the Social Security number (SSN) as a
common number for all student activities.  Unless it is a conscious
decision by the library management, the SSN should not be used for
access to the online library system or for checking out books.  As a
nation we have resisted the call for a national ID card, unlike many
countries in Europe.  But the use and abuse of the SSN makes it a piece
of information that can be used to link disparate databases in commerce
and in government.  In a CFP conference panel, Evan Hendricks of Privacy
Times recounted some abuses by government and industry involving
secretive matching of personal information across multiple databases
through matching on SSNs by TRW and the Social Security Administration.
Investigators found that in two databases of names (150,000 names in one
list and one million in the other) about 20% of the SSNs were
inaccurate!  Depending on one's perspective, this is either extremely
frightening or in some perverse way a ray of hope that, despite the
apparent simplicity of national scale surveillance, it has not yet
reached very efficient proportions.  Certainly we can do better than
having to settle for either of these.

    In many automated library systems, there are ways to
generate unique ID numbers.  Even though it may seem that none of the
data collected by libraries about their users will ever become a source
for cross-database matching, the use of non-SSN identifiers does provide
an extra safeguard.

    There is a growing controversy over the secondary use of
gathered information.  Some progressive organizations have a box on
registration and membership forms allowing the individual to opt in and
allow the personal information to be re-used by the organization or to
be re-sold to worthy causes, or to anyone at all.  Alan Westin, a
privacy expert and consultant for Equifax, predicts that by the year
2000  marketing databases will be consensual and that the participants
will be compensated for the use of their information. One positive step
that the library world could make is to ask the American Library
Association to add an "opt in" box on conference registration forms;
this would make it easy to prevent them from re-selling your name to
dozens of vendors and exhibitors, whose communications you may not want
in your mailbox.  At the time of this writing I had to scribble a
proviso on my application not to re-sell the information they collected
from me. Whether it works, I will know by the time you have this essay.

<note from author: The American Library Association did not
take my name from the conference mailing list as I requested.
Consequently, I received over 50 pieces of unsolicited mail.
-Steve Cisler>

MONITORING OF EMPLOYEES IN THE ELECTRONIC WORKPLACE


    If you have called 411, booked an airline ticket,
ordered a computer program via mail order, had a catalog keyed in by an
off-shore data conversion firm, or read a newspaper, you have come into
contact with someone who has been or is being electronically monitored
by their supervisors.  The devices available to eavesdrop, to monitor,
and to blatantly mold electronic workers' performance is well developed.
Operators are timed to see how fast they get you a requested phone
number or book a flight.  Data entry people have their keystrokes
counted, and some reporters have told horror stories of seeing a warning
screen pop up with the words "Your colleague in the next cube is working
faster than you."

    Librarians can envision how, in their places of work,
electronic surveillance could be used to monitor the productivity and
accuracy of staff performance.  At present, there seems to be fairly
little discussion of potential abuses of electronic monitoring of
employees in the library world, unless perhaps it is at a clerical
workers union gathering.


MONITORING OF CITIZENS IN CYBERSPACE


    There exists a large, anarchic computer
conferencing/bulletin board system that is known as Usenet. On an
average day more than 110,000 articles, totaling over 200 Mbytes, are
submitted from 11000 different Usenet sites. Within 24 hours all the
computers on the network have received these messages.  Usenet is
accessed mostly by Unix-based computers and workstations that reside in
an enormous variety of environments, including hobbyists' basements,
computer science departments, corporate MIS rooms, and government
agencies.

    Many of the administrators who keep this network running
voluntarily have a deep distrust of the intentions of the government,
especially of the agencies charged with surveillance of Americans and
foreign nationals here and abroad.  Some of the more paranoid believe
that powerful text processing engines are combing these messages 24
hours a day, flagging those where certain terms are used.  Consequently,
a number of users like to throw electronic monkey wrenches in this
alleged monitoring by including at the bottom of each message sensitive
terms like nuclear, terrorist, Bush, Communist, Tri-Lateral Commission,
CIA, etc., in an effort to slow down the surveillance mechanism they
suspect exists.  My own hunch is that it could exist but does not.

    At present there is an ongoing debate about the extent
to which the FBI monitors electronic bulletin board systems.  There is
evidence that the boards run by or for "phone phreaks" and "computer
crackers" receive very close attention from the law enforcement crowd.
But incidence of surveillance of more middle of the road boards is more
difficult to document.  The Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (CPSR) have filed Freedom of Information Act requests
that the FBI has ignored.  The CPSR may have to go to court to get
relevant records released, much as the library community did with the
Library Awareness Program.

    The integrated online systems in libraries have the
potential to monitor the circulation records of users. Through
transaction analysis, if combined with user-specific authorization
numbers to log on, libraries could even gather personal data about
searches in online catalogs.  Libraries have a good record in terms of
rejecting monitoring of library users.  Just as with some of the other
concepts discussed here, the future may require more vigilance than ever
before as libraries begin to plug into multi-purpose information
networks.

SECURITY OF PERSONAL INFORMATION ON THE NETWORKS


    One of the more interesting but arcane debates that is
spreading around Cyberspace is the need for encrypted information.  The
general consensus among those who talk about it (and the government
generally does not) is that while encryption schemes are necessary, the
government has set limits on how powerful an encryption scheme networks
can employ.  Some in government want to maintain their edge by
controlling the use of encryption programs by the public.

    Librarians should be aware of these developments because
with the greater connectivity among future networks will come a greater
need for security.  Libraries are generally relatively open places, in
an intellectual sense.  It will take some creative tactics in the
virtual library of the future to both maintain that atmosphere, and at
the same time to protect personal information from other users, from law
enforcement investigators, and from virus outbreaks or the introduction
of hostile worm programs.  Even the use of computer agents -- software
surrogates that travel around the network performing various functions
such as searching for material on a subject or sorting electronic mail
-- will demand a whole new code of ethics by librarians and network
administrators.  How much will one agent be able to communicate to
another agent, if both are looking for information about a patent or a
sensitive research issue?  How will the confidentiality of the
questioner be preserved?  And will this processing overhead slow the
network down to unacceptable speeds?


Conclusion


    This has been a rapid survey of several issues that I
have been following at conferences and through online sources.  Some of
this discussion will be found in technical journals, the popular press,
and even television.  The library community will have to figure where it
fits into these complex puzzles. Probably libraries will fit many
places, sometimes in opposition to some government agencies, to some
businesses, and even to some scholars.  I am sure this LITA President's
Program will provide a good forum for discussing some of the issues.

    An organization that is at the forefront of advocacy of
privacy rights in the electronic networking environment is the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, 155 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141,
[phone].  The EFF has given support to another active group, the
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Box 717, Palo Alto,
California 94302.  Members of these groups participate in Usenet
newsgroups such as comp.risks (risks of computers, automation, and
reliance on the technology); alt.privacy (an open forum to discuss
privacy issues); eff.org.talk (discussion group for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation); comp.admin.policy (new group to discuss e-mail
privacy, user access to networks, security).

    You may also contact the author electronically on The
WELL: <[e-mail]> or on the Internet <[e-mail]>.  The WELL
offers access to a number of electronic discussion groups on censorship,
information policy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and library
issues.  Phone [phone] for more information.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
ELECTRONIC INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

                        Gordon M. Conable

                  Monroe County Library
System
                        Monroe, Michigan


    The principles of intellectual freedom have been
codified over the last fifty years for libraries and librarians in "The
Library Bill of Rights" and its various interpretations by the American
Library Association.  These principles are based upon precepts of
American constitutional law, particularly the First Amendment.  The same
principles can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the United Nations equivalent of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

    These documents spell out the right of free expression,
including freedom of religion, assembly, association, speech, the press,
and the right to petition the government.  Both documents speak to the
rights of individuals and serve to limit the actions of government which
could curtail individual rights.

    New technologies have profound impact on many aspects of
human endeavor, and the electronic age is altering the way humans think,
write, gather, store, and disseminate information.  In the process,
opportunities and problems that were previously unanticipated rear their
heads and a temptation exists to assert that because of the
technological changes, the underlying legal principles and rights of
individuals have somehow been dramatically altered by the technologies.

    Libraries have often approached new technology with the
assumption that old paradigms may no longer apply.  To cite two common
examples: libraries that would never think of charging users to search
print indexes often charge users to access the same information if it
resides in an electronic database; and about a third of all public
libraries that have videotape in their circulating collections charge a
rental fee for those tapes, adopting a model common in the retail
sector.  Neither of these choices is inevitable.  While both appear to
be an outgrowth of the new technology, it might be more accurate to
describe them as a result of the marketing of the new technology.  The
database vendors operate on the basis of different economic assumptions
than the print publishers.  In the case of the print index, marketing
has always meant the sale of a physical object -- the set of printed
volumes -- which reflected a publication/production cost rather than a
per-use charge.  In the electronic version, no physical object is sold.
What is marketed is access and use rather than a physical object, and
access and use can be monitored, metered, and charged accordingly.
Hence, an economic model favors user charges.  Libraries, quite
naturally, have often found it both logical and easy to pass those
charges onto users.  In the case of video, it first entered the
marketplace primarily as a rental item, and many libraries found it
convenient to look to the retail model when attempting to determine how
to handle tapes.

    In many ways, libraries are institutions that have been
defined by the characteristics of the book.  It is clear, however, that
the justification for libraries, particularly publicly supported
libraries, is based on constitutional principles rather than on the
characteristics of any medium.  First Amendment principles, together
with the right to privacy, are the centerpieces from which librarians
must think about and deal with the issues surrounding electronic
information.  And those principles are broad enough and flexible enough
that they should not be determined by the technology involved.

    The issues that are being confronted anew in the context
of electronic media include, among others: copyright and the ownership
of intellectual property; the licensing of information or access to it;
the relationship between the original creator, the compiler, the
distributor, and the user; the question of what is public and what is
private.   But these issues are fundamentally political rather than
constitutional in their nature.  They are factors of private market
mechanisms as much as they are factors of constitutionally dictated
public policy.  As such, they are likely to be decided legislatively and
economically before they will be treated judicially.

    Herein lies much of the risk for libraries, librarians,
and advocates of the public right to know.  The lobbying and economic
resources available to the "information industry" in general and its
more visible advocates are substantially greater than those which
librarians and public interest organizations are able to bring to the
table.

    There is a right to free expression; there is statutory
access to at least some, and theoretically most, governmentally
generated information.  There is a long-established tradition for
publicly supported libraries to serve as a means of access to that
information.  There is a less clear mandate that information should be
available without charge or without cost recovery.  The issue is not
whether libraries should continue to make the information available
without charge -- ALA's policy positions, at least, make clear the
profession's commitment to do so.  Some library funding agencies are
less committed to fee-free service than librarians, however.  In an era
in which "privatization" of governmental services has growing support
both from politicians looking for easy means of cutting governmental
expenditures and from entrepreneurs who are looking for governmental
license to profit from publicly produced information goods, the
advocates of free access -- or fee-free library access -- may well be
facing an uphill battle.

    Against this background, it remains to be seen whether
information formerly made available to libraries from governmental
sources without charge will now be prohibitively priced; whether the
economic assumptions under which libraries operate will allow them to
acquire government and other information in electronic media at all or
at a cost that does not force them to abandon a non-metered approach to
service; and whether the "public good" of free library service will
survive the economics of electronics.

    The issue of privacy -- protection of information about
oneself from uncontrolled dissemination -- is another concern of major
proportion.  Much attention has been focussed -- and not with entirely
satisfactory resolution -- on the use of governmentally generated data
about individuals for purposes other than that for which it was
gathered.  Libraries have grappled with this issue directly in dealing
with patron confidentiality and library records.  Despite a general
commitment on the part of librarians to confidentiality, it is worth
noting that circulation systems are being sold by vendors at least
partly on the basis of their capabilities for record keeping which would
facilitate practices by librarians that would grossly violate patron
privacy.

    Private sector efforts to combine and market electronic
data about individual consumers are receiving increased attention.
Current technology accommodates extensive, sophisticated, and
potentially intrusive collection and dissemination of such personal
data.  During the first half of 1991, public attention has focussed on
such efforts as: the Lotus Development Corporation's attempt to market a
massive database of consumer information; a proposed scheme by
Blockbuster Video to market information about video rental preferences
of its customers by genre; and a company selling supermarket scanners
which compile item purchase data on all shoppers to aid advertising and
promotion schemes.  Publicity about these efforts has generated
significant public backlash, forced the cancellation or at least
slowdown of the development of some of these products and services, and
may even lead to legislative attempts to limit them.  The latter raises
interesting and conflicting questions about the constitutional rights of
the compilers of such data versus those about whom it is compiled.
Governmental restraint on publication of such data may, in fact,
implicate First Amendment rights to publish.

    One issue for librarians implied by this has to do with
questions of making databases of this nature available to their users.
Many public libraries, for example, have agonized about the ethical
issues of making criss-cross directory information available.  If the
information is available, a choice by the library to withhold it may be
a form of censorship and may compromise intellectual freedom principles.
How many libraries, however, have attempted to add credit rating
databases to their business libraries?  Retailers may have on-line
access to such data; why not libraries?  And supposing this and much
greater amounts of similar data were available on compact disc -- should
it be purchased and made available?  If there is a right to privacy in
the Constitution, could the dissemination of certain information by a
publicly supported library involve a constitutionally implicated
invasion of privacy when private sector dissemination of the same
information might not?  The questions ahead of us will be knotty and
essential.

    Finally, it is worth noting that among the significant
forces confronting these issues are users who are pushing the
capabilities of electronic technology to explore just what is really
possible in this new information environment.  Economic, legal, and
technological controls are only enforceable to the level that they are
practical.  This is a period of rapid technological development and no
little ferment.  It will take awhile to understand the issues, let alone
solve them.

    Laurence H. Tribe recently addressed these issues in
detail in a paper entitled "The Constitution in Cyberspace: Law and
Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier," delivered as the keynote
address to the First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy on March
26, 1991.  Tribe concluded his remarks by proposing a Twenty-seventh
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to read as follows:

"This Constitution's protections for the freedoms of speech,
press, petition, and assembly, and its protections against unreasonable
searches and seizures and the deprivation of life, liberty, or property
without due process of law, shall be construed as fully applicable
without regard to the technological method or medium through which
information content is generated, stored, altered, transmitted, or
controlled."

    Professor Tribe's underlying construct should equally be
applied to the manner in which libraries and librarians approach the
myriad of intellectual freedom issues facing them as they develop means
of integrating these new technologies into their mission and operations.

                  THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW
                               AND
                ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT INFORMATION

                          Nancy Kranich

                  New York University Libraries
                       New York, New York


    James Madison once wrote that "Knowledge will forever
govern ignorance and that people who mean to be their own governors must
arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.  A popular
government without popular information or means of acquiring it is but a
prologue to a farce or tragedy or perhaps both."

    As information professionals, librarians hail the words
of James Madison and recognize the importance of his message every day.
Whether or not the nation's forefathers explicitly recognized the
importance of information to a democratic society and the public's right
to know through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, librarians
believe in that right and make every attempt to reinforce it.  But they
have also come to realize that, more and more, those rights,
particularly First Amendment rights, must be carefully protected,
defended and strengthened.

    Over the past decade the public's right to information
by and about the United States government has eroded.  The government
has whittled away at information access under the guise of the Paperwork
Reduction Act, national security, export controls, budget cuts,
automation and even privacy.  Eliminated were one quarter of the
documents previously published, including many of the items formerly
distributed through the depository library system.

    A longstanding partnership between libraries and the
federal  government has assured the nation's citizens ready and equal
access to government information.  Through the Depository Library
Program which was launched in the 19th century, nearly 1400 libraries
located in every Congressional district have served as host institutions
for distributing government information.  In return for receiving nearly
20 million free copies of some 40,000 government publications annually,
depository libraries house, organize and assist with no-fee use of the
government's information resources.  At least 167,000 citizens make use
of these depositories each week.

    More than 7,500 electronic databases are disseminated
each year by civilian agencies of the federal government.  As agencies
make increasing use of electronic formats, the public can benefit if
government databases are disseminated through libraries, particularly
depository libraries.  A project to test the feasibility of depository
library distribution of five electronic databases on such topics as the
environment, energy, census, trade, and economics was launched in late
1988.  While depositories are the likely loci for this essential
information, a forthcoming evaluation of the project should shed more
light on the actual benefits of this mode of dissemination.

    Access to electronic government information should
promise all that came with print products and more, and  will present
new opportunities along with new challenges.  No one recognizes these
challenges better than librarians.  Public access is fragile, diminished
by any one of many factors that prevent the utilization of important
information.  At the very least in this age of electronic databases and
networks, government information must be:

    ■ developed in consultation with the general public to
determine the most appropriate informationand format for dissemination;

    ■ published regularly, on a continuous basis;

    ■ standardized so that coordination efforts can be
facilitated government-wide, encouragingcompatibility, lowering overall
costs, and reducing user confusion;

    ■ protected from censorship, with integrity,
reliability, accuracy, and validity ensured;

     ■ cumulated, archived and preserved by agencies charged
with the long-term retention of records.


Beyond these basic production and maintenance requirements are
additional principles that should underlie the distribution of
government information.  Chief among these are that government
information must be:

    ■ disseminated in whatever format is most appropriate, most cost
effective, most timely, and mostuseful for government agencies,
libraries, and the general public;

    ■ distributed widely through broad-based government
sales programs and no-fee access throughdepository libraries located in
every Congressional district;

    ■ priced for sale at no more than the marginal cost of
dissemination;

    ■ redistributed without limitation, as long as equal,
ready and equitable access is guaranteed;

    ■ accessible even if market potential is very limited.
While users may be few, importance is oftenconsiderable.

        And finally, if the public is to utilize this
valuable data effectively, government information must be:

    ■ enhanced by the availability of menus, indexes, and
documentation so that users can retrieve,process and comprehend
essential government information products and services;

    ■ controlled bibliographically through centralized
national databases and networks.  If citizens areto use information in
electronic format, they must be able to identify it through
widelydisseminated, standardized, comprehensive, up-to-date
bibliographic tools;

    ■ safeguarded so that privacy rights of individuals
requesting, using, or listed ingovernment records are guaranteed;

    ■ interpreted and/or explained for users on request by
expert agency personnel and/or otherwell-informed specialists;

    ■ protected by no copyright restrictions so that
materials can remain in the public domainand available for repackaging
by a diversity of sources.


    Government information is of inestimable value to the American
public.  Assuring the public's right to this information requires a
democratic caretaker no smaller than the government itself.  No other
entity can assume the primary responsibility for collecting, organizing,
and disseminating the public's information assets, nor guarantee the
public's equal rights to use and repackage it.  The marketplace is
simply too erratic and whimsical to fulfill this obligation.  Without
the government playing a primary role, the gap between information haves
and have nots will only widen.  To preserve a just and democratic
society in an information age, the government must affirm its obligation
to ensure the flow of information, regardless of format, to the public.
Neither national security, budget constraints, automation, political
expediency, or reduction of paperwork burden are an excuse for the
government to abrogate its responsibility to inform the citizens of its
activities.  An open government is essential and vital to a democracy.

    Librarians and libraries have a unique role to play in
assuring equal and ready public access to government information.  They
are in almost every community.  Most are non-profit. They have a wide
array of supporting materials in all kinds of formats.  As
professionals, librarians are trained to utilize this information and
are equipped to provide access to a variety of formats.  All of these
factors position libraries and librarians favorably.  But unless
librarians make the right to know happen by actively advocating the
rights of users, it simply will never be a reality.

    No other group has such a broad understanding of and
commitment to public access as librarians.  Without the vigilance and
leadership of librarians working together with other organizations
interested in promoting the public's right to know, access to government
information will deteriorate even further.  At risk is far more than a
record of the government's activities and an enlightened electorate.  At
risk is the very survival of the democratic system that safeguards our
cherished freedoms and rights, so carefully protected by James Madison
and others who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            "POWERSHIFT" AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

                        Sharon J. Rogers

                  George Washington University
                        Washington, D.C.


    Since computers and electronic databases were first
introduced into libraries more than a quarter century ago, questions
about who should have access and how that access should be financed have
been debated extensively.  As we enter an era in which more and more
individuals will work and communicate electronically, we must continue
to revisit these questions and to focus on additional issues pertaining
to intellectual property, privacy, and freedom of expression in the
electronic environment.  In order to examine issues like these as they
apply specifically to the conduct of scholarly research in the 1990s, it
will be important to appreciate the rapidly changing context in which
that work is being carried out and disseminated.  This paper examines
some of the characteristics of that changing context.

    In Powershift, Alvin Toffler gallops through the barrage
of daily information to emerge with a model of power that, he argues, is
transforming the very nature of power. For librarians and academics,
scholarly communication is the arena for our experience of "powershift."

    Scholarly communication patterns are beginning to
display a rich array of print and electronic experimentation.  We are
beginning to decipher the forces and patterns that are shaping a
transformational breakup of the world of scholarly communication as we
have known it.  Best of all, we can imagine the shape of new sets of
relationships that will characterize the scholarly communication world
of the 21st century.  One version of "How Scholarly Communication Should
Work in the 21st Century," posits a centralized, non-profit network on
which scholars would "publish" articles:

        Scholars in all disciplines could "publish"
their articles on the Scholarly Communication System, an electronic
network on which they could also read other publications.  As a scholar
completed an article or paper, it would be sent electronically to the
system, where it would be assigned a category and cross-referenced to
other relevant categories.  Given the increasingly interdisciplinary
nature of much scholarly work, the capacity to alert readers in one
subject area to articles published in other areas could help build
important links among disciplines.

    The National Research and Education Network (NREN) can
be expected to create a technological infrastructure that will allow the
realization of this vision by harnessing high-performance computers and
high speed, high capacity networks.  The technology of advanced
networking is visible and available.  Even in areas such as graphics
storage and transmission, where only candidate solutions are available,
few observers predict that these difficulties will remain as barriers to
eventual implementation and success.  NREN is the event around which the
forces and patterns of scholarly communication are coalescing as
powershifts become apparent.  The remainder of this essay will explore
some of these powershifts.

    A marketplace powershift for the primary consumers of
scholarly communication is shaped by the scholars themselves.  Scholars'
behaviors, seeking articles--not the journals they are packaged
in--demonstrate that the journal as the vehicle for scholarly
communication is becoming obsolete.  Scholars' behaviors again--from the
cold fusion debacle to recent efforts to convey breakthrough medical
information to the active exchange, even archiving of preprints--confirm
that the speed of scholarly communication requirements surpasses the
current capabilities of the print system.  The marketplace powershift is
also evident as the "just in time" document delivery becomes an expected
service in academia, encouraged by research libraries defeated by
repeated annual dramatic serial price increases.


    A second powershift relating to scholarly communication
is philosophical:  In Harlan Cleveland's terms, "How Can `Intellectual
Property` be `Protected`?. . . it's the wrong verb about the wrong
noun." The struggle to apply current copyright law to new electronic
technologies--and the failures that result--illustrate the validity of
Cleveland's concerns.  How can the concept of "fair use" be applied to
new technologies?  How does one incorporate information in electronic
formats into the system of interlibrary loan that has sustained
generations of scholars?

    The U.S. Congress' Office of Technology Assessment has
boldly answered these questions by recommending that Congress start from
scratch in redefining intellectual property issues.  Many visions of the
future electronic publishing world suggest that "pay for use" is the
only viable alternative in the new environment of digital technologies
where there are active incentives for copying.  Even the concept of
"authorship", a mainstay of copyright law, disappears in a "dynamic
digital medium."

    An institutional powershift for publishers is a third
consideration.  The publishers' traditional gate-keeping function is
bypassed as electronic bulletin boards and other unedited forms of
electronic communication burgeon.  Rising prices which put books and
journals beyond the capacity of research institutions to own are
creating challenges to the conventional practice of asking authors of
scholarly articles to give up ownership of copyright.  The copyright
assignment process effectively conveys work created, often at public
expense, into private hands.  Many publishers use electronic techniques
to create printed products but have proved extremely cautious in making
the electronic version an end-product.

    The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) has
working groups actively engaged in creating opportunities for scholarly
publishing on NREN.  Anne Okerson, Association of Research Libraries,
suggests five strategies for moving toward a different publishing
environment:

    *     Formulate a statement of principles, including a
commitment to availability, affordability, directories, and friendly
access.

    *    Take an active role in deliberations about
privatization and commercialization of the network.

    *    Formulate guidelines on intellectual property
and economic issues.

    *    Develop ownership and copyright policies.

    *    Review academic incentives to give needed
recognition to electronic publication.

    An organizational powershift is taking place for
librarians as the applications of technology to scholarly communication
change the roles that they play.  For example, Richard E. Lucier adds a
role to the librarian repertoire, calling it "knowledge management."
"Knowledge management is a mutual responsibility for scientific and
scholarly communication, a responsibility shared by scholars,
scientists, and research librarians." Librarians as knowledge managers
begin their work with scientists and scholars in the initial point of
creation and follow this through with them to the application stage,
thereby entering the scholarly communication process much earlier than
the more conventional "dissemination and use" stage.  From work at Johns
Hopkins also comes the concept of a "collaboratory . . . a combination
of technology, tools and infrastructure that allows scientists to work
with remote facilities and with each other as if they were co-located
and effectively interfaced."  The prototype work at Johns Hopkins in
human genetics and internal medicine has produced new information
products, dynamic in the literal sense of growing daily through the
collaborative work of all participants in the scholarly communication
process.

    In summary, there is right now a great deal of shifting
and reorganizing occurring in the world of scholarly communication.
There will be challenges ahead in the form of intellectual property
issues, in identifying how we enhance interaction between librarians and
scholars, in grappling with questions about equity of access to the
processes and systems that define scholarly research and exchange, and
in ensuring protection of basic individual freedoms and rights in a
networked environment.  The transformation has begun, and it is likely
that in dealing with such issues over the next several years, we will
have to accept the challenge of aiming at a moving target.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
          A BILL OF RIGHTS FOR AN ELECTRONIC SOCIETY:
                  A PUBLIC LIBRARY PERSPECTIVE

                         Susan Harrison

                  The New York Public Library
                       New York, New York


    When John Jacob Astor bequeathed $400,000 to the City of
New York in 1839, his intention was to create a "Public Library for
general use, free of expense to persons resorting  thereto."1  Only
$75,000 of the bequest was to be used for a building and the remaining
$325,000 was to be spent on books.  This was a remarkable development in
the history of libraries and strengthened the concept of the public
library as a place where individuals could obtain free access to books
and, by extension, to information.   University libraries were well
established in New York, as were private subscription libraries operated
by professional and mercantile groups. Ordinary people who were not
associated with a learned or professional organization, however, had
limited access to information that would help them with their trades,
with basic education, and with opportunities for self improvement.
Public libraries such as the Astor Library and other similarly endowed
and publicly funded libraries became a major source of information for
new immigrants who learned English, for mercantile and industrial
workers who used library resources to learn trades, for writers and
independent scholars, and for millions of Americans who gained basic
literacy skills and who acquired new knowledge after hours by studying
in public reading rooms.  Public libraries were and continue to be an
important source of information on political and social issues and a
means to assure an informed voting public.

    The Astor Library, with its 80,000 volumes, provided
information that no individual could afford to collect.  Today, the role
of public libraries has been extended to include assistance with
computer literacy and to provide information regardless of the medium in
which it is presented.  Libraries provide information in a variety of
optical, micrographic, and video formats, in addition to data acquired
from online data bases and electronic networks.  Many public libraries
have also developed their own data bases of community services,
government officials, local history, and local indexes, to supplement
information from commercial sources.  The explosion of information and
the profusion of expensive formats, expensive reading devices, and
costly telecommunications services are as difficult today for
individuals to provide for themselves as books were to library users of
the 19th century.  The cost and number of modern information services
also tax the ability of libraries to fulfill their mandate to provide a
broad spectrum of information to their public.  Information to be
collected includes not only published works, but unpublished papers,
data files, research in progress, and online indexes, all in vast
quantities and from myriad sources.  An increasing quantity of
information will be derived exclusively from online data bases and
networked sources, and public libraries must be aggressive in their
efforts to offer these resources to their users.

    In an environment where there will be increasing
dependence on electronic data and increasing diversification of the
sources of data, public libraries are wrestling with issues that will
determine their role in a society where information assumes still
greater importance and where a growing number of private sector
organizations threaten to usurp the public library's place as an
information provider.  Some key issues facing public libraries in the
1990s and into the 21st century are discussed below.


FREEDOM OF ACCESS TO INFORMATION BY ALL POPULATIONS


    In Powershift,2 Alvin Toffler predicts an age where
there is universal access by the population to computers, information
technology, and advanced media.  The new environment will have a
sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure which will become as
familiar to people as our present highway and railroad systems.  Toffler
foresees a new generation where access to information will play an
increasing part in people's acquisition of power, income, and success.
Elements of the network he describes are in place today and they are now
used by limited numbers of people who have access to appropriate
equipment and networks through academic institutions, government
agencies, and other employers.

    In a study conducted in 1990 by Louis Harris and
Associates, Using the Public Library in the Computer Age,3  the
surveyors found that public use of library reference materials had
increased 26% over a previous study in 1978  and that people of diverse
ages, income levels, education, and ethnic backgrounds have an awareness
of current technology and its critical role in meeting their information
needs.  Two thirds of the people surveyed indicated they would be
interested in using  home computers to access their public libraries in
order to locate information.  The study concludes that the public
library is in a critical position to empower users in the information
age and that libraries are best able to assure access to information
expressing all viewpoints by the broadest spectrum of users.

    Access to information has also traditionally been
defined for users of public libraries in terms of the distribution of
facilities geographically along with hours of operation.  Until now,
readers were required to visit the library site or, at best, telephone
the facility when information was needed.  As systems and networks are
introduced, many have been offered as dial-in services for users who
have PCs and modems, thus extending hours of service and overall access
beyond the traditional patterns.  Some forecasters see the evolution of
automated library outlets, like automatic teller machines, which will be
capable of dispensing on-demand books, media, printouts, and data on
terminal screens.

    Public libraries must play an important role in this
environment by providing free access to data for all populations and by
working aggressively to assure that this access is protected.  Libraries
will be under increasing financial pressure to provide a daunting array
of information service from a diminished economic base.  Since only a
few traditional services and print sources will be replaced immediately
by the new technology, it will be the challenge of public libraries to
develop cost-effective means to access and deliver information and to
develop new sources of funding to carry on this critical work.


VALUE-ADDED SERVICES AND INTERFACES


    In providing access to electronic data and networked
systems, public libraries must work to make these resources reasonably
easy to use.  Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classifications and
the descriptive arrangement of catalog cards and printed indexes
represent the best efforts of generations of librarians to make
quantities of information accessible in a logical and consistent manner.
It is the role of libraries and librarians, in cooperation with systems
vendors, to see that their electronic systems and services offer
consistent, natural, and straightforward search strategies and, through
the development of telecommunications standards and adoption of standard
user interfaces, to assure that instructions and terminal displays are
clear and easy to use.  This is particularly important in the current
network environment where users of the INTERNET can search hundreds of
data bases in far flung research installations and academic institutions
through hundreds of telecommunications services.  Searching conventions,
workstation commands, and data arrangement characteristics of these
databases vary widely from one to another, making general access
difficult for all but the most experienced searcher.  This wealth of
information will be lost to the general users served by public libraries
without professional mediation or improved standard user interfaces.


COMPUTER LITERACY TRAINING


    Among the diverse populations served, public libraries
are currently assisting the poorest of the "information poor" who lack
basic literacy skills, with tutoring, classes, and specially designed
reading materials.  It is estimated that there are 23 million people in
the U.S. who read below the 5th grade level and 24 million families are
classified as living below the poverty level who can also be helped by
public libraries.

    Although some electronic systems and networks are
designed so as not to require extensive technical training for general
use, people will need to acquire some computer literacy and a
familiarity with computer workstations.  Education and support for use
of online information systems and networks is appropriately offered in
public libraries for those who have not acquired these skills elsewhere.
In the short term, librarians will need to assist users with equipment,
formulation of searches, and overall strategy to a variety of disparate
sources.  Libraries must also develop programs to assist users who
receive too much information, who are overwhelmed with a wealth of data.
Part of library training involves tailoring searches and distilling
large amounts of data into usable relevant portions.


PRIVACY OF PATRON RECORDS


    In the course of developing automated systems to improve
internal operations and online catalog workstation features, libraries
have amassed data bases which include detailed personal information
about the borrowing habits of large segments of their populations.
Circulation files include patron addresses, statistical information,
some of which may be personal; usage statistics; and data on current
reading.  Some public access catalogs also permit users to build and
store, for a time, personal bibliographies or reading histories.  Most
states now have legislation protecting the privacy of library users
while retaining the right of libraries to maintain necessary circulation
files for the recovery of borrowed materials.

    It is essential that libraries appreciate their mandate
to protect the privacy of their patrons.  This can be achieved by
collecting minimal patron data and more importantly, by purging all
borrowing history when materials have been returned.  Staff must be
warned that they are not to give out borrower information without a
subpoena and libraries should exercise discretion in their production of
overdue reminders and other patron notifications so that personal and
delinquency information is not visible on data mailers or postcards.
Recent experience with the FBI "Library Awareness" program should remind
libraries that government and police agencies continue to be interested
in people's reading habits and that is the role of public libraries to
protect users from unwarranted snooping.

    These are some of the issues relating to the challenges
that lie ahead for public libraries in an electronic age, where
information is a valuable resource for personal and public advancement.
In a highly automated information-dependent society where universal
access to computers and telecommunications networks is envisioned,
public libraries, in the tradition of their 19th-century roots, must
continue to play an important role in supplying information needs of
citizens.  Public libraries are the appropriate agency to preserve
access to information by all users regardless of their financial
resources.  Public libraries will need to incorporate increasingly
sophisticated electronic means to deliver the broadest array of
information, they must participate in efforts to improve user
interfaces, and they must also protect the privacy of users whose
reading and borrower patterns are so easily monitored and analyzed
electronically.  Public libraries need to be part of planning for
systems and telecommunications initiatives like National Research and
Education Network (NREN), and to position themselves as a critical
element in a more highly automated information age.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


1. Dain, Phyllis. The New York Public Library: A History of Its Founding
and Early Years. New York: The NewYork Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations, 1972, (ISBN 0-87104-136-6), p. 4.

2. Toffler, Alvin. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the
Edge of the 21st Century. NewYork: Bantam, 1990, (ISBN: 0-553-05776-6).

3. Westin, Alan F. and Anne L. Finger. Using the Public Library in the
Computer Age: Present Patterns,Future Possibilities, A National Public
Opinion Survey Report by the Reference Point Foundation,in Cooperation
with the American Library Association.  Chicago: American Library
Association, 1991.
INFORMATION FOR ALL PEOPLE: THE ROLE OF LOCAL AND STATELIBRARIES IN
OVERCOMING GEOGRAPHICAL BARRIERS TO INFORMATION

                        Howard F. McGinn

                  North Carolina State Library
                     Raleigh, North Carolina



    Remote, unknown, unexplored lands protected by natural
barriers have intrigued humankind since the initial emergence of homo
sapiens from the primeval ooze.  From the wanderings of prehistoric
tribes in search of food, arable land, safety, and rich pastures, to the
wanderings of the Spanish conquistadors in search of gold, the fountain
of youth and converts for their earthly kingdom of God, to Lewis and
Clark, human beings have endured extreme hardship, suffering, and death
in their quests for survival, material riches, fame, and spiritual
enlightenment.  They have traversed high mountain ranges, enormous
rivers, and thousands of miles of ocean to reach "promised lands."

    The wandering continues unabated in the modern age.
While some people have climbed the mountains, bridged the major rivers,
and completed the tunnel beneath the English Channel, others continue to
explore the near space of outer space around the earth.  Hollywood has
contrived to cast a romantic glow on remoteness.  Gene Kelly danced his
way through the Scottish mists to happiness in Brigadoon.  Ronald
Coleman found eternal youth in Shangri-La.  Richard Dreyfuss is
somewhere in the universe after his Close Encounter of the Third Kind.

    But while escapism and adventure have been lures to an
existence in remote areas, the most dominating reason for the conquest
of geographic barriers has been economic.  The ultimate prize sought by
the early explorers of the Americas was gold and furs, not souls.  The
primary goals sought by Lewis and Clarke were the expansion of the
United States and an audit of the lands of the newly acquired Louisiana
Purchase.  The hoped for result of the tunnel beneath the English
Channel is increased trade between Great Britain and the other nations
of the European Economic Community.  But perhaps the most radical yet
far reaching manifestation of this search for the unknown combined the
concepts of economic wealth with the creation of a new world order.
This philosophy rested in the writings of the 18th Century French
philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy, the Compte de Saint Simon. "It was
he who wrote 'From each according to his ability, to each according to
his work.'" And as David McCullough writes in The Path Between The Seas:
The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870 - 1914: "Mainly the good society
was to be attained through ennobling, regenerative, work.  The world was
to be saved -- from poverty, from war -- through the immense public
improvements, networks of highways, railroads, and two great ship canals
through the Isthmus of Suez and the Isthmus of Panama." The highways
were built, the railroads crossed the continents, the canals mated the
seas.  In their wake came immense power and wealth for a few and extreme
poverty for many.  In their construction came mass exploitation of
native-born and immigrant peoples and the creation of fortunes that
would become the cornerstone of American philanthropy.  In their
completion came the last years of the dominance of the British Empire
and its eventual replacement by  America.  And in the end of this era
came the small towns in the prairies that built the railroads and helped
create middle class America, and the coal mining towns of Appalachia
that fueled the machines of these colossal projects and helped create a
permanent "third world" America.

    Here is where the irony begins, in these prairie towns
that are now nearing extinction, in these coal towns that are locked in
permanent poverty.  The railroads, canals, and highways their citizens
built in order to overcome geographic barriers so that products might be
delivered from remote areas to urban market



places have declined, victims of obsolescence, neglect, and the advance
of technology.  Yet the towns and their people have the potential for a
future not overwhelmed by poverty because of the emergence of a global
economy based on the rapid transfer of electronic information over data
telecommunications systems that transcend all physical barriers so
effortlessly that geographical barriers have become meaningless.  And
the key outlet in both remote and urban areas for the distribution of
these electronic raw materials and products is another ancient
institution that is flirting with irrelevancy, the library.  What role
can the public library, or for that matter, any library play in this new
economy?  What is the role of state government, especially the state
library agency, in assuring that equal access to information is made
available to all private and corporate citizens in all geographic areas
of a state, especially states with significant geographical barriers?
Let me suggest answers to these questions.  I'll begin with the role of
the local library.


LOCAL LIBRARIES: THE INFORMATION PUBLIC UTILITY


    Many libraries and their directors feel that they are
immune to change, that they can defy the Darwinian evolutionary process
by closing their eyes tightly, increasing the warm fuzzy feeling that
they believe their communities expect of the library, and hoping the
world will just go away and leave them alone.  Funding, of course,
should stay, increase and multiply.  This resistance to change by these
librarians is usually based on a personal reluctance or inability to
compete aggressively in the global, information-based economy and in the
belief in the mystique of the book, a mystique that postulates that all
knowledge that is important is recorded on paper.  They are missing a
future that offers unlimited power and influence to the librarian and
the institution of the library because they refuse or are unable to
grasp the fact that the library, by controlling access to information,
can become the community's "information public utility", the source of
the raw electronic information that the community will need in order for
its businesses and citizens to operate and prosper in the new economy.

    The role of the local library as the community's
information public utility is possible because any size library, in any
geographical area of a state can become the information power source for
a town.  The experience of the State Library of North Carolina's North
Carolina Information Network is that rural libraries, in particular, can
significantly enhance their image and the investment their communities
make in the information assets of the library by becoming the purveyors
of the vital electronic information the town requires to function and
compete.  These libraries continue to circulate books, develop programs
for children and young adults, and do all of the things that have come
to be regarded as traditional.  What they have also done is evolve into
an essential component of the community's economic development program
by helping people and companies make money and create jobs through the
delivery of electronic information.  They have become relevant once
again.


STATE LIBRARY AGENCIES: THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE


    In order for this metamorphosis to take place in the
local library, the aggressive cooperation of the state library is
essential.  In most states only the state library has the positional or
political placement in government to develop services that will serve
all areas of the state.  A borrowed phrase from John Le Carre defines
the role of the state library very poetically: the state library must
become "the cool-headed broker between the necessity and the far
vision." In order to develop the information networks needed by
communities in all parts of the state, three roles are most important
for the state library to play: coordinator, product developer, enforcer.




Coordinator


    The role of coordinator is crucial because contractual
arrangements with commercial information vendors and federal, state and
local government agencies are needed to serve vast geographic areas.
The key element in creating universal service is access to an
up-to-date, high speed data telecommunications network that reaches all
areas of the state.  As the National Research and Education Network
(NREN) develops, this access will become even more crucial since the
state level network will probably function as the local network
component of the NREN.  The data telecommunications networks in the
states are most often operated by a state telecommunications agency or
by the state's public university system.  Some states may even have more
than one system.  The state library, in its role as coordinator, must
make contractual agreements with the operators of these networks if the
entire state is to be served.  In North Carolina, for example, the State
Library signed an interagency agreement with the University of North
Carolina Educational Computing Service to provide access to the
University's X.25 packet network to public and private academic
libraries across a state that includes barrier islands in the Gulf
Stream and the highest mountains east of the Mississippi River.  The
University had already constructed a packet network that had established
nodes in each of its sixteen campuses, each of the state's fifty-eight
community colleges, the State Library, regional health science
libraries, and several private academic institutions such as Duke
University and Davidson College.  The State Library has provided the
funding to install the equipment at thirty of these nodes that permits a
local library to dial a local telephone number to access the
University's packet network.  Because of the  geographic distribution of
the institutions and their packet nodes, even the most remote mountain
community has inexpensive local access to the statewide network and
eventually to NREN.


Product Developer


    The role of product developer combines the role of
coordinator with the functions of a publisher.  Electronically stored
information proliferates in state capitals.  State libraries must gain
access to these public data files and make them available over the
state's network in a form that is usable by local librarians and
citizens.  The North Carolina Information Network distributes, for
example, in database format, listings of all contracts for goods and
services and all highway and non-highway construction projects being put
out for bid by state government.  For the first time businesses in towns
across the state can bid on 99% of the state contracts.  Business and
tax revenue now flow into remote, poor counties.  This program was
developed by the State Library and the state's Office of Purchase and
Contract.  A similar cooperative program with the Department of
Administration and the state's Personnel Office lists, electronically,
all job openings in state government once a week.  The effects of
geography disappear.


Enforcer


    The role of enforcer is more difficult to define and
more laden with political problems, yet it is essential if the
electronic information infrastructure is to succeed.  State library
policies must be designed to force local libraries to participate in
these networks and offer electronic information programs to their
communities.  Using North Carolina once again as an example, all
libraries in the state will be required to use OCLC for interlibrary
loan by December 31, 1991.  The State Library had offered a toll free
telephone ILL and reference service for over twenty years, but the
success of the Information Network's OCLC group access program made the
ILL function of the traditional service obsolete.  The toll free service
has been converted into a comprehensive statewide reference service.


    Geographical barriers are no longer an excuse for the
existence of material poverty or poverty of the mind.  Libraries, if
they are willing, can help lift their communities out of the third
world.  If they are not willing, they run the risk of extinction because
they will become irrelevant and die from lack of funding.  Cost cannot
be used as a reason for non-participation by a library.  The notion that
access to and use of electronic information systems is expensive is a
myth.  The technical and equipment investment in the development of
these networks, though, is expensive.  But if the state library can
develop cooperative programs with state agencies that have already
invested in electronic delivery systems, then the public's investment in
these systems can be leveraged to serve all the people of the state.
Shangri-La and Brigadoon are possible to reach if the librarian, like
the explorer and dreamer, is willing to take risks, explore, and dream.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

     INFORMATION ACCESS AND AN ELECTRONIC BILL OF RIGHTS:
                     A  SCHOOL  PERSPECTIVE

                       Stephen L. Matthews

                  Audrey Bruce Currier Library
                         Foxcroft School
                      Middleburg, Virginia



    Electronic media is not new to the school environment,
with visual and audio formats having played an important role in basic
education since the late 1950's.  School librarians became school
library media specialists, not to irritate the rest of the profession,
but to better describe the expanded role of non-print in the
library/information program of schools.  Electronic formats have not
only been incorporated into the collections of school libraries, but
have facilitated the production and design of instructional programming
and the storing of this in-house information for the school and local
community as a whole.  With the publication of Information Power in
1988, the library media profession produced a proactive blueprint for a
three-prong professional role encompassing traditional storage and
retrieval tasks, teaching, and instructional design/production
responsibilities.

    Our schools are public tools.  They socialize and
prepare students for life in American society, while they grapple with
values and teach skills.  Few students are finished and ready for the
workplace when they graduate from high school.  As Americans, we
continue to delude ourselves that graduation from high school provides
closure to basic learning and readiness for an increasingly technical
and global society.  One could argue that even the recipients of
graduate professional degrees are merely prepared to apply their theory
and lab work in the "school of actual endeavor."  The primary
responsibility of schools is to  dispose students toward an openness to
inquiry and provide them with the wherewithal to take responsibility for
their own learning.  Within this context, the ability to know what
information is needed and how and where to find it should be one of the
most basic goals of elementary and secondary education.

    Yet, what determines the character of information that
students receive in the process of their formal education?  Do students
as minors need to be protected from the world and from themselves?  If
so, when should they be protected and by whom?  What unifies and helps
to link schools with a lifelong learning process?  Information and the
ability to access it is what will provide the connection needed by high
school graduates to move successfully into higher education or society
at large.

    One of the major changes for schools brought forth by
electronic information has been the ability to generate and share
information quickly and widely.  Schools can create entire curricula
available through online networks.  It is in this area where choice and
oversight is crucial.  What should students have access to?  What is
necessary in its own right as information, and what is used as an
instructional tool to provide a learning prototype of information
systems to foster the critical thinking/searching skills necessary to
use electronic media effectively?

    Why would schools need an "Electronic Bill of Rights?"
Would the purpose be to address the specific nature of electronic
information or, if protection of access and encouragement of use of
information are the goals, to recommit ourselves to the constitutional
guarantees and statements of professional values and ethics that we
already strive to live by?   Change is an ever-present force in the way
we structure and present information. Our dedication to protecting
access and free flow must transcend the container it comes in and the
paths through which it is disseminated.


    The "Library Bill of Rights" and the "Freedom to Read
Statement" both reflect constitutional concerns for individual freedoms
and provide language and a focus to defend and advance access to
information.  However, in the school environment where censorship is
quite common, these values are constantly under siege.  With the
staggering possibilities of computer-generated multi-media, it is
inevitable that challenges will take place.  It is important to
emphasize the continuum of commitment to access and the negative impact
of denying a new generation the right to know.  It would be
counterproductive to set electronic media apart.  Instead, we need to
accelerate our mastery of the technology which drives it while we
increase public awareness of the importance of protecting this evolving,
sometimes dizzying, set of formats.

    The daunting task for schools, and more specifically for
media centers, is to develop a set of common professional rationales for
protection of information integrity and user access in the electronic
environment.  Whether this is done through a new initiative such as an
"Electronic Bill of Rights" or as a logical outgrowth of already
existing documents, several points must be considered.

    1. We need to reiterate the values and applications of
the 1st Amendment concerning information dissemination.  It is
imperative that we repeatedly remind our communities and our schools
that free access and free inquiry are traditional values as well as the
foundation of innovation and progress.  The irony of electronic advances
in information transfer is that they vastly increase the potential for
broadened access, yet offer new more efficient ways to violate 1st
Amendment rights.

    2. Basic access means convenient and free access to
certain types of information.  Fees are routinely charged for many
electronic services and these for-fee services are often severely
limited in hours of access.  Basic service will increasingly entail
electronic access and manipulation of information.  We need to define
what "access to basic information sources" entails and offer it without
charge and conveniently.  Once an institution or government becomes
accustomed to a "revenue source," it is a painful if not impossible task
to discontinue it.

    3. The nature of electronic information requires an
intermediary support structure.  Those who are able to afford computers,
modems, etc. have a decided advantage in today's information
environment.  If librarians serving the needs of a free society don't
provide a portal to the electronic world, there will be virtually no
opportunity for some citizens to overcome an already decided
disadvantage.

    4. As we participate in the shaping of the technology
and its application, we need to educate our students and our
communities.  Schools have a primary responsibility to incorporate
technology into the curriculum and to provide basic knowledge about the
production, distribution, and availability of information.

    5. Availability of access and commercial profit are
often in conflict.  What is good for vendors is not necessarily good for
the information needs of students who need to learn how to cope in an
electronic world.  While vendors are important, even crucial players and
often allies, our actions are motivated by different and sometimes
conflicting purposes.

    6. Librarians and library media specialists will be even
more necessary to provide the human connection and the philosophical
framework necessary to shepherd a free society and basic education
through the labyrinth of electronic twists and turns.


        ELECTRONIC RECORDS AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM IN
           SCHOOLS OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE:
                       A HISTORICAL ESSAY

                      Frederick J. Stielow

            School of Library and Information Science
                 Catholic University of America
                        Washington, D.C.



    An Electronic Bill of Rights is an apt topic for
inclusion in instruction in schools of library and information science.
In addition to the normal focus on applied theory and tool skills,
students ideally engage philosophical principles with demonstrable
consequences for their profession and the world at large, and learn
about proactive practitioners and associations lobbying on the national
and international scene.  Students are exposed to the true power and
complexity of information policies, including such electronically
heightened factors as government surveillance/controls and the
conflicting rights between intellectual freedom and privacy.

    Yet, the historian in me also urges caution.  Myths
often outweigh the truths on intellectual freedom and librarianship.
One way to add to the reader's understanding of these current issues and
perhaps learn from the lessons of the past is through a historical
analysis of the teaching on intellectual freedom and automation in our
professional schools.

    Professional education began at the bachelor's level in
the mid-1880s without anything approaching our present consciousness on
intellectual freedom.  In keeping with the best of their times, the
founding fathers and their Progressive disciples were filled with an
almost missionary zeal to elevate society through the scientific
provision of properly edifying materials.  American librarianship in
essence began from a model of social control and implied censorship.  It
is doubtful, however, that this was formally taught for philosophical
debate in the library schools.  Indeed, as the famed Williamson report
supports, library education quickly eschewed moral dilemmas altogether,
preferring to preoccupy itself with narrower technical matters.

    The oxymoron of censorship within an agency espousing
democratic values was not systematically confronted by the profession
until the 1920s and 1930s.  ALA's first decisive statement favoring open
access to materials on all sides of an issue did not appear until 1939
with "The Library Bill of Rights."  This is particularly significant
since librarianship, perhaps more than any other field, takes its
educational lead from its national professional association.  But while
exceptions existed, overall there seems to have been little room in
highly technical curricula for student edification in matters of
intellectual rights and the like even in the years immediately following
ALA's adoption of "The Library Bill of Rights".

    The change awaited the rise of graduate education and
the MLS following World War II--a war that strengthened belief in the
library as an "arsenal for democracy."  A new trend could be seen in the
emergence of basic "foundations courses," which appeared following ALA's
first graduate school guidelines in 1951 -- developments which
transpired during one of librarianship's finest hours in the fight
against McCarthyism.

    Mary Lee Bundy, however, has argued that even at that
time educators continued to concentrate on technique and did little to
explore the power of information in its societal context.  Professional
principles and ethics were imparted more as formulas than as calls to
action.  The real breakthrough in incorporating

an issues orientation to intellectual freedom in library education
awaited the tumultuous 1960s, when library school students took to the
fore and such new players as the Office of Intellectual Freedom and
Freedom to Read Foundation appeared.  Students and liberal allies
brought intellectual freedom doctrines to bear on the new issue of
patron privacy rights, as well as such seemingly non-library problems as
civil rights, poverty, and war.  The updating of ALA's accreditation
guidelines in 1971 helped affirm a new accommodation.  Even with a later
retreat in terms of social activism and privacy rights, intellectual
freedom had achieved semi-sacred status for both conservatives and
liberals--an assumed instructional element for mention in every library
school in the United States.

    Library schools were quick to embrace automation.  The
efforts of pioneering educators date at least to the 1950s and contagion
from a strange European import called information science.  By the
1960s, library education as a whole was infected and, by the 1970s, one
school after another was adding information science to its title.  By
the 1990s, the need to deal with the infusion of MARC records, online
searching, and newly published works on floppy disks and CD-ROM left
automation as an endemic element in library education of far more
practical import than ethics.

    A linkage between ethics and automation was not
immediately forthcoming.  Following from the communication schema of
Claude Shannon, and with the factors of government and military support
behind most of its advances, information science generally began by
treating data as only a raw commodity without addressing the social
import of the message.  Given those ingredients, the personalities
involved, and the complexities of the technology, it is easy to
understand how one could follow a narrow instrumentalist path and fail
to find time for information issues.  There have been similar practical
restraints in extending the examination of issues surrounding technology
into ethics, foundations, and collections development courses.  Some
instructors may feel automation is beyond their competency or find it
hard to fit automation within the rubric of book-based instruction.

    On the other hand, these once usually parallel paths are
now intersecting more frequently in schools of library and information
science.  Catholic University of America, for example, makes certain to
integrate the two concepts throughout its core sequence of four classes,
as well as advanced topics seminars on "Information Resources
Management" and "Online Searching".  Its basic "Information and Society"
course visits the new threats to information along the historical
continuum of librarianship (moreover, students can actually witness and
lend support to the policies being made by taking trips to Capitol
Hill).  The required "Introduction to Automated Systems in Libraries and
Information Centers" course reaffirms those experiences within an
electronic context for such library dicta as open access and the
government's responsibility to provide information to the citizenry.
The examination of automated systems also brings up concepts of privacy
and security.  Fortunately, the FBI's botched Library Awareness Program
in the late 1980s has provided much grist for the mill, helping to
create a new myth to round out librarians' views for a true Electronic
Bill of Rights.

    Discussions reveal that CUA is not alone.  Other schools
show a similar understanding and path toward blending ethical principles
with automation in the curriculum.  Anyone who attempts to keep up with
the news cannot ignore the extension of now traditional library issues
to automation in the Paperwork Reduction Act, the privatization or
questionable security classification of governmental data bases, and a
host of legal maneuverings on intellectual freedom and privacy.  Dealing
with such issues is also demonstrably necessary in order to help
distinguish graduate level library computer studies courses from
undergraduate course work in automation or computer literacy from other
departments--e.g., Introduction to Microcomputers 101.

      In sum, library education can perhaps be best
characterized as in the process of synthesis between automation and
ethics.   Some continue to be blinded by technological Valhallas and
treat the computer as a neutral medium.  Others remind librarianship and
its education arm to learn from the past and balance between techniques
and true mission.  In these last regards, classroom discussions on the
elements of an Electronic Bill of Rights emerge as definitionally
germane to library and information science education.  They

are part and parcel of current awareness, the development of
professionalism, and, perhaps, even an extension of the Jeffersonian
vigilance required to maintain a democratic system and recreate our myth
structures.


                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

ELECTRONIC PRIVACY AND DATA PROTECTION LEGISLATION IN THE 102nd CONGRESS

Frederick D. King

 American Library Association Washington, D.C., Office


    Congress is pondering a variety of topics connected with
electronic privacy and data protection.  The following is a survey of
legislation currently before Congress.  It begins with comments
regarding  NREN legislation, is followed by sections on a variety of
privacy and telecommunications issues, and then by sections on telephone
and audiotext legislation.  The information in this paper was current
through May, 1991.


NATIONAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK


    The pending legislation to establish a National Research and Education
Network (NREN) currently in Congress is not very specific about data
security or privacy. The current version of HR 656, which was ordered
reported on May 8, requires the National High-Performance Computing
Program to address the security requirements, policies, and standards
necessary to protect computer networks and information resources
accessible through them. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology will conduct the research needed to adopt security standards.

    Senator Gore's NREN bill, S. 272, has a similar
requirement, but the responsibility for defining and implementing a
security plan is spread among a wide range of federal agencies. The
National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science
Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency are
required to adopt a common set of standards and guidelines to provide
enhanced security for the network.

    The Senate version also requires the Director of the
Office of Science and Technology Policy to report to Congress on
appropriate policies and standards to protect the privacy of users of
networks, a requirement that was dropped in the House version.

    Another NREN bill, S. 343, which was reported on May 23,
states that the NREN shall "be designed and operated so as to ensure
continued application of laws that provide network and information
resources security measures, including those that protect copyright and
intellectual property rights, and those that control access to data
bases and protect national security."


DATA PRIVACY


HR 280 "Individual Privacy Protection Act of 1991." Introduced by Rep.
Collins (D-IL).

    Establishes an Individual Privacy Protection Board. The
Board shall recommend to the President and the Congress what
legislation, administrative action, or voluntary adoption of
requirements are necessary to protect the privacy of individuals while
meeting the legitimate needs of government and society for information.
The Board shall also review federal law, Executive orders, etc., and
report on the extent to which they are consistent with the rights of
privacy, due process of law, and other guarantees of the Constitution.
The Board shall comment on the implications for data protection of
proposed federal, state, or local statutes, regulations, or procedures.
The Board may examine interstate transfer of information about
individuals; data banks and information programs and systems which
significantly affect the privacy and other personal and property rights
of individuals; the use of social security numbers, license plate
numbers, and other symbols to identify individuals in data banks; and
the analysis of statistical data with other personal data in a way which
results in a violation of the implied or explicitly recognized
confidentiality of such information. The Board may determine what
specific categories of information should be prohibited by statute from
collection by federal agencies.

    Referred to the Government Operations Subcommittee on
Government Information, Justice, and Agriculture on February 19.


HR 685 "Data Protection Act of 1991." Introduced by Rep. Wise (D-WV).

    Establishes a Data Protection Board as an independent
agency of the executive branch. The Board shall develop guidelines for
use by federal agencies in implementing the Privacy Act of 1974. The
Board may investigate compliance with and comment on proposals to amend
the Privacy Act; review federal, state, and local laws, Executive
orders, regulations, etc., and report whether they are consistent with
data protection rights; and propose legislation on data protection.
According to Rep. Wise, "In the not too distant future, consumers face
the prospect that a computer somewhere will compile a record about
everything they purchase, every place they go, and everything they
do.... We need to help consumers, businesses, and government develop
policies and practices to distinguish between appropriate and
inappropriate uses of personal data. That would be one of the principal
functions of the Data Protection Board."

    Referred to the Government Operations Subcommittee on
Government Information, Justice, and Agriculture and to its Subcommittee
on Legislation and National Security on February 20.

    On April 10, the Subcommittee on Government Information,
Justice, and Agriculture held a hearing on data protection issues and
public and corporate reactions to privacy. The main focus of the hearing
was Equifax's decision to cancel the release of its Lotus MarketPlace:
Households CD-ROM database. John Baker, Senior Vice President of
Equifax, explained a survey that Equifax had commissioned with Louis
Harris & Associates on the subject of privacy. The survey showed that
Americans are concerned about the lack of control they have over
information about them, but that they also value the benefits they
receive from information and technology. Although Lotus MarketPlace had
safeguards against abuse, Equifax decided that it would be socially
responsible to cancel the product. Another concern raised at the hearing
dealt with data protection laws in the European Community. According to
Rep. Wise, "if the United States is perceived to have inadequate data
protection laws... U.S. companies could lose access to information from
Europe and could thereby lose international influence, business
opportunities, and jobs."


HR 2443 "Privacy Act Amendments of 1991." Introduced by Rep. Wise (D-WV)

    Makes several changes in the Privacy Act of 1974.  One
change amends the definition of "record" so that personal information is
subject to the act independent of the medium on which the information is
maintained.  This makes it clear that computerized information is
subject to the Privacy Act.

    Referred to the House Committee on Government Operations
on May 22.

S. 618 "Violent Crime Control of 1991." Introduced by Sen. Biden (D-DE);
1 cosponsor.

    A 194-page bill to control and reduce violent crime.
Sec. 545 of the bill states "It is the sense of Congress that providers
of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic
communications service equipment shall ensure that communications
systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of
voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by
law."

    Referred to the House Judiciary Committee on March 12.
Hearings were held on April 18, April 23, May 7 and May 15.


WORKPLACE PRIVACY


S. 516 "Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act." Introduced by Sen. Simon
(D-IL); 1 cosponsor.

    Requires employers who engage in electronic monitoring
to provide affected employees and potential employees with prior written
notice describing the type of monitoring to be done. Requires employers
to permit employees to have access to all personal data collected by
such electronic monitoring. Prohibits employers from electronically
collecting data that is not relevant to the employee's work performance.
Data collected may not be used as the sole basis for evaluation or
production quotas. Employers are prohibited from collecting data
obtained by electronic monitoring which describes how an employee
exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless such use is
expressly authorized.

    Referred to the Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee
on Employment and Productivity on March 7.


HR 1218 "Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act." Introduced by Rep.
Williams (D-MT); 85 cosponsors.

    An identical companion bill to S. 516.

    Referred to the Education and Labor Subcommittee on
Labor-Management Relations and to its Subcommittee on Employment
Opportunities on March 21.


FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT


HR 1423 "Freedom of Information Public Access Improvement Act of 1991."
Introduced by Rep. Kleczka (D-WI); 10 Cosponsors.

    Amends the Freedom of Information Act in various ways,
including defining "record" to include electronic information in any
storage medium, and "search" to include a "reasonable amount of computer
programming necessary to identify records."

    Referred to the Government Operations Subcommittee on
Government Operations, Justice, and Agriculture on March 14.


GOVERNMENT COPYRIGHT


HR 191 "Technology Transfer Improvements Act of 1991." Introduced by
Rep. Morella (R-MD).

    Allows federal agencies to secure copyright on behalf of the United
States as author or proprietor in any computer software prepared by
employees of the United States Government in the course of work under a
cooperative research and development agreement.

    Referred to the Science, Space, and Technology
Subcommittee on Technology and Competitiveness on February 12, and to
the Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and Judicial
Administration on April 16.


TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY


HR 277 "Telecommunications Policy Coordination Act of 1991." Introduced
by Rep. Collins (D-IL).

    Establishes an Office of Telecommunications Policy in
the Executive Office of the President. The office would prepare national
telecommunications policy options, serve as the principal advisor to the
President in matters relating to telecommunications issues and policies,
and monitor the development of new telecommunications technologies.

    Referred to the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance on February 11.


TELEPHONE CALLER ID


S. 652 "Telephone Privacy Act of 1991." Introduced by Sen. Kohl (D-WI).

    Enables telephone users to block Caller ID. Telephone
companies are not required to enable callers to block receipt of
identifying information on the emergency assistance line of a police or
fire department, or on a 911 emergency line. According to Sen. Kohl,
"forced Caller ID violates our fundamental right to privacy because
there are a variety of situations where callers need and deserve to keep
their phone numbers to themselves.... if a stranger came up to you on
the street and asked you for your home phone number, would you give it
to him? Of course not.... The answer is to allow consumers to retain
their freedom of choice." Sen. Kohl also expressed his concern that
Caller ID might be illegal. In 1990, a Pennsylvania court of appeals
ruled that Caller ID violated the state's constitution and its wiretap
statute, which is almost identical to the Federal version. The case is
currently before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Sen. Kohl also said
experts have argued that Caller ID may be an illegal "trap and trace
device" under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

    Discharged without action by the Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science, and Transportation on March 21, and referred to the
Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Technology and the Law on March
25.

HR 1449 "Telephone Privacy Act of 1991." Introduced by Rep. Synar
(D-OK); 1 cosponsor.

    Allows telephone callers to block caller ID. Allows
customers to sue providers that allow caller ID but do not allow
blocking. This bill is a companion to S. 652.

    Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary on March 14.


HR 1305 "Telephone Consumer Privacy Rights Act." Introduced by Rep.
Markey (D-MA); 11 cosponsors.

    Allows telephone callers to block caller ID. Does not
apply to private branch exchanges or emergency numbers. Customers would
not be charged for blocking calls. When he was introducing this bill,
Rep. Markey stated that "the awesome power and pervasiveness of advanced
telecommunications may mean that in the future, personal privacy will be
threatened in fundamental ways."

    The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance held a hearing on this bill on April 24.
See HR 1304 below for details.


TELEPHONE SOLICITATION


HR 1304 "Telephone Advertising Consumer Rights Act." Introduced by Rep.
Markey (D-MA); 42 cosponsors.

    Requires the FCC to create a database of people who
object to receiving telephone solicitations. Companies that solicit by
telephone would be required to purchase copies of the list, and
companies would be prohibited from making calls to people on the list.
Automatic dialers would not be permitted to call emergency lines, paging
or cellular telephone services. All fax advertising transmittals would
be required to be identified. When Rep. Markey was introducing this
bill, he referred to the telephone as "an insistent master■when it
rings, we answer it■and many consumers complain bitterly that, when it
rings to deliver unsolicited advertising, it is invading their
privacy... This bill...is a bipartisan effort to return a measure of
control to consumers over what they hear and read."

    The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance held a hearing on HR 1304 and 1305 on
April 24. The witnesses at the hearing held a broad range of opinions
both on Caller ID and on a nationwide database. Mark Rotenberg of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility said that Caller ID was
"directly at odds with established legal and ethical standards of
privacy protection," and recommended that free per-line blocking be
offered to subscribers. He also said that a flat prohibition on
unsolicited advertising may have a chilling effect on free speech.
Janlori Goldman, Director of the Privacy and Technology Project for the
American Civil Liberties Union, said that ACLU supported the bills, but
that they were concerned with the First Amendment issues raised by HR
1305. Richard Brown, Executive Director of the Direct Marketing
Association, recommended that self-regulation would be preferable to a
federally-mandated nationwide database.

    HR 1304 was marked up by the Subcommittee and approved
for full Committee action on May 9.  The bill now limits the database to
residential telephone subscribers.  The bill also states "The Congress
finds that...[i]ndividuals' privacy rights, public safety interests, and
commercial freedoms of speech and trade must be balanced in a way that
protects the privacy of individuals and permits legitimate telemarketing
practices."

HR 1431 Introduced by Rep. Boehlert (R-NY).

    Allows people to file a statement with the FCC that they
do not wish to receive unsolicited telephone calls. The FCC is required
to maintain the list and make it available to any person on reasonable
terms and conditions. Non-profit organizations are exempt. When the FCC
believes that a person is violating this law, the FCC may ask the
Attorney General to take civil action; civil penalties for violating
this law may not exceed $10,000.

    Referred to the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and
Finance on March 25.


HR 1589 "Telephone Privacy Act." Introduced by Rep. Unsoeld (D-WA); 2
cosponsors.

    Outlaws commercial solicitation by computers. Rep.
Unsoeld called this bill "a piece of legislation of interest to every
American with a telephone and a desire for peace and quiet once they
reach the sanctity of their own home."

Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce on March 21.


AUDIOTEXT


HR 328 "Telephone Consumer Assistance Act." Introduced by Rep. Gordon
(D-TN); 67 cosponsors.

    Requires the FCC to establish a system for oversight and
regulation of audiotext services. Requires the services to provide an
introductory message that describes the service, specifies the cost of
the call, and informs the caller of the option to hang up without being
charged. The bill also requires that any bypass of the cost disclosure
message be disabled when the cost of the service has changed, and
prohibits local exchange carriers from disconnecting telephone service
because of nonpayment of audiotext charges. Common carriers are required
to provide each caller with the option to avoid audiotext charges caused
by unauthorized use or misunderstanding of the charges and to offer
callers the option of blocking access to all audiotext services.
Advertisers are required to state the charges for audiotext services,
required to state that minors receive parental consent before placing
calls, and are prohibited from carrying advertisements that emit tones
that can automatically dial an audiotext number. Common carriers are
prohibited from providing service in which children under 18 would be
asked to provide their name, address, and other information. The bill
requires the Secretary of Commerce to conduct a study of audiotext
service providers' use of technology to identify callers' telephone
numbers and sell lists of numbers.

    The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance held a hearing on February 28 to explore
the problems of audiotext abuses and to gather information on the need
for regulation. All of the witnesses agreed that abuses of the industry
should be curbed, but their solutions to the problem differed. One
witness, whose children ran up an audiotext bill of over $1000, argued
that access to audiotext services should be restricted to persons who
have requested the service in writing and have received access codes.
Joselle Albracht, Assistant Attorney General of the Consumer Protection
Division in Dallas, Texas, supported HR 328, saying that the audiotext
industry "has a potential to become the greatest medium for consumer
fraud to date." James R. Herold of Pacific Bell explained the safeguards
that California has adopted, including price caps for individual calls
and notification when charges for a single billing period exceed $75.
Thomas Pace of the Information Industry Association said that IIA
supports the clear disclosure of audiotext costs, but that the "kill
message" (a message stating that the caller could hang up without being
charged) requirement would discourage callers who didn't want to wait
for the information to be presented. The requirement would also set a
troubling First Amendment precedent, sending the signal that the use of
new technology would justify more intrusive government control of
information content. Bruce J. Fogel, Chairman of Phone Programs Inc.,
said that he did not deny that abuses existed, but that his company did
not see the necessity for federal laws. Further hearings on this bill
are planned.

    On May 8, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it
was charging Phone Programs Inc. with deceptive and unfair advertising
practices in connection with its "T.J. Funnybunny" promotion. Children
were urged to call a 900 number to take part in fun adventures and
receive a gift, but when they did, they were given an address to which
the children had to send a copy of the bill for the call.

    A new version of this bill, now called the "Audiotext
Industry Obligations and Consumer Rights Act" and incorporating portions
of HR 328, will be introduced to Congress shortly.


S. 471 "900 Services Consumer Protection Act of 1991." Introduced by
Sen. McCain (R-AZ); 4 cosponsors.

    Requires providers of 900 services to announce, at the
beginning of each transaction, the price of the call and a description
of the service. Callers would be given the option of hanging up during
the beginning announcement without being charged. Consumers would be
allowed to block access to 900 numbers at no cost. Advertisements for
900 services directed at children would be required to include a notice
that parental permission was required before they called, and radio and
television advertisements directed at children would be prohibited from
including tones which automatically dial a 900 telephone number.

    Referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation on February 21.


                *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

               Principles of Public Information


                            Preamble

From the birth of our nation, open and uninhibited access to public
information has ensured good government and a free society.  Public
information helps to educate our people, stimulate our progress and
solve our most complex economic, scientific and social problems.  With
the coming of the Information Age and its many new technologies,
however, public information has expanded so quickly that basic
principles regarding its creation, use and dissemination are in danger
of being neglected and even forgotten.

The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, therefore,
reaffirms that the information policies of the U.S. government are based
on the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and on the recognition
of public information as a national resource to be developed and
preserved in the public interest.  We define public information as
information created, compiled and/or maintained by the Federal
Government.  We assert that public information is information owned by
the people, held in trust by their government, and should be available
to the people except where restricted by law.  It is in this spirit of
public ownership and public trust that we offer the following Principles
of Public Information.


1.    The public has the right of access to public information.

    Government agencies should guarantee open, timely and
uninhibited access to public information except where restricted by law.
People should be able to access public information, regardless of its
format, without any special training or expertise.

2.    The Federal Government should guarantee the integrity and
preservation of public information, regardless of its format.

    By maintaining public information in the face of
changing times and technologies, government agencies assure the
government's accountability and the accessibility of the government's
business to the public.

3.    The Federal Government should guarantee the dissemination,
reproduction, and redistribution of public information.

    Any restriction of dissemination or any other function
dealing with public information must be strictly defined by law.

4.    The Federal Government should safeguard the privacy of persons
who use or request information, as well as persons about whom
information exists in government records.

5.    The Federal Government should ensure a wide diversity of sources
of access, private as well as governmental, to public information.

    Although sources of access may change over time and
because of advances in technology, government agencies have an
obligation to the public to encourage diversity.
6.    The Federal Government should not allow cost to obstruct the
people's access to public information.

    Costs incurred by creating, collecting and processing
information for the government's own purposes should not be passed on to
people who wish to utilize public information.

7.    The Federal Government should ensure that information about
government information is easily available and in a single index
accessible in a variety of formats.

    The government index of public information should be in
addition to inventories of information kept within individual government
agencies.

8.    The Federal Government should guarantee the public's access to
public information, regardless of where they live and work, through
national networks and programs like the Depository Library Program.

    Government agencies should periodically review such
programs as well as the emerging technology to ensure that access to
public information remains inexpensive and convenient to the public.

                           Conclusion

The National Commission on Libraries and information Science offers
these Principles of Public Information as a foundation for the decisions
made throughout the Federal Government and the nation regarding issues
of public information.  We urge all branches of the Federal Government,
state and local government and the private sector to utilize these
principles in the development of information policies and in the
creation, use, dissemination and preservation of public information.  We
believe that in so acting, they will serve the best interests of the
nation and the people in the Information Age.

             Adopted by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries
                            and Information Science June 29, 1990
A SHORT LIST OF REALLY GOOD READINGS


    Compiling a bibliography is a purely thankless task.  It
is analagous in many ways to being a translator of great books from one
language into another: it involves a lot of work, and receives very
little attention unless you do it really badly.  And even if you are
exhaustive to a fault, you will undoubtedly overlook some important work
or works and offend someone.  Probably for these reasons, I was not
successful in recruiting anyone to compile an exhaustive bibliography on
relatively short notice for this publication.  Therefore, what appears
here is not a bibliography.  Whether according to Webster or not, the
word "bibliography" seems to connote a high degree of thoroughness, even
to the point of perfection.  I make no such claims here.  And I
apologize in advance to anyone who's seminal articles or books on one of
these topics I have omitted, and I'm sure there are a few.

    Despite these disclaimers, the list that appears below
wasn't put together exactly haphazardly, either.  It is the result of
some online bibliographic searching, some manual bibliographic
searching, and the "invisible college" of colleagues who have shared
with me.  Apart from the latter method of collection -- plus the
inclusion of Ithiel de Sola Pool's book -- anything else listed here was
published at least in its most recent form in 1988 or later, and most of
it is from the library science literature.  You will not find this list
exhaustive; it's not intended to be.  I am confident, though that -- as
I have suggested by the title I have chosen for this listing -- readers
will find the articles, books, and reports listed here to be
well-written, informative, and thought-provoking, a very good starting
place for pursuing issues related to the topic of a Bill of Rights for
an Electronic Society.

.... The Editor

                  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


Bollinger, William A. "Information Access Policies in the 1990s:
National and International Concerns" in Proceedings of the National
Online Meeting (New York, May 1-3, 1990). Medford, NJ:
LearnedInformation, Inc., 1990, pp. 51-55.


Burnham, David. "Data Protection" in Computers, Ethics, and Society. M.
David Ermann, Mary B. Williams,and Claudio Gutierrez, eds. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 94-106.


Connolly, Frank, Steven W. Gilbert, and Peter Lyman. A Bill of Rights
for Electronic Citizens. Washington,D.C.: Office of Technology
Assessment, 1990.


Critical Connections: Communications for the Future. Washington, D.C.:
Office of Technology Assessment,1990.


Flaherty, David H. "The Emergence of Surveillance Societies in the
Western World: Toward the Year 2000 "Government Information Quarterly, 5,
no.4(1988): 377-387.


Haywood, Trevor. "Electronic Information: The Withering of Public
Access" in New Horizons for the Information Profession. Los Angeles and
London: Taylor Graham, 1988, pp. 195-206.


Informing the Nation: Federal Information Dissemination in an Electronic
Age. Washington, D.C.: Office of Technology Assessment, 1988.


Karraker, Roger. "Highways of the Mind" Whole Earth Review, no.
70(Spring, 1991): 4-11.


Kirtley, Jane E. "Discussion Forum: From File Drawer to Floppy Disk:
FOIA Implications of Electronic Data Collection Raised in Two Recent
Supreme Court Cases" Government Information Quarterly, 6,no.4(1989):
335-338.


Lesser, Barry. "Information Protection Issues in the Information
Economy" Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science,
14(February/March, 1988): 21-22.


Lyon, David. "Information, Democracy, and the State" Chapter 5 in The
Information Society: Issues and Illusions. New York and Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988, pp. 86-104.


Marx, Gary T., and Sanford Sherizen. "Monitoring on the Job" Technology
Review, 89 (November/December,1986): 62-72.


Nielson, Brian. "Intellectual Freedom in an Electronic Age" Online,
15(May, 1991): 88-90.


Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1983.


Rowe, Richard R. "Democracy and the Marketplace of the Mind" Bulletin
of the American Society for Information Science, 16(April/May, 1990): pp.
26-28.


Rubin, Michael Rogers. "The Computer and Personal Privacy, Part I: The
Individual Under Assault" Library Hi Tech, 5 (Spring, 1987): 23-31.


Rubin, Michael Rogers. "The Computer and Personal Privacy, Part III: The
Regulation of Computer Records in the United States" Library Hi Tech, 7,
no.3(1989): 11-21.


Schmidt, C. James. "Intellectual Freedom and Technology: Deja Vu?" North
Carolina Libraries, 45(Fall,1987): 129-130.


Shattuck, John. "The Right to Know: Public Access to Federal Information
in the 1980s" Government Information Quarterly, 5, no.4(1988): 369-375.


Shill, Harold B. "A Basis for Increasing Public Access to Federal
Electronic Information" Government Information Quarterly, 6, no.2(1989):
135-141.


Turn, Rein. "Privacy Protection" Annual Review of Information Science
and Technology, v.20(1985): 27-50.


Williams, Rt. Hon. Shirley. "The Impact of Information Technology on the
Wider Society" in New Horizons for the Information Profession.  Hilary
Dyer and Gwyneth Tseng, eds. Los Angeles and London:Taylor Graham, 1988,
pp. 212-225.


Wood, Fred B. "Directions in Federal Information Dissemination Policy in
1989" in Library and Book Trade Almanac, 34th ed., 1989-90. New York: