FIS1311

Review of Inman's "A Librarian's Experience of e-Government"

2005-11-13T13:57:00.000-05:00

Article Title: "A Librarian's Experience of e-Government"
Author: Jane Inman
Publication Date: 30-January-2005 Publication: Ariadne Issue 42
Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/inman/intro.html
Copyright and citation information File last modified: Friday, 28-Jan-2005 14:14:29 GMT

Review

Inaman’s article on e-Government—or e-Gov—is from a decidedly U.K. perspective. She begins with an account of a web services initiative in her native Warwickshire, England, turning at the end to the pressing need for trained information management professionals. Inman argues that librarians are the key to making informational sense of the IT revolution.

Response

Is Her e-Gov My e-Gov?

I, too, work in electronic Government, or e-Gov. I am currently working on the Information Management Strategy for the Government of Ontario, and have had experience working with e-Gov initiatives for the past five years. I was also recently at a conference put on by the Government of Alberta Information Management called Managing Information Assets in the Public Sector. Having also participated in several other conferences, both as participant and speaker, and having worked on what may well be termed e-Gov initiatives, I would like to expand on Inman’s expression of e-Gov.

In the body of her article Inman describes e-Gov as a relatively narrow initiative, with a fairly specific target audience: providing web-based library services to clients. While this is certainly one entirely legitimate aspect of e-Gov, it is far from the complete picture. In my own experience, e-Gov also includes Information and Information Technology infrastructure, policies and directives, planning, and standards, to name a few. And whereas Inman focuses her attention on a narrow client group, my experience with e-Gov includes not only government-to-citizen activities (as per Inman’s characterization), but also government-to-government (internal, external, extra-jurisdictional), and government-to-business activities. Inman’s web project contains little about policy development, horizontal re-alignment—a.k.a Shared Services—or even political aspirations. Though it may indeed be shocking that in 2005 we still hear about silo-based organizations (a very millennial marketing description popular close-on-the-heels of “ROI” and “Y2K”), that too forms a common activity of e-Gov priorities. Nowhere in Inman’s article were we given to concern about the disclosure of personal information from one jurisdiction to another (the almost rote response to security concerns seeming to be: ‘share more information’—a response that has profound impacts on library an information science professionals), the introduction of Records or Document Management Systems (also called among other things, Electronic Information Management Systems, or Electronic Document and Records Systems), the broadening of program statutes enabling the sharing of information, cross-jurisdictional information management issues, access to information, or the retention issues associated with the increasingly common use of e-mail as a policy-setting medium.

These are the e-Gov issues I face, issues that should also benefit from the training and expertise of librarians.

So What Do I Agree With?

The following excerpt from Inman does a good job of expressing the need for e-Gov services:

At a practical level we understand information architecture. We know that a Web site cannot function if it is not arranged logically. We know that a Web site needs to be indexed and we know that metadata is only really cataloguing. We know that we need to use a controlled vocabulary, put in added terms and perhaps use a thesaurus and subject headings. We are customer-focused and we know what our customers need and what they will and will not use.

In fact, the need is much simpler than that: Governments need the ability for internal-facing information provision (i.e. use of government information by government) as well as the ability to make information available to others—citizens, customers, businesses, other governments, media, etc. Openness and transparency are fundamental principles to the notion of democracy. Organizing information so it can be stored, recalled, and used is the next logical requirement after the simple statement of need for information provision.

Nevertheless, Inman does a good job of articulating what follows this statement of simple need: customer service. The term “customer” is often used to describe any number of transactions in the e-Gov domain—citizen, end-user, client, voter, stakeholder, or any other recipient of an information provision activity. Governments are in the business of information. Now that we have—in the modern western world—enhanced information provision with information communications technologies there is a vacuum to be filled; the stuff to fill the vacuum is the output of library/information science and information architecture: Logical arrangement, indexing, expression of metadata, controlled vocabularies, thesaurus, subject indexing, and customer-focussed information provision.

Inman’s reference to the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) initiative is an excellent example of where e-Gov is headed and how executive leadership plays a fundamental role in setting direction. IDeA is a project from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and is a focal point of government providing resources to itself, other governments and the public. IDeA is a “free advisory and research service on local e-government” with a 'research once and share many times' mandate. This is a response, in part, to the need to provide planning support and shared services seem to figure somewhere in the background of the IDeA initiative. Inman’s reference to the 14 priority areas and 56 specific outcomes of the e-Gov agenda, for which IDeA provides support does provide a good reference point of how the complex needs of providing and measuring success for e-Gov activities.

e-Gov and Information Management

While Inman offers insight into providing information services via the 11,000 pages, 2,000 visitors per year, and 157-plus Best Value Performance Indicators, one is left wondering in light of the volume of information being provided, whether much of it is of good quality. While the ODPM’s IDeA site is a good domain for bringing information provision services together, as is the U.K.’s Directgov.ca.uk , there is still a concern that the quality of information comes second to providing quantity of information. Especially when government accountability, openness and transparency are the objectives of e-Gov, it is important to distinguish good information from mediocre information or information of poor quality. Whether quantity of information is good or not is debatable, and Inman focuses on the fact that it should be the central role of librarians in governments as information organizations. Librarians have been cut from the civil service in Ontario and Canada over the past 15 years in the interests of demonstrating fiscal restraint. In his Keynote (Effective Access Leads to Effective Government[.doc]), to the recent Ontario Government Access and Privacy Workshop - 2005, John Reid, the Information Commissioner of Canada recently described this as the “information dark ages.” Governments are finding it difficult to manage information it has collected, created or is the custodian of. Inman is right to close her article with the statement that “E-government is just one area where [librarians] can make a difference,” but one is left wondering what other skills librarians ought to have besides just information provision.

Inman’s review of the role of librarians in an e-Gov domain is thoughtful and articulate, but misses addressing one critical aspect of information provision in a government environment: policy. While her article does a good job of linking library science specific concerns with e-Gov, she does not provide any clarity on how the skills and training of librarians can help to create a more open and transparent government. More than assisting in the provision of information products, this is perhaps the real next step for the library science discipline.

RSS Feed

2005-10-30T22:55:00.000-05:00

RSS feed:
http://learningspaces.org/1311/rss/StuartBailey.rss.txt

2005-10-24T22:14:00.000-04:00

I attended an Information Management conference in Edmonton last week. You'd think that with push button publishing, I'd have updated this sooner. You'd be right; I probably should have.

What I learned, though, is that government management of information is a real, significant issue, and there is a whole whack of work to do. We in Ontario are a bit slower off the mark, but are coming along. The feds have enough documentation to choke a horse. Alberta, though, is far and away better than all the other provnices on Information Management.

The biggest take-away for me is that Senior Government Executives have to step up and take leadership on this issue. Governments also have to finally start hiring experts in library and information science if they want to manage the information in their custody properly; there needs to be a recovery from the 10 - 15 years of cuts. One expert at the conference put it this way: if the government wants to save money the same way they did with librarians, they would put calculators on every government worker's desk and fire all the accountants. The point being: librarians provide an information-in-context service more than just finding and retrieving; librarians are trained to make sense of information the same way accountants make sense of numbers.

I promise, I'll try to post more information on the conference shortly.

TEI - Text Encoding Initiative

2005-10-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

TEI – Text Encoding Initiative
http://www.tei-c.org/

First conceived at a conference at New York’s Vassar College in 1987 out of which came the seminal ‘Poughkeepsie Principles,’ (Burnard and Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p.1) the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a project designed to give programmers, literati and technocrati a means for marking up texts with a consistent format. The TEI is a result of seed sponsorship from the Association of Computers in the Humanities (ACH), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). Further support has been received from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the European Community, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Seen as a needed response to the growing proliferation of standards and competing systems and hardware options available to academics and scholars, the TEI is intended to provide a contiguous markup framework for describing text as accessed through machines. Rather than a hard-and-fast encoding language, the TEI is a rule-based framework that gives users guidelines for the description of different elements of printed texts. The Poughkeepsie Principles were first published as The TEI's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in April 1994 as two substantial green volumes known as TEI P3. The Guidelines, say these design documents, should (Burnard and Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p.1):
• “suffice to represent the textual features needed for research;
• be simple, clear, and concrete;
• be easy for researchers to use without special-purpose software;
• allow the rigorous definition and efficient processing of texts;
• provide for user-defined extensions;
• conform to existing and emergent standards.

The world of scholarship is large and diverse. For the Guidelines to have wide acceptability, it was important to ensure that:
1. the common core of textual features be easily shared;
2. additional specialist features be easy to add to (or remove from) a text;
3. multiple parallel encodings of the same feature should be possible;
4. the richness of markup should be user-defined, with a very small minimal requirement;
5. adequate documentation of the text and its encoding should be provided.”

The current edition (TEI P4) appeared in print in June 2002 and is distributed for the TEI Consortium by the University of Virginia Press (The TEI Guidelines). The TEI Guidelines are available in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Korean, and Spanish.

The TEI is also updating P4 with P5, which is designed to incorporate XML schema more broadly and is an updating initiative that has been underway since 2002. P5 started release in 2005. The P5 draft guidelines describe the layout for the most recent version and include detailed information on the structure of P5-encoded documents.

TEI follows general description characteristics of element and attribute, as found in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language), two of the first markup languages used for the Initiative. In recent years, XML has become more predominant and P5 is a revision working towards XML as the more common markup standard. TEI is structured to allow for descriptions of parts of text, providing a rich schema for preparing printed text for the electronic domain. It operates on a structure of base and additional tagsets (elements of the text grouped logically together), which can suppressed or redefined.

Using tagging concepts similar to HTML, TEI gives users a place to indicate parts of a document, characters’ speech or action, or other important aspects of a text, such as diagrams or graphics. All TEI texts contain a header and the transcription of the body of the text. The TEI header element looks like "teiHeader" and subsequent body element tags look like (N.B. tag brackets"<" and ">" are actually used in the encoding scheme rather than the quotation marks surrounding the tags used here--they are not reproduced here due to rejection by Blogger) "text", "front", "body", "back", "p" (paragraph), "q" (quote) and so on to indicate parts of a text. Line breaks "l" and other characteristics of the text-as-published can also be preserved to provide readers with a more accurate description of the actual text—which may in some cases affect semantic comprehension, especially in cases of stanza or prosaic publications.

One of the more interesting opportunities that TEI offers those encoding a text is to articulate a semantic analysis or interpretation of the text, which could provide “potentially complex alignment or linkage between the text and the analysis, or between the text and one or more translations of it” (Burnard and Sperberg-McQueen, 2002, p.7). Alternatively, TEI offers meta information, linguistic analysis, or any other type of analytical articulation to be included directly in the text. While this is still one person’s (or perhaps that of a group or collaborative effort) interpretation of a given text, it does make it easier to link that text to other similar texts, to link it with detailed information to other document printed at the same time—even different versions of material (especially useful in translations where the meaning may have changed slightly from one version to the next), or generally to search for embedded analysis within a web document.

There are currently 123 projects using TEI listed on the TEI website (Projects using the TEI). These are varied and diverse and include projects such as “Early Canada Online" (Early Canada Online), “Boccacio’s Decameron" (Boccacio’s Decameron), and the descriptively-titled “Using XML to generate research tools for Wittgenstein scholars by collaborative groupwork" (Using XML).

Software tools are also available to make encoding easier. For example ‘Pizza Chef’ (Pizza Chef) is a tool that allows users to build their own personalized view of the TEI document type declaration (DTD) in either SGML or XML. Many other TEI tools exist to make the job of description and customization easier for users.

The TEI acknowledges that in order to be used to its full potential, it requires customization. TEI Lite is an example of such a customization and the diverse list of projects using TEI show the adaptability and customizability of the encoding initaitive by special user groups.

While TEI does provide a robust framework for the articulation of print-based texts in electronic form, and one key advantage is that TEI can leverage existing markup languages such as XML, this still presupposes that users have some working knowledge of these programming languages. TEI does provide a good summary document on XML (A Gentle Introduction to XML), which describes the use of XML in the TEI encoding schema, although this may still prove to be a barrier to many as it requires users to learn a special language to work with the framework. However, its specialized and powerful rewards do offer many advantages to scholars describing print-form texts in an electronic domain.

Ultimately, the fact that the TEI—begun in 1994—is still used today is a testament to its longevity and application. In the Internet domain, anything that can last a decade is ancient, which is perhaps a fitting description for a project that seeks to transcribe antediluvian texts—or those texts that appeared before the flood of the information communications technology.

References

A Gentle Introduction to XML (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2005 from http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines2/gentleintro.html

Burnard, L. & Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. (2002). TEI Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange. [Electronic version]. Retrieved \October 2, 2005, from http://www.tei-c.org/Lite/teiu5_en.pdf p. 1

Boccacio’s Decameron (n.d.). Retrieved October 3, 2005 from http://www.brown.edu/Research/Decameron/

Early Canada Online (2005, Sept. 19). Retrieved October 3, 2005 from http://www.canadiana.org/eco/english/index.html

Pizza Chef (n.d.). Retrieved October 3, 2005 from http://www.tei-c.org/pizza.html

Projects using the TEI (n.d.). Retrieved October 3, 2005 from http://www.tei-c.org/Applications/

Using XML to generate research tools for Wittgenstein scholars by collaborative groupwork (2003, March 16). Retrieved October 3, 2005 from http://helmer.hit.uib.no/wab/sept1914/

The TEI Guidelines (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2005 from http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines2/

And another thing...

2005-09-26T12:17:00.000-04:00

about this blog action: it does strike me as somewhat ironic that mainstream (read: 'printed' news sources, I guess) media have taken to sourcing blogs as news sources. Originally, blogs were the tool to get around the mass media, and they have now become subsumed in many ways by the very monster they sought to circumvent.

While riding in to work on the subway, reading Dose, I saw that they were sourcing a blog for news. As an edgy, saucy publication, this isn't too big of a surprise, but it does amp up the creator-contact-reader relationship a bit. In fact, Dose has struck me as using this medium-skip in a particularly interesting way: they have had bloggers correspond with them from Rome during the choosing of a new Pope, and have used text messaging for day-long road trips. When posted with pictures, the collage really does verge on a fresh news form. In fact, today's print edition of Dose had a blurb (transit-reader-sized articles are the norm) on a Huston Chronicle employee, Mike Matthews fleeing Hurricane Rita in a Prius, texting updates as he drove. [Interestingly, when I tried to find this story on Dose's website, I couldn't; I had to check the prrint version...] This effectively reduces the cycle of news generation/publishing to virtually nil. The important corollory being that there is little room for editorializing--a sign of 'watering down' or biasing news reporting, something Fox, CNN and other major media conglomerates are often accused of doing. So the question remains: is blogging a more pure form of news reporting?

Bloggers Striking it Rich

2005-09-22T15:20:00.000-04:00

CLose on the heels of my last post, wired.com has an article about blogging for money.

even my grandmother has a blog

2005-09-20T09:31:00.000-04:00

Well, that's not true. My grandmother does not have a blog. But it seems like everyone else does. So I ask myself, what hath this pushbutton publishing wrought?

Back in the day when blogging first began writ large (as in when Blogger, Live Journal, Moveable Type and other services began offering platforms for anyone to self-publish to the Internet) there was a belief that blogging would change the world. And, I suppose there are examples of that. Putting the power of the word into the hands of common folk was seen as a liberating move, something that would circumvent the trend towards media concentration. While there have been some examples of bloggers changing the world, when I see blogs on the Toronto Star, I think that the death of the blog as a form of proletariat publishing is nigh.

'Why' you ask? Well, because I think people are lazy. That and fluid dynamics: we are more likely to take the path of least resistance than to ferret out new ones. Even though there are fora where anyone can post their own ideas--domains that have been taken advantage of by bands, stars, and others in the public eye, the incorporation of the emergent medium into the mainstream signals a weakening of its disruptive power. Now that major media outlets also blog, there is little that is unique about the millions of other blogs.

And then there is that nagging question of authority. when we want accurate information, should we trust the Wall Street Journal, or 'rntIkewlhaxor'?

This post is imperfect, I admit. In truth, I should be a lot more rigorous and find links and research to support my opinions. That would raise the standard of what I'm writing here to a higher level. But, this is kind-of my point: blogging has no required standard save the one self-imposed by the author. While some, such as Warren Kinsella, may have a journalistic background, most are just platforms for personal opinions. It doesn't matter than I don't follow a rigorous academic standard in publishing on my blog. This may, of course, result in me not developing a fan base of devoted readers, but what do I care? If I really want to be a bloglines star, I think it's more a matter of luck and a well-connected social network--more like a high school populatiry contest--than a valid ability to report.

Political Improprieties

2005-09-18T21:02:00.000-04:00

I've got two main concepts on my mind these days: Peter C. Newman's The Secret Mulroney Tapes and Justice Denise Bellamy's final report on the Toronto Computer Leasing Inquiry. I have read the latter, and while I have purchased the former, I have only read the broadsheets' coverage.

The report on the MFP Computer Leasing Inquiry is very well written. In fact, I couldn't tear myself away from it, despite the fact that I was at work. I did, however, find a way to work it into my job--essentially a key underlying theme is information management. But, it's also very disturbing that so much could go so wrong, so badly.

In Justice Bellamy's words.

I have also been quite interested in the dust-up that's occurred since Newman dropped his 'journalistic' bomb. Did Newman cross the line? Did Mulroney do it to himself? Yes, and yes. Newman's come off as a bit mean-spirited, although I can't say that definitively until I've read it for myself. Nevertheless, he did report what Mulroney said, and I can't believe Mulroney thought there was such a thing as 'off the record' with a reporter. I mean, come on--especially after they signed an agreement and everything.

In Newman's words.

I ask myself, though, is public office that bad? Naively, I work under the impression that it is a noble calling to work in the interests of others. Both of these cases are examples of how greed and power claim those interests. Is an inevitability that public office leads one to be a jerk? I don't know.

Poste the Firste

2005-09-12T13:59:00.000-04:00

Testing. Testing.
Can anyone hear me there?
More vocals in the monitor, please.
Drums are good.
Commence bloging.