James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs, "Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future" (Freegovinfo Press, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs, "Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future" (Freegovinfo Press, 2025)
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Adam Kreisberg
Date: December 11, 2025
Guests: Jim Jacobs (Librarian Emeritus, UC San Diego), James Jacobs (Government Information Librarian, Stanford University Libraries)

Main Theme:
An in-depth exploration of the evolution, challenges, and future of preserving US government information—print and digital—with special attention to the institutional, technological, and political hurdles facing information professionals. The episode spotlights the authors' comprehensive new book, their decades of advocacy, the impact of the internet on federal information infrastructure, the OAIS preservation model, and urgent calls to develop collaborative, robust digital preservation strategies in light of current political realities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Authors’ Backgrounds and Motivation

• Collaboration History:

  • James and Jim Jacobs have collaborated for 20+ years, originally co-founding the Freegovinfo.info blog in 2004 (03:19).
  • Both are deeply experienced in government information—Jim for 40+ years across multiple universities and levels of government documents, James for 20+ years as a government information librarian and advocate (03:46–05:47).

• Book's Purpose:

  • To document the historical context of government information preservation, trace how the field has evolved (especially with digital transformation), and guide the profession forward (06:16).
  • “It gave me a chance to put a lot of the history into a single place and document what had happened and why it had happened and why we got to where we are today.”
    — Jim Jacobs [06:16]

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2. Publishing Philosophy and Open Access (07:38–12:22)

• Decision for Open Access & Creative Commons:

  • The authors deliberately published via Creative Commons to ensure the book is “free or inexpensive,” available digitally (PDF, ebook) and in print at cost ($20) to maximize access, especially for LIS students and professionals (08:15–10:14).

• Alignment with Advocacy:

  • Their open-access approach mirrors their advocacy for free and unrestricted public access to government information:
    • “We wanted to get it in the hands of the people who could most use it at the point of need.” — James Jacobs [11:45]

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3. Institutional Infrastructure: GPO, NARA, and Library of Congress (13:19–21:47)

• Key Agencies and Jurisdictions:

  • GPO (Government Publishing Office): Charged with publishing public government documents across branches.
  • NARA (National Archives and Records Administration): Responsible for preserving government records—mainly internal, not necessarily for immediate public access.
  • Library of Congress: Acts as the “Library of Congress,” not a national library; selects information for Congress, not a publisher per se (14:05–17:39).

• Overlaps and Tensions:

  • Digital information has blurred statutory lines; gaps and duplication persist as each agency leans on the others, leading to “a lot of duplication and a lot of gaps” in preservation (20:28–21:47).
  • “All three agencies...say this job is too big for us individually, so we’re going to rely on you other two...What we've seen is there’s a lot of duplication and a lot of gaps.” — Jim Jacobs [21:41]

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4. The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) and the Internet Disruption (24:20–31:20)

• FDLP Origins and Functions:

  • Formed in 1813, expanded in 1962 into regional and selective libraries tasked with providing long-term public access and de facto preservation (24:54–28:06).

• Internet's Disruption:

  • The Internet meant government information could be accessed directly, bypassing physical distribution, thereby reducing libraries’ traditional roles and creating new preservation challenges (29:39).
  • “When the web came in, you didn’t have to distribute multiple copies...That was the disruption.” — Jim Jacobs [29:39]

• Lost Opportunities:

  • Libraries’ roles shrank to mere catalogers, not preservation partners. Authors argue for “equal partnership in digital preservation and long-term access,” distributing preservation responsibility among all stakeholders (31:20–34:11).

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5. Vision for a Distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure (32:23–36:26)

• Proposed Model:
  • Functions—selection, acquisition, storage, metadata, dissemination—are distributed across libraries and archives based on expertise and capacity.
  • Practical example: The Data Rescue Project, where volunteers saved threatened government datasets collaboratively, is cited as a prototype for collective action (35:13).

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6. The OAIS Model: Understanding & Reimagining it for Government Information (37:34–47:08)

• What is OAIS?

  • OAIS (“Open Archival Information System”) is a reference, not technical, model outlining the minimal functions and philosophy needed for digital preservation (39:12).

• Key Metaphor:

  • “If there was a reference model for ground transportation...you could conform...by building a scooter or a Mack truck...OAIS...puts the emphasis on who you’re doing it for, the designated community.” — Jim Jacobs [39:12]

• OAIS’s Role:

  • Provides shared language for interdisciplinary, cross-institution collaboration.
  • It is flexible, not overly technical, and is meant to suit each community’s needs.
  • “OAIS gives us...a common language, a common literature to communicate what...we mean by digital preservation.” — James Jacobs [45:52]

• Five Guarantees of Preservation (highlighted as the heart of good preservation work):

  • Not just preserved, but also: discoverable, deliverable, readable, understandable, and usable (47:08).

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7. Current Political Context and Its Impact on Preservation (49:56–61:01)

• Reliance on Government for Preservation is Risky:

  • Past decades have shown it is unsafe to rely solely on governmental self-preservation. Information can be altered, withdrawn, or lost due to funding, policy, or technical failures (51:33).
  • “The thing...we have been saying for 20 years...is that we can’t rely on the government solely to preserve its own information for a lot of reasons.” — Jim Jacobs [51:44]

• Recent, Alarming Developments:

  • Current (Trump) administration is removing information for political purposes—erasing inconvenient data and historical records, a new escalation beyond previous instances of benign neglect or technical loss (54:49–55:23).
  • Yet, this crisis has galvanized a new wave of activists and professionals:
    • “That’s the silver lining...now there’s a whole lot of people...who are like, oh, this information is really important. And...if I see something, I’ve got to save something.” — James Jacobs [56:54]

• Need for Pre-emptive, Collaborative Infrastructure:

  • Preservation must happen as information is created and released, not just in reaction to potential deletion (58:04).

• Historical Context:

  • While the problem is acute today, information restriction is a recurring issue—past administrations have narrowed access through budget, technology, or policy (59:16–60:27).

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8. Q&A: Looking Forward (62:01–66:58)

• Current Projects:

  • James Jacobs: Continues with the End of Term Web Archive (preserving .gov domains at each presidential transition) and is developing tools for making web-archived materials more discoverable (62:20–64:12).
  • Jim Jacobs: Interested in research on the PDF file format’s preservation challenges, inspired by issues surfaced in the book (64:12–65:22).

• Call to Action for the Next Generation:

  • Hopes the book will inspire younger librarians and researchers to tackle unresolved problems, e.g., expanding inventories to data repositories and social media (65:22–66:40).
  • Offers openness for collaboration and education with other library schools and organizations (66:40).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s kind of scary to say that...my association with this kind of topic does stretch back 40 years.” — Jim Jacobs [04:48]
• “We both feel that print is its own user interface that is different from the digital user interface, and some people prefer that.” — Jim Jacobs [08:47]
• “We wanted to get it in the hands of the people who could most use it at the point of need.” — James Jacobs [11:45]
• “GPO has always been responsible for published government information...NARA, its job was to deal with records management, those internal records.” — Jim Jacobs [18:05]
• “When the web came in, you didn’t have to distribute multiple copies of digital documents geographically...That was the disruption.” — Jim Jacobs [29:39]
• “What could have been done is GPO could have said, we need partners in preserving this information and guaranteeing long-term access to it. And that hasn’t happened yet.” — Jim Jacobs [31:20]
• “If you’re storing without access, you’re just hoarding.” — Jim Jacobs (paraphrasing James Jacobs) [48:25]
• “This administration...is the first one that has ever decided that past administration, past policy, past information was no longer necessary to be preserved...Rather than just simply, you know, left in libraries.” — James Jacobs [54:49]
• “We need the involvement of people whose primary job is not to create the information or to change the information, but to preserve the information.” — Jim Jacobs [60:27]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:19–06:40 – Authors’ backgrounds and longstanding collaboration
• 07:38–12:22 – Publishing decision: open access, Creative Commons, and philosophy
• 13:19–21:47 – Overview of GPO, NARA, Library of Congress: roles, overlaps, gaps
• 24:20–34:11 – History and disruption of FDLP; the impact of the internet; need for new preservation partnerships
• 37:34–47:08 – The OAIS Model explained and reimagined for government information
• 49:56–61:01 – Current preservation challenges under present administration and why collaboration is essential
• 62:01–66:58 – Next steps for the authors and call for involvement from new voices in the field

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sweeping yet detailed look at the changing landscape of government information preservation. Jim and James Jacobs, drawing on decades of experience and advocacy, argue that facing down the risks of digital loss, political manipulation, and overwhelming information scale will require a new, distributed, and deeply collaborative approach among libraries, archives, and the broader community. Their new book—freely available—serves as both a historical primer and a call to action for the next generation of librarians, archivists, and engaged citizens.

Transcript

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[Jim Jacobs]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the New Books Network Library Science Channel. My name is Adam Kreisberg. I'm your host for today's episode, and I'm an associate professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science. I'm really happy to be joined today by the authors of Preserving Government Information, Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs. Welcome, both of you, and thanks again for being here today.

[Jim Jacobs]

Thank you, Adam.

[James Jacobs]

Thank you, Adam.

[Jim Jacobs]

Great.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Really quickly, I'm just going to do a quick introduction formally and then we'll we'll get right into it. So we've got Jim Jacobs, who's the librarian emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and James Jacobs, the Government Information Librarian at Stanford University Libraries. So again, we're really pleased to have you both on the podcast today and to be talking about this book, which is a very timely addition to a lot of conversations happening in the field today broadly around digital preservation and government information, which is both part of a long continuum of work and also the subject of some much more recent developments within the federal government information landscape.

So, great. Well, I guess to start off with, and either of you can take this one first, just like to hear a little bit about your backgrounds and kind of what led you both to collaborating on this book? What were some of the things in your professional lives and backgrounds that kind of culminated in this particular book project?

[James Jacobs]

Okay, I'll go. This is James, not Jim. I think this is sort of a culmination of 20 plus years of collaboration with Jim. We started a blog called freegovinfo.info back in 2004 originally to highlight an article that we wrote for.

Gosh. What was the name of the journal?

[Jim Jacobs]

Journal of Academic Librarianship.

[James Jacobs]

That's right, Journal of Academic Librarianship called the Once and Future fdlp. So we've been thinking about this. The FDLP is the Federal Depository Library Program for those of your listeners who don't know.

So we've been, we've been thinking about this and I've been thinking about it for 20 years. Jim has been thinking about it for longer than that. So I'm sort of a Johnny come lately to the, to the sphere as it were. But we've, you know, we've both been working in the, in the government information realm, Jim, as a data librarian, myself as a government information librarian for a long time. And this is just, you know, 20 years of us thinking about and working on preservation and collection development and.

Research consultations and research support of using government information.

[Jim Jacobs]

And I'm Jim. My, my association with this kind of topic does stretch back 40 years. It's kind of scary to say that.

I worked at four universities and in each of those I've had a job that has involved government documents at either the local or state or federal or international level. So I've worked with all levels of government information. But the bulk of my career I worked as data services librarian for social science data at University of California, San Diego. And when I retired from ucsd, I worked for the center for Research Libraries as a consultant on auditing several digital libraries as part of. And they're conforming to the OAIS Preservation standard.

So over those years.

I've been working both with digital information integrally. It's been an integral part of my job. And even going back into the 80s when we libraries weren't really digitally set up, I was already starting to do things with digital collections and work. And when I wasn't working in a government documents department, I was supporting government documents.

So it's, it's been something that I've lived through and seen a lot of. And one of the things that interests me about this book is it gave me a chance to put a lot of the history into a single place and document what had happened and why it had happened and why we got to where we are today.

[James Jacobs]

I think that's one of the most important parts of the book, Jim, is that it gives this historical context to, you know, to government information and managing government information in libraries and where we were, where we are and where we're going.

[Jim Jacobs]

Yeah, because where we are is from where we came from. And we're doing a lot of things, trying to. We're trying to transition to a new future that's transformative, and we haven't done that fully yet. But we're hoping that this book will help guide us.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yes, certainly. And you can see in the book how much of the historical context is sort of seamlessly integrated with some of the things you all get to towards the end of the book around, you know, ideas and solutions and suggestions for how this field or this area of professional practice might move forward.

[Jim Jacobs]

Really quick.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Before we get into some of the contents of the book, though, I do have a quick. I have a quick publishing question as well, which is sort of around your decision making around how to sort of how to actually publish this book. You know, always interested in talking about scholarly communications as well. So, you know, if you, if you could maybe reflect a little bit on the decision around publishing the book via Creative Commons license and kind of how the distribution.

Workflow has worked out for you both.

[Jim Jacobs]

I can, I can address most of that. I think.

One of the things that, that we knew before we started writing was that we wanted this to be a book that could be used in library and information schools as a textbook. That meant that we wanted to make sure that it was either free or inexpensive.

That meant that as we started talking to publishers, we were looking at publishers that had some sort of a digital free or open access policy.

We also wanted to have a print version because I think we both feel that print is its own user interface that is different from the digital user interface, and some people prefer that. And it's actually better in some ways for some purposes to have a print. It also would ensure that the book would have a long life, even if our distribution of it from the FreeGov Info blog or the University of California's digital repository or Stanford's digital repository went dark or were difficult to reach for some reason, it gave a permanence to it. So we also had looked at commercial publishers, but we finished the book in late 2024, and the publishing process going with any commercial publishers was going to take a year or two. And after the last election, we Wanted to get the book out as quickly as possible.

I had some experience working with my wife, who's an author, on self publishing, so she was able to coach me a little bit some of the. The technical details of. Of how to get a book out and how to get it into different. Different formats. So that took some learning.

But we were able to get it out as. As a print book, as a PDF, which is saying pagination and look and feel is the print book. And also it's an ebook so that people can use it in any way they want. And we're able to keep the price of the print book at cost, which is $20. And so we don't make any money on it, and have the digital copy free to everybody, so everybody can grab it, even if they have a mild interest in it or only an interest in a chapter or an appendix. Does that answer your question?

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

[James Jacobs]

I would just add that we had that same experience with Journal of Academic Librarianship, where we had this article. We thought it was a really important and impactful article, and because it was published in a journal, we probably would have gotten, you know, 25 readers over the years, but we decided to make it more digitally available and started writing a blog and posted to the. To the website, and we did the same thing with the book. And I think through that kind of free and open distribution, I think we've. We've reached a lot more people than we would have if it. If it was just a print book that you could have, that you could get in a library or, or I don't know if any bookstores would even carry a.

[Jim Jacobs]

Or if you had to pay 60 or $80 for it.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah, yeah. Like, lots of academic books are even. Even more than that these days for some publishers. So, yeah, we wanted to get it in the hands of the people who could most use it at the point of need.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah, absolutely. And it also, you know, having read it, it kind of aligns with the publishing philosophy, also aligns with the philosophy of information access and distribution in the book. So. Or that you all are advocating. So that also is nice. And. And also it comes through in the pages.

[Jim Jacobs]

Oh, good.

[Adam Kreisberg]

So. So kind of thinking through the book and, and the questions are, are maybe going to follow roughly some of the topics that you all cover in the book? And as you've already mentioned, this book is pretty comprehensive.

[Jim Jacobs]

It's.

[Adam Kreisberg]

It covers a pretty long period of time, and.

It also. It also does a really good job of unpacking some of the fundamental concepts of Digital preservation, like the OAS model. So we'll see if we get into that as well. But, but to start with, I want to maybe get into some of this history. So if we could talk as a way, a way into that, if we could talk a little bit about kind of the three main information organizations that you all discuss in the book and outline their, their different responsibilities and jurisdictions, because that's, I think, really helpful for understanding kind of the, that the book outlines. So we've got the gpo, the Government Publishing Office, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, nara. So if we could start there maybe in sort of outlining what each of those entities do statutorily and kind of where some of the overlaps maybe between their responsibilities are. Because I think that source of friction was one of the key areas for me, at least in your book, that I hadn't really necessarily thought about, particularly where GPO kind of ends up kind of touching responsibilities that the Library of Congress or National Archives maybe had done at one time and are reconsidering or thinking about how their responsibilities might be shifting.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah. Yeah, I can start, I guess, and Jim can, can backfill. I, I think the, the thing that, that people need to realize is that they're in, in this space, there's public information and there's archival records, and for the most part it's gpo. And the National Archives, Library of Congress is sort of a complimentary role maybe to both of them. So the Government Publishing Office historically has been charged with publishing reports and documents of Congress as well as the, the Executive Branch and the Judicial branch of public information, public record or public documents. And then nara, the National Archives, has been charged historically with being the, the record keeper of the government of the Executive branch. Those records are more like internal, internal memos and the internal workings of executive branch agencies. And so they're not necessarily meant for public access, although there is a FOIA process, the Freedom of Information act process, where any, any person can request information from a, from an agency and that agency has to go through a process in order to release those records. But the, in the record space, there's agencies are given a wide berth and a wide leeway into what they consider records that should be preserved for the long term. So in the book, I think we mention only about 1 or 2 or 3%, depending on the agency of internal records actually get published or get preserved for the long term. At the National Archives and each agency.

There are certain things that they can schedule, they're called record schedules.

That they can Say this swath of information, like the communication of the director or the head of the agency gets preserved for the long term. But this kind of records, you know, lower level functionaries in an agency, their emails and communication don't necessarily need to be preserved for the long term. So that's historically where the GPO and the, and the, and NARA have sort of split responsibilities. The Library of Congress, I think everyone or most people think of as a quote unquote, national library. But they are, they're not a national library. They're specifically a Library of Congress. And so it just so happens that the copyright offices within the Library of Congress said historically when materials were published, they would send a copy of whatever book or whatever was published to the Library of Congress as part of the copyright process. But they are not a publisher of information per se, like the gpo. And like, like nara. Did I explain that well, Jim? Did I miss anything?

[Jim Jacobs]

Yeah, I, I did a couple of things.

[James Jacobs]

I got into the weeds really fast.

[Jim Jacobs]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's confusing if you're not working with the things. And a lot of us work only with part of them. A lot of us work with gpo, but not nara or Library of Congress, but not gpo.

The rubric I use to separate the GPO and NARA responsibilities is that GPO has always been responsible for published government information. That's information that was explicitly designed to be released and published for the public. Whereas nara, its job was to deal with.

Records management, and those are those internal records. And very few of those internal records end up being preserved and, and then made available to the public until long after they were originally created. So it's two different batches of information. It's truly published public information and information that after the fact has been selected as records that we don't want to throw away.

[James Jacobs]

And then there's things like the foreign relations of the United States, which popped into the news last week. It's a published document that the GPO publishes, but it's internal records of the State Department, historical records.

[Jim Jacobs]

Those things can overlap. And in the paper era, the GPO was responsible for publications and they're responsible for records. And it was pretty clear cut. There was some overlap, but it was pretty clear cut. The Library of Congress.

On the other hand, acted as a library. They decided what things they would select for their constituent, which is Congress. So they were selecting information by Congress as well as for Congress and about Congress. And they actually ended up, Library of Congress ended up with more flexibility in the digital age by just follow following normal library procedures for selecting and acquiring information. They had a great deal of flexibility in what they would do and how they would do it, whereas gpo, for example, was limited in what it could do by a definition in the law of what a publication was. And a lot of the digitally published information on the web didn't fit that, or at least they didn't say that it did, so they wouldn't collect information off the web. For instance, NARA also was narrowly defined as a records management.

That's changing a little bit where now Congress has told NARA to treat everything on the web as records so that now agencies are scheduling their public information, their published public information the same way they schedule their private internal communications for preservation or not. Which means a lot of information is not getting scheduled for preservation because it doesn't deal with current business and they don't see the long term value of it. GPO therefore has no specific role because there's no new definition of what publications is. So there's now a new tension between who's going to collect what. All three agencies, interestingly say this job is too big for us individually, so we're going to rely on you other two. What we looked at in part of the book is how successful that's been and what we've seen is there's a lot of duplication and a lot of gaps. So they haven't yet sorted out for the digital age how to use each of their strengths to make sure that the things that need to get preserved do get preserved by at least one of those agencies.

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[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah, and I would say that was one of the more interesting kind of analyses when, when you were all were looking at examining sort of like what's on the gpo, what's on the, in their repository and thinking about which branches it's coming from and trying to compare that to some of the gaps, or rather compare that in order to identify the gaps relative to kind of what the Library of Congress and National Archives have published on their sites. And I think that is speaking personally as someone who felt like I have a fairly good handle on some of this stuff, you know, it does get quite confusing quite quickly. And in the book, you know, the writing and tone, you do a really good job of trying to lay it out as clearly as possible. And I can, you can tell actually that the audience might be mlis students or emerging professionals. That actually leads me to my next question, which is about another kind of piece of the Federal Information Infrastructure, which is the Depository Library System.

So again, maybe if you could briefly introduce the Federal Depository Library System and think about, or and maybe explain sort of, given what we just talked about, how the Internet disrupted, to use a very Silicon Valley term for things the Internet tends to do, how it disrupted the kind of status quo for how the FDLP helped provide access to government information around the country.

[James Jacobs]

You want me to start?

So the FDLP has been around for a long time in one form or another since 1813.

At least. The, you know, the historical underpinnings started around then.

And in the, in the print age, in the, in the age of, of paper documents. It was a, a really interesting and, and I think really critical to, to, to the democratic process in that you had a, a central government agency that was publishing information. This is the, the Government Printing Office at that time, not the Government Publishing Office. They changed their name, I don't know, about 15 years ago.

And they would distribute information out to libraries around the country. Right now there's 1100 or give or take, about 1100 libraries around the country that are federal depository libraries. And they are tasked with, with receiving government publications, putting them on the shelves, giving public access to them, and sort of a de facto preservation of government publications for the long term.

There's lots of different kinds of libraries, law libraries, academic libraries, federal libraries.

County libraries, public libraries, all kinds of different sizes and shapes of libraries historically have received.

From very small percentages of the, of the federal publishing output to larger ones. And there's a system started in 1962 in which we, we created regional libraries. There were in theory 50 in each state. There was a regional library that was tasked with receiving everything that was printed and preserving everything that was printed and distributed. Selective libraries like Stanford, like ucsd, have various levels of receipt of publications and they could, they could weed their collections if they wanted to. After five years they could just, you know, if they accepted something after five years, they could get rid of it if they wanted to. There are lots of libraries, especially academic libraries, that, that sort of act like regional libraries. My library, for example, we're an 85% selective, so we receive almost everything and some of the things we don't receive. Our law library is actually a, also a depository and they received sort of, you know, bills and statutes and legal kinds of information that we don't have to. So in effect we're sort of a regional library without the name of a regional. And.

We have deep and rich research collections. So.

We don't weed our government information collections. We keep them for the long term, thinking that, you know, a historian in 50 years might need this document. And if we don't have it, then, then where will I get it? I think the, the fdlp, the, the Internet has, has. I wouldn't say that it's, that it's destroyed the fdlp because I think the concepts of the fdlp, the collecting, preserving, describing and giving access to government information, those key tenets of the FDLP are maybe even more important now because there isn't a way to distribute information.

And libraries are kind of slow. But I think.

We'Re starting to move into the area of digital preservation and the importance of it. That wasn't really short, but.

[Adam Kreisberg]

No, that's good though. I, I think similar to the overlapping responsibilities of the GPO and NARA and Library of Congress, the FDLP system is also can be kind of opaque to those who aren't really kind of really embedded in, in it and in the day to day operations of sort of not just what's happening now, but how things maybe used to be in a predominantly printed, you know, publishing workflow.

[Jim Jacobs]

Yeah, I think the disruption came because in the print era, in order to get, to give people in the country access to printed information, you had to print a lot of copies and distribute them physically all over the country. And libraries provided a good platform for doing that. Almost anywhere in the country, you could get to a local library and get some information about and copies of government information. So access was through distribution. When the web came in, you didn't have to distribute multiple copies of digital documents geographically. You could distribute them directly from the publisher, the agency, or from the printer, the publisher, GPO directly to the public. Which meant that that role of the libraries of receiving stuff on deposit and making it physically available to people was not there anymore. That was the disruption.

What we think should have happened is that when that became evident, we needed to give the libraries a new equal partnership in digital preservation and long term access. And what GPO chose to do and libraries went along with quite happily because of the way things were, is to say libraries didn't have to get anything anymore. Therefore there was no deposit into them and their role was.

Reduced to a very small role of putting records in their catalogs. And for people who used library catalogs to find government documents, they could still find them as if they were in their local library. What could have been done is GPO could have said, we need partners in preserving this information and guaranteeing long term access to it. And that hasn't happened yet. And that's one of the things that we're hoping that we can provide a pathway towards still.

[Adam Kreisberg]

So just to kind of maybe unpack this a little bit further, when you say partners alongside gpo, are you talking about the federal agencies that are publishing this information? Are we talking about.

The depository libraries, the National Archives, or all of the above?

[Jim Jacobs]

I guess all of the above is the short answer to your question.

The model that we suggest for the future for digital preservation infrastructure would.

Take all the functions of preservation, which includes selecting information, acquiring information, storing the bits, making them discoverable and distributable, and to the end users, readable and understandable and usable. Take all of those different functions and instead of having every either agency or a government publisher like gpo, or archive like nara, or every individual library all over the country having to do all of those functions and duplicate all those functions individually, you'd spread those functions out over all of them. So that one library might be responsible for collecting information on economics and building, therefore a virtual collection of economic data.

Another library might be responsible for selecting information that was for water policy. Another might be responsible for selecting information for agriculture. Other libraries might be responsible for, once that information was selected, for actually ingesting it and making it preservable. Another One might be another library might be responsible for creating and maintaining metadata for that information. Other libraries might be responsible for actually storing the bits and so forth. And in the last couple of chapters, we outline both from the functional roles that the OAIS preservation model.

Specifies and then from the perspective of the individual libraries, what kind of things might you do and what kind of things could be done. We think that by distributing it, you make it, you make it much easier for individual small libraries and large libraries, small archives and large archives, government agencies without any real preservation responsibility, government agencies with preservation responsibility, all to participate in one big system that ends up being the digital preservation infrastructure that ensures that everything that needs to be preserved is preserved. And preservation would then include all of the things, not just the storing of the bits, but the discovery and delivery and readability and usability of the information.

[James Jacobs]

And I think you're starting to see that happening. For example, the Data Rescue Project.

Has been in the news recently. It's a bunch of data librarians looking to collect and preserve government data, government data sets specifically, that were, that were in danger of being erased from the Internet. They created a whole process where they had, you know, a thousand volunteers who were downloading data sets and cataloging them, first in a spreadsheet, but then uploading them to ICPSR at the University of Michigan, which is a long standing social science data archive. And so they. You had this, you had the collection description and Preservation act and access distribute across a whole network of people who had the skills and both the technical skills and the subject expertise to deal with data sets. And we're looking to do something like that for all libraries.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah, the Data Rescue Project, a fascinating initiative, quite timely and probably the subject of a future book. Perhaps.

There's plenty to sort of think about there.

[James Jacobs]

And my other hat.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah, that's right.

I wanted to kind of also.

Talk about the OAIS model before we get too far into some of the politics of our current moment, which actually that data Rescue project conversation really is about. But one thing I also really appreciated about the book was the description of the OAIS model kind of in the abstract and then as it applies to this, to this community and this information situation before. You also, Jim, as you were just mentioning, kind of talk about expanding it and rather reimagining it and I guess is a better way to describe it, reimagining OAIS and how it would apply to this current government preservation infrastructure. So I guess it's not a surprise to hear that you've had a hand in some.

Trustworthy repository certification work, given the way that the book talks about the OAIS model. So I guess the question is, what are some of the ways in which you think the OAIS model should be updated or changed? You know, again, maybe speaking as a educator in an MLIS program, when I teach this model, we're still kind of teaching it as the high level specification or theoretical model, kind of still based on the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, the original version of it.

And in the book you propose some, as you were just hinting at some interesting ways of reimagining or thinking about the responsibilities and distributing those. So if you could talk a bit about some of those suggestions and how the OAS model can continue to serve us as well as it has in the past into the future.

[Jim Jacobs]

That's a big question.

[Adam Kreisberg]

I know.

[Jim Jacobs]

Let me refer you to the book.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yes, everyone should read the book.

[Jim Jacobs]

I think if you're not a preservationist, if it's not your job to preserve particularly digital information, you may not know anything at all about OAS except that it sounds complex and expensive and difficult and, and arcane. I don't think any of those things are true, though. Having worked with it a lot.

I see it as a very simple and elegant document. It's called.

A reference model. And a reference model is a specific kind of specification. It's not technical, doesn't tell you how to do things or even what to do. The analogy we use in the book is if there was a reference model or ground transportation, the reference model might say a ground transportation vehicle has to start and stop and turn and steer.

And you could conform to that reference model by building a scooter or a Mack truck or a station wagon or a school bus or a pogo stick. They can all stop, they can all start and they can all steer. And what you do depends on who you're doing it for. Are you transporting kids? Then do a school bus, don't do a pogo stick. If you're transporting milk, do a tanker, don't do a pickup truck, and so forth. And that's really what OAS does. And it puts the infant, the emphasis on who you're doing it for, which they call the designated community of the OAIS institution. So if you're an institution that wants to preserve information, the first thing you do is you say, who are we doing this for? And once you've just defined that community that you're doing it for, then that leads you to the to answer questions like what information do they need? That's the Information I'll select and acquire and preserve. How will they look for it? That tells me how I want to make it discoverable. How, how do they want to acquire? Do they want individual book like things in PDFs or do they want large data files? Do they want maps? Do they want interactive things? How are they going to, after we deliver it to them, how are they going to read or understand or use it? And all of the answers to all of those kinds of questions which OAIS helps you ask, determine how you will design your pogo stick or school bus. If that's not carrying the metaphor too far.

[Adam Kreisberg]

No, I thought it was a helpful metaphor because I have, I have found, you know, in the classroom, some students kind of intuitively understand what the model is meant to describe, while others really struggle with it because I think their instinct is to assume that it's much more technical than it actually is.

[Jim Jacobs]

There's a lot of technicality to it and the technicality is good. It helps us. What the technical details of oais do is they give us a vocabulary for, for discussing and describing and talking about what we're doing.

The utility of that is that if we're very specific about who we're doing this for, it's easier for us to evaluate how well we're doing.

If we don't specify who we're doing it for and what our goals are for their. For that communities to be able to use the information that we're preserving, it's harder for us to do.

One of the things we go into a little bit in the book is the difficulty of.

Determining what metrics to use to determine if you've successfully preserved everything that you should have. Because digital objects are so much different than physical bound books, it's easy to say we got the entire run of a journal and we got the both volumes of a two volume set of books. But when you're dealing with digital information, it can be packaged and repackaged.

And delivered in so many different ways. We're talking about raw information in a way that we don't have good metrics to know whether or not we got the thing that we need to get. By concentrating on designated communities, we can say this group of people wants for instance, PDFs, so we've gotten PDFs and this is how many PDFs we've got. This community needs data sets and we've gotten the data sets and the metadata that go along with them. James has a good example of a collection that Internet Archive is doing of the military industrial PowerPoint complex, where someone's taking PowerPoints that have been gathered from military websites and put them together into a single collection with the idea that some people will want to see how the military is communicating what it's doing.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah, I love that example.

[Jim Jacobs]

So I think oais. I don't think OAIS needs to be updated and I think it needs to be understood as.

Something that's, that's actually easy to understand and elegant in its simplicity, with the detail being something that not everyone needs to get into. But the detail is there to help people who are actually doing that particular part of, of the preservation activities. And there are a bunch of parts, so not everybody has to be expert in all the parts of oais.

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[James Jacobs]

Yeah, I think it's, it's really important. It's. It's sort of like if you were speaking Spanish and I was speaking Korean. How are we going to communicate? And OAI S gives us, gives us a common, a common language, a common, a common literature to, to communicate what, what exactly we mean by digital preservation.

[Jim Jacobs]

And we, the different communities that need to cooperate in the digital preservation infrastructure, use the same terms to mean different things. A record for a, for a cataloger means one thing. A record for a database administrator means something else. A record for records manager means something completely different.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah. A record for a public person means.

[Jim Jacobs]

A record for a librarian. A real person who just needs information and doesn't know what it's called is still something else. Yeah, but OAIS gives us that language that we can talk across disciplines of preservation so that behind the scenes.

We can talk, not at cross purposes, but we can cooperate and collaborate. And OAS gives us the vocabulary for doing that. Yeah.

[James Jacobs]

I think one of the best pieces of the book is the five guarantees that. I don't know if, Jim, you were the one who originally put that together, but I always thought it was such a simple but elegant description. So information not just preserved, but discoverable. Not just discoverable, but deliverable. Not just deliverable as bits, but also readable by humans. Not just readable, but understandable. And not just understandable, but usable. It sort of hits, you know, all of the levels of what it means to preserve digital information.

[Jim Jacobs]

Yeah, I did. I extracted those from the. From oas. OAS doesn't say it that way.

But I, I, but I think that's what they mean. Those are. Those are guarantees that if you're a fully functional OAIS preservation institution, those are the guarantees that you're making to your public and by it. The. The one point that those five guarantees emphasize is it's not just storing bits.

Someone else has said, maybe you said this, James, that if you're storing without access, you're just hoarding. And you have to do more than just store the bits. You have to make sure that there's ways for people to discover the information that you've saved as bits. And given the scope and breadth of government information, that becomes more and more difficult to do because there's so much of it and it's in it, and it spans so many different kinds of things, from those internal records to standard publications like the Congressional Record, to things like census data.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah. You know, the, the level of coordination that you are suggesting or hinting at, you know, here, but also in the book is, Is. Can be. Can feel staggering. And yet, of course, of course it should feel like that because we're talking about the federal government, which is a bureaucracy complex beyond most people's kind of comprehension. And so the idea that we need to take these models, like the OAS model, and kind of blow them open and consider how different groups, all with a stake in this work, can coordinate and collaborate is. Is really kind of at the heart of, I think, what you, what you get to. Towards the end of the book.

You know, the, the book, again.

You just, you just plugged it. But I'll just remind everyone that the book is available via Creative Commons license as open access. So, you know, if you're, if this conversation is. We're really just scratching the surface of what, what you both get into in the book. So I do encourage everyone to download a copy and read some of this for themselves. But that does kind of get me to.

What you wind up at at the end of the book, which is around some of the suggestions or potential paths forward for this community. And really only in the final chapter. And thinking mentioning the authorship timeline as you did earlier, maybe for me, makes this a little more clear.

Really only talking about the kind of current government and current administration's stance and position towards. Towards information in the final chapter or so, if I can recall correctly. So maybe if we could talk about some of those recommendations and then also how the current government's perspective on information management and publication may complicate some of that work.

[Jim Jacobs]

Well, I can start with something very simple, which is at the very beginning of the book, we make a point of going into, probably in more detail than anyone wants to read, the fact that libraries have for literally decades relied on the government preserving its own information.

And the thing that when the digital age started, that James and I have been saying for 20 years, or in some cases 30 years.

Is that we can't rely on the government solely to preserve its own information for a lot of reasons. Single point of failure, if they decide not to or turn it off or alter it or run out of funding, they. Their policies may not be the policies that best address the needs of a very diverse community of users, which is even more diverse in the digital age than it was in the print age, because digital information can be used differently than print information was all used the same.

And just because of the quantity and breadth of the kind of information makes it difficult for people to drill in and find. If we saved everything, if the National Archives had every digital bit that the government had ever.

Produced, it would be impossible to find anything because there's just too much. And it needs collaboration.

It needs a lot of people saying, this community needs this kind of information and I want to make sure it doesn't get overlooked. And another community, another institution saying, this community also needs some of that same information, but needs it for a different reason because they're going to use it differently. And creating virtual collections that can have different user interfaces to them, that can have different delivery paths for them and provide different support for them. That's where the collaboration comes in.

Libraries and archives doing what they've always done, which is working for a community to satisfy the needs of the community, but doing it as part of a preservation infrastructure so that everything is there so that people can find whatever they need, depending on where they're starting from. And each individual library or archive doesn't have to replicate and duplicate what. What some other library has already done. James, I was going to hope that you would address our current situation.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah, so the. I think Jim and I agree, and many government information librarians agree, that government information is the instantiation of what the government is working on at that moment. And that changes over time as policy focuses change and, and legislation changes and historical moments change and all of that. But the importance of libraries is that they have always collected that material to give access to the. The idea that in a democracy, governments change. But you can still go back and find out at any. At any historical moment what the government was thinking and what the government was working on.

This administration, I think, is the first one that has ever decided that past administration, past policy, past information was no longer necessary to be preserved, to be accessible, and that past information.

Was maybe against their current policy initiatives and so therefore needed to be erased rather than just simply, you know, left in libraries.

I think that. I think all the things that Jim and I have been talking about is this current moment is sort of a silver lining because it. It's gotten a lot of people, and I always like to look for silver linings. It's one of my. It's a feature, it's not a bug, I guess, of my personality. But I think there's a lot more people who, you know, five years ago, Jim and I were talking and it was crickets because nobody, everyone thought, well, yeah, we should preserve stuff. But I can't do it. I don't know how to do it. I don't. It's too much, too big for me now. There's a whole lot of people, librarians and archivists and.

Other. Other academics, other people outside of government who are like, oh, this information is really important. And, you know, if I see something, I've got to save something. I can't. I can't. I can no longer let it go and, and assume that the government will. Will preserve that information once the policy changes or once they have different historical moments. So that's the, the silver lining that I'm seeing is that a lot of people are now getting together, starting to. Starting to meet and starting to talk to each other to, to define the problem and to figure out how to move forward with that. With that problem.

[Jim Jacobs]

And one of the things that, that we spent a lot of time on doing data analysis on in the book is identifying gaps that already exist in digital preservation of government information. And we sort of knew that those gaps exist. But frankly, even I was surprised at the scope and breadth of those gaps.

But the good news about that was that for the most part, they were. They weren't that anybody was maliciously trying to erase information from the past. It was just that nobody could preserve everything. They were gaps because they were mistakes, and there were gaps because we didn't have the infrastructure to successfully preserve them. What we've seen in the first Trump administration and now in the second Trump administration is that when an executive branch wants to just erase stuff, they can do it. And there's. There's just no legal or policy or technical way that we can guarantee that that information won't be lost.

[James Jacobs]

And they can do it fast.

[Jim Jacobs]

They can do it faster than we can. We can save it. And one of the big messages of the end of the book is that what we need is an infrastructure that we. That we can preserve information as it's created and released, not as it's being deleted and destroyed.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Yeah. The trust that's kind of built into this system, or has been traditionally built into this system, is really being tested or I guess, shaken when, as you mentioned, the administration are in a situation where the government decides that they just want to delete or destroy information that doesn't conform to their current policy positions.

[Jim Jacobs]

It's important too, Adam, to recognize that it's not just the Trump administration. The Trump administration is done more, faster and at greater scale than anyone's ever seen before. That's true. But we've always seen governments that want to control or limit or reduce or limit act access to government information.

We've seen there was a series of publications that ALA did for years called Less Access to Less Information by and about the Government.

And it documented minutely that kind of thing. That happened over about a. I forget the time period, 20 or 30 year period.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah. And we had it. I had it digitized by the Internet Archive and it's now all available. All the whole series is available on FreeGov info because it is so important. And it is something that has historically happened.

[Jim Jacobs]

And we've seen things like when the shift from print to microfiche.

Happened, the decision was made that it was more important to save money by printing on fiche instead of paper than it was to have preservable objects. And they decided to use fish that we knew was not going to last very long. And we've seen the Reagan administration cut back on publications just the way we've seen the Trump administration cut back on data collection.

So it's not something that's going to be solved at the end of this administration, regardless of who's elected by the government. It won't be solved by the government. We need the involvement of people who, whose primary job is not to create the information or to change the information, but to preserve the information. It's not the libraries and archives job is to record the record of government, not to implement the policies of government.

[Adam Kreisberg]

Exactly. And I think, you know, at the end of the book you do work to provide kind of a path forward really. And as you mentioned, one that isn't in direct response to the current administration but is rather kind of a positive and a positive path forward for this infrastructure which like many elements of the federal government has this long trajectory throughout, let's just say the last hundred plus years and which, which doesn't turn on a dime overnight. And so which we need to continue to think about in that long term. Thinking. Well, thanks again for, for both of your time. I don't want to take up too much of your time. As I mentioned, there's so much more that you get into in the book that we haven't even really touched on here in our conversation. But I did want to ask you.

[Jim Jacobs]

Both.

[Adam Kreisberg]

What else you're working on and maybe how you're going to continue to expand on this work. I know you have the blog as well that you're still publishing on, but now that you've done this huge book project, I wonder what other projects you're both cooking up.

[James Jacobs]

Yeah.

I'm keeping busy. I've been working for a long time before the book was published. I've worked on the End of Term Archive for many years, since 2008. The end of Term Archive is a as a web archive at the Internet Archive that seeks to preserve the entire dot gov web domain at the end of each presidential term. Especially important this time around. And so it's been in the news a lot. I'm starting to see a lot more meetings. So I'm going to gatherings and convenings of various folks who are interested in preserving the output of the government, whether that's data or publications or archival records. And so in the next couple of months I have three or four meetings that I'm that I'm going to. I think the book is going to be really important for those meetings and I've made sure that people that are involved there are going to have a copy of that book.

I'm also trying to figure out better ways to access the materials that we have collected and so I'm. I'm working on a grant now to, to extract information from web archives from the Internet Archive, from Heritrix, from, from other sorts of web archival collections and make them more findable and more. More accessible. So I'm looking to do that in the, in the next, in the next year.

[Jim Jacobs]

I have a folder in my computer with all the projects that I would make notes of to work on next. As I was working on the book and I'm not sure which one of those I'm going to do, one that still has some attraction to me intersects with the book and digital preservation to a bit. I was starting to gather information about the, the PDF format because.

We rely so heavily on it and it's so complex and has some dangers built into it, I think in terms of long term preservation.

That.

I think it would behoove the community to think about that particular format in relation to other optional formats as a way of communicating information and the decisions about which format to choose gets into some of the things that we talk about in one of the appendices about the.

Essential content of digital objects. So I'm kind of interested in that. I think I might follow up on that. But one thing that I'm hoping the book will do is spur other people, younger librarians, younger than I am, to address some of the things that we only got so far in. And I didn't do that academic thing about listing the research projects that this could start at the end of each chapter. But I think we implied things where we said this is, this is all we know now there's a lot more that needs to be looked at. For example, just in looking at the inventory of government information, we did not [e-mail] explicitly or all the, all the data repositories that that points to. We did not look at social media and both those things are expanding just exponentially. And a lot of government information was still covered by what we looked at in terms of text based information that comes out sort of as publications. But I think a lot more work can be done in that area and I'm hoping the book will inspire new young researchers to delve into some of those things. And I'd be happy to talk to people about those things if anybody wants to.

[James Jacobs]

And we've already talked to the folks at the library school at University of Washington and we're always interested and, and available to talk with others about these ideas because I think they're really important and really critical to a functioning democracy.

[Jim Jacobs]

I'm wondering if we should write a book that's the same book but not directed at LIS students.

Kind of an article for Harpers.

[James Jacobs]

That'd be great. That's a good idea.

[Adam Kreisberg]

I do think there could be a readership for such a book.

Well, I want to thank you both again for being a part of this conversation. Yes. Say hello there. And, well, just to wrap things up, just to remind you of the book's title, preserving Government Information Past, Present and Future, I've been speaking today with Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs, and I've been your host, Adam Kreisberg, here on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening. Listening.

[Jim Jacobs]

Thanks, Adam.

[James Jacobs]

Thanks, Adam. Really appreciate it.