GAO releases some of America's legislative history, but the rest is only available for pay from Thomson West

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Those of you following the saga of the sell-off of the federal legislative histories by the General Accountability Office might be interested in some good news and some bad news.
The good news is they have released 619,000 pages of histories, which were the pilot project scans they conducted. Looking at this data shows just how incredibly valuable these legislative histories are and how wonderfully talented the government employees are who compiled the information.
The bad news is the government *gave* millions of dollars worth of help to Thomson West which is raking in the bucks with the big database. In response to the data release by GAO, we have countered by offering to have scanned, at no direct cost to GAO, the same docs they gave to Thomson West. All we want is their hand-me-downs to give to a deserving public.

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Civlib • Copyfight

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Jake0748

Is this the official record of what Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and all those guys did and wrote about? Does it include all the writings of clerks, secretaries and other assistants?

Does our current (or any recently passed) government REALLY think its a good idea for ANY portion of our (archived) nations deliberations about what this country should be to be privately owned? … (if so, fuck them).

The copyright systm is a nightmare in it’s current form, and the whole concept of “intellectual property” needs a whole lot of work.

Pardon my rant. Peace
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

They’re government documents. They shouldn’t be in any person or organization’s sole control.

Dan, what’s with the sz?
boffo

#11 replies, “In this day and age, visibility on the net *is* the definition of what makes something public.”

Er, no it’s not. It’s what makes something convenient.

The public domain is the public domain, whether it’s a crumbling piece of paper in a drawer in Washington, DC, or a PDF we can open in our browser.
3Pac10

They are federal government documents and by definition they are public domain. As a result, this isn’t at all about copyright or intellectual property. You can pull the stuff down off of West’s database, cite it, copy it, give it to your friends, even use their page numbers in your database, and there’s not a thing they can do (they know, they’ve tried).

The problem that is faced with legislative history is that there is so much of it, it is not recorded in an order that is useful for anyone working with it, and it’s not searchable. West does have a pretty good system for finding information that’s not in any particular order and linking it to other information that might be useful.

Would it be better if the National Archives, the GAO or someone put together its own annotated, indexed, searchable database of federal laws, important cases interpreting them and pertinent legislative history? Yep. I wish they would. But that would be spending tax dollars to benefit lawyers. See how that would fly. Unfortunately it isn’t cheap to do and only a few outfits (West and Lexis predominantly) do it. My theory is that “exclusive” means that the GAO won’t cut the same deal with Lexis.
mekrod

Awesome! Just get Google to buy them out and post them under Project Gutenberg or some such. Otherwise, a rather useless pile of kindling.
eustace

Eventually, I would expect people to start putting some of it, as it becomes available, online. Slowly filling in gaps may be the best we can hope for.
Man On Pink Corner

#3: You’ll get over it
Anonymous

#6. Yes. The question is, is it legal for them to have an exclusive deal with anyone? Years ago, I used to work for the photoduplication division of the Library of Congress. It was made very clear that we couldn’t have any kind of exclusive deal. Now at that time, they DID have a deal with Readex to make microform copies that one company used in Microprint. (a proprietary format) Any company could have bought the raw negatives from LC, even though they were formatted in such a way that they wouldn’t be useful for somebody preparing other formats. So even though it was functionally an exclusive deal, legally it wasn’t.
boffo

To elaborate on the point by 3Pac10: It is a good and noble effort to put these documents in an easy-to-access electronic format, but there is a great deal of hyperbole here as well. As someone who regularly researches legislative history, this information would not be “lost” if this project fails. All of these documents are already in the public domain at the National Archives, and some are already published in another form and available at most libraries. Would it be great to have everything at the other end of The Google? Sure. But it’s not as though they will be lost forever to copyright profiteers. Seriously, it’s as though if we can’t access it on the internet then it doesn’t exist.
CarlMalamud

#9 sez “Seriously, it’s as though if we can’t access it on the internet then it doesn’t exist..”

It may exist but it isn’t public. In this day and age, visibility on the net *is* the definition of what makes something public.
tempbot

GAO standards for Government Accountability Office. Just sayin’.
jahknow

Dateline: January 20, 2009…
Dan

mm… “sz?”

sh…
3Pac10

Aw, it’s not that big a deal. As Justice Scalia showed today, you don’t need legislative history or even precedent. All you need are some old dictionaries, a bunch of quotes taken out of context, and the ability to ignore half of the second amendment.
Brian Carnell

@4 wrote:

“Is this the official record of what Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and all those guys did and wrote about? Does it include all the writings of clerks, secretaries and other assistants?”

Um, no, it is not. *All* of the paper records at issue here were created in the 20th century covering the 64th-104th congress.

@5 wrote:

“They’re government documents. They shouldn’t be in any person or organization’s sole control.”

There is nothing in the contract between GAO and Thomson that establishes any exclusivity. The GAO is very explicit that what it is doing is assisting Thomson in digitizing the documents at as minimal cost as possible in exchange for a) preserve the documents in digital format, and b) having electronic search access to the documents. The GAO had a pilot project to scan documents, but apparently found it a bigger project than anticipated (in fact, the contract with Thomson explicitly requires them to re-scan all of the docs the GAO itself had already digitized).

As @6 points out, Thomson’s use of the word “exclusive” in its *marketing* materials almost certainly is a dig at Lexis rather than an attempt to reclaim these documents from the public domain.

It will be interesting to see what their reply is to Public Resource.

It would be interesting to find out what Lexis thinks of this and whether or not they would like the same deal that Thomson got and that Public Resource is asking for. It’s a shame the GAO didn’t put out a notice back in March 2007 when it reached this decision to see if there were nonprofits who might be interested in scanning all of these docs and then making them available to the GAO and the public. That’s the real travesty here, IMO.