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SUMMARY OF THE ELECTRONIC PUBLIC INFORMATION NEWSLETTER
VOL. 6, No. 3 March 1996
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INDEX:
1. LOC RECOMMENDS CONGRESS ADOPT A SINGLE INFORMATION SYSTEM
2. REP. VERN EHLERS: THE FUTURE ROLE OF THE GPO UP IN AIR
3. NTIS/KINKO'S DEAL COULD TRANSFORM INFO DELIVERY
4. OMB CIRCULATES DRAFT OF DEPOSITORY LEGISLATION
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1. LOC RECOMMENDS CONGRESS ADOPT A SINGLE INFORMATION SYSTEM: The Library of Congress (LOC) is recommending the creation of a single, but distributed, legislative or Congressional information system to serve both the House and Senate. The establishment of
such a unified system is designed to reduce or eliminate the redundancies now found in the various information systems that serve the Congress. The recommendation was contained in "A Plan for a New Legislative Information System for the United States Con
gress," which the LOC submitted last month to the House Oversight Committee, Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Key to the success of the LOC plan is the recommendation that the House Oversight C
ommittee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee establish a joint House and Senate Legislative Working Group. The purpose of the Working Group would be to establish uniform policies and standards to eliminate duplication of effort within the Le
gislative Branch in the "creation, collection, preparation and distribution of legislative information." Within such a unified system, LOC recommends that both THOMAS, the LOC's online Congressional information system, and GPO Access remain as "public ac
cess points" to the system. The report states: "ACCESS and THOMAS have both been well received and are heavily used by the public. They both have wide name recognition with the public. There is some confusion about overlap, but if data integration can be
achieved, minor modification of the THOMAS and ACCESS interfaces could help eliminate this confusion without either system having to lose its purpose, its public identity, or its appeal."
2. REP. VERN EHLERS: THE FUTURE ROLE OF THE GPO IS STILLTO BE DETERMINED
In an interview with EPIN Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-MI, chairman of the House Computer and Information Services Working Group and the prime mover behind the adoption last fall by the House Oversight Committee of the CyberCongress Project, stated the following i
n relation to the Library of Congress plan:
Enhlers: We have the larger plan (CyberCongress Project) which we developed last fall and of which the Library of Congress plan is only a small part. I want to make sure the Senate is included. There are a lot of specifics of the plan that have to be work
ed out. And that is going to take time particularly with Senate involvement and also we have to try to define the role of the Government Printing Office (GPO)..... There are some in the House that say we don't really need GPO ACCESS, and others, primarily
in t he Senate, who say we want GPO to continue. That issue is not resolved.
3. NTIS/KINKO'S DEAL COULD TRANSFORM INFO DELIVERY: The cooperative agreement signed between the national Technical Information Service (NTIS) and Kinko's could revolutionize the delivery of government information to the public, and cast a relatively smal
l government agency into the role of being a major disseminator of government information. At the same time, it presents a model for a future where online government information in electronic form is delivered to remote sites for printing-on-demand. The N
TIS/Kinko's partnership will be watched with interest by the printing industry-potentially the big loser in all of this-and the manufacturers of high-speed printers, an essential ingredient of the success of any print-on-demand venture.
4. OMB CIRCULATES DRAFT OF DEPOSITORY LEGISLATION: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is circulating the draft of a bill designed as an alternative to certain aspects of the Government Printing Office's (GPO) plan to convert information for the Fed
eral Depository Library Program into electronic form. The thrust of the OMB proposal is to make the Executive Branch agencies the central storage and dissemination points for Executive Branch information rather than GPO. According to the draft, agencies c
ould make arrangements directly with depositories, bypassing GPO, for access to their information for a fee. The fee would be paid either by the libraries or through a scheme whereby the Superintendent of Documents would reimburse the agencies for the dep
ository electronic copies.
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James McDonough, Editor
epin@access.digex.net
Tel: 301/365-3621
Fax: 301/365-2782
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