2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

Open Government: Digitization and Information Sharing
134
BEST PRACTICES 2012
By Joanne She, Coordinator of Digitization Services, U.S. Department of Justice and Tina
Smith, Reference Librarian, U.S. Department of Justice
INTRODUCTION
“Open Government” has been a strong public interest and a great government concern for
a long time. Back in 1966, Congress passed the first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),
and since then, this law has been significantly revised several times, and many related
laws have been passed as well. On December 31, 2007, President George W. Bush signed
the OPEN Government Act of 2007 [1] into law and pushed an E-government movement.
Once President Obama took office, his first step was making open government a high
priority.” 1 Three years have passed since then, and based on our observations, we think
that the Open Government Policy has actually led a to vital digitization movement in the
government, and that this digitization is reforming the government and enhancing
information sharing.
DECLASSIFICATION MOVEMENT
The first strategy of the Open Government plan is massive disclosure of government
information. One of the major focuses of E.O.13526[2] is declassifying more government
information automatically and systematically. It directed all agencies to review their
classification guidelines and ensure that all delegations of original classification authority
are limited to the minimum necessary, and to develop a plan implementing the new
provisions into their daily procedures in final form within 180 days. 2 This step has led to
massive disclosure of information and more government documents open to the public
once they are declassified. According to the 2010 Report to the President, 3 federal
agencies declassified more than 29 million pages last year. The chart below shows a
breakdown of this declassification activity.
Table 1: Declassification of Major Federal Agencies, FY 2010 (Data taken from
pp.16-18 of 2010 Report)
1 White House. Transparency and Open Government. Accessed January 3, 2012:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment
2 Obama, B. Executive Order 13526- Classified National Security Information. December 29, 2009.
Section 6.3. Retrieved January 3, 2012, from the White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/thepress-office/executive-order-classified-national-security-information
3 National Archives and Records Administration, Information Security Oversight Office. 2010 Report
to the President. April 15, 2011. Page 1. Retrieved January 4, 2012, from NARA:
http://www.archives.gov/isoo/reports/2010-annual-report.pdf