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MLIS 7120: Course Purpose

    Copyright © 2003 Wallace Koehler - All Rights Reserved

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    Syllabus

    This course is designed with six purposes in mind. These are:

    • Use and access to government documents
    • Defining government documents
    • What are government documents used for
    • How are they generated or created
    • How and who uses them
    • How and where to find them

    Librarianship, but perhapsparticularly government documents librarianship is undergoing a redefinition since the events of September 11, 2001. How that redefinition will reshape our practice is as yet uncertain. What is certain, however, is that it will. The USA Patriot Act (a government document)establishes new law enforcement prerogatives that have implications and implications for libraries and their traditional concerns for patron privacy and the ways those privacies have been protected. In addition, the government has begun to reconsider the scope and the desirability of the depository program.

There is clear overlap in the stated purposes. Why indeed do we set government documents apart from other publications? Part of the answer lies in the quality or character of the publishers. Government documents -- or at least some government documents -- have an official character. They represent the record of decisions made or decisions in process. These documents may tell us, for example, what taxes we must pay, whether we need vaccinations to travel to other parts of the world, or why some behavior is considered more heinous than another.

    We will discuss at some length the nature of government. What makes government government and therefore what makes a document a government document. We are on complex grounds discussing this issue. It is at the heart of political theory. Political theorists frequently distinguish between the "state" and the "government." We in the United States sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between the two partially because we blur and therefore confuse the two institutions. For example, in the United States the president is considered the chief of state as well as the head of government. In the United Kingdom, the monarch is the chief of state but the prime minister is the head of government. In many other countries, the distinction is also made - in Italy, Israel, Germany there are presidents whose roles are largely ceremonial. But they also have prime ministers whose roles are not ceremonial. The concept of "state" is an abstract one. Government represents the organization and application of power within the state.

    With that we are definitely on the slippery slope of theory. Government, the legal positivists would tell us, exercises the legitimate authority of the state. Just exactly when, you might ask, does a given institution begin to exercise the legitimate authority of the state? Consider for example, the American Revolution. When did the founding fathers stop being revolutionary criminals and become the legitimate power? Or, consider the American Civil War. Was the government of the Confederacy ever legitimate? If so, when did it begin and when did it end? Or to put it more simply, was Robert E. Lee a hero of the Confederacy or a traitor to the United States or both? Consider this. Take a trip to Fredericton, New Brunswick. Fredericton is the capital of that Canadian province. Tucked away on a side street is an interesting plaque commemorating a leading merchant, patriot, and hero. Who is he? Benedict Arnold. And just how do American history books treat this individual?

    Legal positivists have argued that the right to exercise force in human communities is reserved to the State. Notice that I have capitalized the word State to distinguish it from the more common usage we have in the United States to imply a subdivision of the Federal nation like the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, or Australia. State in its more legal application means any independent country. We will not quibble here over terminological nuance, but these things may matter for you in certain practices in certain circumstances someday. Sometimes we may talk in terms of "small case" and "upper case" states.

    It is government that exercises that force monopoly. In a very broad sense then any institution that has the power to compel behavior, or more to the point, the power to reward or punish deviation from the established norm, exercises the force monopoly of the community. Such institutions constitute de facto and de jure government. Or, if some institutions do not, we nonetheless must give them some consideration (see NGO discussion).

    As we will discuss at greater length, (see polisci101) there are many levels to government. We must take all into consideration. In the United States, we are usedto the turning to the national government as our primary focus. However "Washington" is but a small part of our concern. In the U.S., we have the national government. But we are also concerned with state and local government. Consider the array of institutions of local government: city government, county government, utility districts, school boards, and so on. In many cases, these agencies are independent of one another and may have overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdiction.

    The United States is party to a vast number of treaties. The United States is also a member of a large number of international organizations (IGO). Some of these are global in nature, others are regional, and some are strictly bilateral. Not only are the treaties "government documents," so are the documents that result from the treaties and the IGOs. Note that Article VI of theUS Constitution recognizes treaties as part of the law of the land. In library and information science practice, I predict, we will find that that treaties and executiveagreements will come to affect our practice more than we might think. The Berne Convention and its influence on intellectual property law in the United States and everywhere else in the world; corporate persistence in protecting copyright, trademarks, and patents have been relentless. Governments have taken varying perspectives.

    Assignment: Carla Hesse authored an interesting article for Daedelus (Spring 2002). Find it. Read it (It is available as a pdf file). Given current changes to intellectual property management, what are the implications for government documents practice. Discuss these issues on WebCT Threaded Discussion.

    In addition to the United States, there are more than 200 countries and other political entities on the planet. Each of these produces government documents. Human beings are interacting with one another more and more. Indeed the telecommunications revolution causes us to be concerned with each other and each other's institutions. We can no longer limit the purview of course like this one to a single national government or to a collection of governments within a single country. Although much of our focus will be on US federal government documents, it will not be solely upon those documents. We must address a far wider range.