U.S. Government Information
"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,
is but a Prologue to Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever
govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives."
--James Madison
The rudimentary elements of information policy for the Federal government of the United States can be found in the United States Constitution, where early lawmakers saw the need for their new government to communicate with its citizens, and to provide them with the means needed to establish a sense of government accountability (4). To say that much has happened since the making of these policies would be an understatement of major proportions, as the government is now among the most prolific publishers in the world, and has been for some time. Whether one believes that it is still forthright in providing its citizens with all of the information they have a right to know, or if he chooses to take a more skeptical view, it cannot be denied that the amount of information the government makes available to the public is almost overwhelming.
Title 44 of the United States Code establishes many of the policies for the production and dissemination of government information that are in place today. In the excellent book United States Government Information:Policies and Sources, Peter Hernon et.al. have dissected and explained key issues of Title 44 for us, including its definition of a "government publication" as being a piece of "information matter which is published as an individual document at Government expense or as required by law". The authors go on to point us towards section 1902 of Title 44 where it is specified that unless such publications are for official use only, considered restricted for reasons of national security, or deemed to have no value in regards to public interest or education, they will be made available to the public. (4)
With the advances of technology we find the phrase "government publication" giving way to the more appropriate term "government information product" as more and more information is provided through electronic forms of media. While still producing massive volumes of text in printed form, all three branches of the Federal Government have established an extremely impressive presence on the web, and each maintains an abundance of sites. These sites not only exist for the President and the Cabinet, the Senate and the House, and the U.S. Court system, but also the hundreds of various departments, agencies, bureaus, offices and committees that make up the infrastructure of the government. In these sites one will find information regarding a staggering array of such things as functions and policies, employment opportunities, educational facilities, press releases, information on terrorism, health care, animals, and criminals, recent and past influence a particular department has had on legislation as well as information regarding the affect of legislation on the entity itself.
Most importantly, what we get here is the information needed to determine how it all affects the rest of us.
