Summary of Electronic Public Information Newsletter

Index

Volume 3 Number 20 1993

Summary of Electronic Public Information Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 20
SA1250320

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     SUMMARY OF ELECTRONIC PUBLIC INFORMATION NEWSLETTER
                  VOL. 3, NO. 20; October 22, 1993
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INDEX:

1. CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TO PUT EDGAR ON THE INTERNET
2. WASHINGTON GROUP OFFERS TO CREATE A PUBLIC JURIS DATABASE
3. CALIFORNIA PASSES PROGRESSIVE INFORMATION DISSEMINATION LAW
4. DOE STUDYING POSSIBLE INTERNET CONNECTION FOR SCIENCE DATA
5. OMB HAS PROBLEMS DEALING WITH IMPLEMENTATION OF A-130


1. IN A SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT EDGAR MOVES TO THE INTERNET: It was
announced on Oct. 22 in Washington that one of the federal
government's most valuable and important databases, the Securities
and Exchange Commission's Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval=20
(EDGAR) database of financial filings, will be made available on
the Internet. The move by the Clinton Administration to put the
database on the Internet is the first concrete example of what the
=FEinformation highways=FE can mean to the public. The decision
reverses the policy of the Reagan-Bush Administrations, which
promoted the privatization of the government's information
resources. The EDGAR decision is also a personal victory for James
Love, Director of the Taxpayer Assets Project, who for many months
labored to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission and the
House Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee to make EDGAR
available to the public via the Internet. However the final
decision apparently came from the White House. The EDGAR Internet
project is being underwritten by a two-year, $660,000 grant from
the National Science Foundation to the Washington-based
Multicasting Service operated by Carl Malamud and the New York
University Stern School of Business. In a press release,
Multicasting and Stern said they hope to have the EDGAR on the
Internet by the end of this year.=20

2. TAX ANALYSTS TO OFFER BID TO CREATE A PUBLIC JURIS DATABASE: Tax
Analysts, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization and
publisher of tax information, last week was scheduled to submit a
proposal to the U.S. Justice Department to create a public, federal
caselaw database. Tax Analysts' unsolicited proposal comes at a
time, when the West Publishing Company of Eagan, MI, (WEST)
announced its intention not to rebid the JURIS contract. As a
result of the WEST decision, a Justice Department official told
EPIN that the department intends to shut down the JURIS database
system, because "80% of the databases" comes from WEST. [See EPIN,
Vol. 3, No. 19; October 8, 1993, pp. 129-30.] Since the Justice
Department leased WEST's caselaw database, the company's withdrawal
from JURIS leaves the Department without access to 16 years of
federal caselaw. It will now be forced to either use the online
WESTLAW database or its Lexix/Nexis equivalent at commercial or
near commercial rates, or create its own database including the
caselaw for the last sixteen years. Thomas Field, Executive
Director of Tax Analysts, in a telephone interview told EPIN that
his organization will submit a bid to Justice to create the
necessary historical caselaw database for approximately $2 million,
considerably below the $6 million dollars annually Justice believes
it will cost the Department to purchase the material from a
commercial outlet.

3. CALIFORNIA PASSES PROGRESSIVE INFORMATION DISSEMINATION LAW:
California Governor Pete Wilson this month signed into a law the
most far reaching and progressive legislative information
dissemination measure in the country. The bill will require the
State Legislature to make virtually all of its legislative
information available to the public in electronic form free of
charge. The bill specifically mandates the Legislature to
disseminate the information via the "largest nonproprietary,
nonprofit cooperative public computer network" in the State, i.e.,
the Internet, but by no means limits dissemination to that channel
alone.

4. DOE STUDYING POSSIBLE INTERNET CONNECTION FOR SCIENCE DATA: The
Department of Energy (DoE) is studying the possibility of making
its Energy Science and Technology Database (EDB) available to the
depository libraries over the Internet or via direct dial-up
services. The dissemination of the database with its 2.5 million
records is part of an overall DoE plan to provide for widespread
public access of the EDB by 1998, according to Charles Stuber,
Assistant Director for Information Science and Management, Office
of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). The decision to
push ahead with depository library access comes after the DoE and
the Governnment Printing Office (GPO) carried out a joint pilot
project involving online and CD-ROM access to the database for six
months in 1991 for a selected number of depository libraries.
Results of that pilot were released last week by GPO in a report
entitled, "Accessing U.S. Department of Energy Scientific and
Technical Information."

5. OMB HAS PROBLEMS DEALING WITH IMPLEMENTATION OF A-130: Bruce
McConnell, Chief of the Information Policy Branch of the Office of
Management and Budget, said recently that the two most
controversial aspect of the federal government's information policy
statement (A-130) deal with its implementation. Speaking at a forum
on public policy at the annual convention of the Information
Industry Association, McConnell said the two biggest problems
arising out of A-130 are: 1) How to calculate "the cost of
dissemination" of an information service, and 2) Achieving the
"right mix" between government initiative and those of the private
sector. As an example of the problem of determining cost, McConnell
mentioned the case of the Census Bureau's CD-ROMs. The OMB official
stated that the average cost of an Census Bureau CD-ROM is $200 as
opposed to $50 for the rest of government. However, McConnell said
that when his office looked into the reason Census charges were
higher than the average, it discovered that Census, unlike other
agencies, provides customers assistance and built the cost of that
assistance into the price of the CD-ROM.=20

James McDonough
Electronic Public Information Newsletter
epin@access.digex.com

Submitted by: ANDREW WILLIAMSON  (cijs26@vaxb.strathclyde.ac.uk)
               Wed, 3 Nov 93 13:23 GMT