INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC INFORMATION POLICY
Philip Doty and R. E. Wyllys

Library and Information Studies is involved with a number of political and social conflicts, especially because of our field's use and study of information technology. The analysis of public or governmental information policy can help us understand these conflicts, decide upon what we might do as practicing professionals, and identify the various political actions we might take.

While there is a great deal of contention about public policy about, e.g., its nature, purpose, role of values in it, and the role of analysis in forming policy, this is the working definition of public policy that we will use here: public policy is the commitment of public resources to certain courses of action to achieve certain goals, always in the context of differential power.

One of the areas of agreement in the study of public policy is the definition of what constitutes an issue. The use of this term in ordinary speech is very common, but, in the context of formal study of public policy, "issue" means a conflict (or area of dissensus) in a matter of (wide) public interest. Please try to remember this usage.

Information policy

• Information lifecycle -- information policy is the collection of laws and policies dealing with information from its creation, through its collection, organization, dissemination, and re-packaging, to its destruction (e.g., Heim, 1986; Hernon, 1994; Mason, 1983).
  
  
• Cultural policy -- information policy involves the roles of information in the formation and expression of people's behavior and values (e.g., Bennett, 1992; Burger, 1993; Eisenschitz, 1993).
  
  
• Discipline -- information policy is at the intersection of information science and public policy (e.g., Hernon and McClure, 1991).
  
  
• Systems theory -- information policy concerns itself with information processing and communication broadly defined (e.g., Trauth, 1986; see also Easton, 1965).
  
  
• Public administration -- information policy is the means by which government employees, institutions, and information systems adapt themselves to an environment in rapid flux and use information for decision making (e.g., Andersen and Dawes, 1991; also see Bozeman and Bretschneider, 1986, and Stevens and McGowan, 1985).
  
  
• Information "flows" -- information policy includes all policies and allocations of resources that "encourage, discourage, or regulate" information and its dissemination" (Weingarten, 1989, p. 79; also see Hayes, 1985, and Overman and Cahill, 1990). This approach is particularly close to the conception of information policy in information lifecycle and systems theory perspectives.

Why Study Information Policy?

1. To understand social life
   
2. To influence policy making
   
   
   • to provide reliable information for policy making
     
     
   • to ensure that all roles that information plays in our society (as an economic commodity, a social good, and a private good) are recognized and supported
     
     
   • to ensure that normative elements of public policy related to information, e.g., social equity, are not neglected in allegedly functional analyses
     
     
   • to catalyze debate among all interested stakeholders
     
     
   • to increase participation in policy discussions beyond social and technical elites
     
     
3. To forge political and intellectual alliances with
   • academic units, e.g., Public Policy, Communications, Computer Science
     
     
   • support and staff units, e.g., libraries, computer centers, technology planning committees
     
     
   • policy makers at all levels, especially professional staff members
     
     
   • technology vendors, other for-profit entities, LIS units in other universities and countries, foundations, and community groups
     
     
4. To contribute to the development of LIS as a discipline
   
   
5. To be active citizens personally and professionally.

As indicated above in the topical approach to information policy, there are many topics that are of interest to LIS in the study of governmental information policy. Among these are the legal status of circulation and use records, freedom of association, fees for government information, the Federal Depository Library Program, and freedom of expression and filtering/censorship. We will discuss two of the most important and far-reaching here in the context of information technology: copyright and privacy.

One important point to remember is that information technology exacerbates long-standing political conflicts, e.g., who should know what any individual reads?, as well as giving rise to new ones, e.g., does Napster violate copyright protections of copyright holders? Thus, the examination of information technology and the kinds of conflicts it contributes to necessarily involves understanding the historical contexts of many of such issues.

Information Policy and the Internet

As with many other aspects of current life, the existence of the Internet has major implications for information policy. One of the most striking of these is its role as a weapon against censorship, especially at national levels. Fortunately, we in the U.S. are free of most forms of censorship, but a glance at the world around us quickly reveals that censors are much stronger in certain other countries.

An article entitled "Caught in the Net" in The Economist dealt revealingly with the Internet as a weapon against censorship, by examining a corruption scandal in India that was exposed over the Internet and then by looking at how the Internet can be used to transfer information into and out of China. Here are pertinent excerpts from the article.

The . . . Internet . . . is opening up government everywhere to scrutiny on a scale that has never been seen before.

It does this in several ways. First, the Internet vastly lowers the costs of entry into the media preserve. A website costs much less than a printing press to set up, and its running costs are dramatically lower. An Internet newspaper dispenses with newsprint and physical distribution, the two largest costs for any newspaper. With the Internet, anyone can be a magazine or book publisher, an investigative reporter or even a television station. Second, the Net’s reach is far greater. In the latest scandal, interested parties not just in India but all over the world had instant access to an impressive mass of material from the moment of publication. . . .

Internet sites are intrinsically harder to control than newspapers. They have no valuable and immovable presses to seize, no newsprint to ration, no distributors to lean on (though Internet service-providers can be intimidated). If necessary, a site can easily move abroad. . . .

China is more neurotic about the Internet than almost any other country, blocking access to a long list of forbidden sites that include those of the New York Times, the BBC and CNN. . . .

It is, however, a losing battle. China already has 30m Internet users, and the number is likely to grow dramatically. Dissident organisations abroad can, and do, send their (unsolicited) reports to hundreds of thousands of e-mail recipients in China. There, as elsewhere, thousands of bulletin boards, on which people post news and views that could never in the past appear in print, have sprung up. As the amount of information, and the number of providers, on the Internet expands, the medium will become harder and harder to monitor. Much of the information may be rubbish, but no wonder the world’s despots are worried.

What Can LIS Contribute To Information Policy?

Since there are very heartfelt conflicts about what disciplines should contribute to and/or dominate the study of public information policy, it seems natural to wonder what Library and Information Studies can bring to information policy analysis. Among the most important contributions we can make are our:

• Skills in information organization and access
  
  
• Knowledge about the nature, multiple roles, and use of information
  
  
• Knowledge about users and their behavior
  
  
• Commitment to the preservation and continuing creation of the cultural record
  
  
• Ethos of service and social equity.

This last characteristic is, perhaps, the most important.

Sources

Andersen, David F., & Dawes, Sharon S. (1991). Government information management: A primer and casebook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bennett, Tony. (1992). Putting policy into cultural studies. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, & Paula Treicher (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 23-37). NY: Routledge.

Bozeman, Barry, & Bretschneider, Stuart. (1986). Public management information systems: Theory and prescription. Public Administration Review, 46, 475-487.

Browne, Mairéad. (1997a). The field of information policy: 1. Fundamental concepts. Journal of Information Science, 23(4), 261-275.

Browne, Mairéad. (1997b). The field of information policy: 2. Redefining the boundaries and methodologies. Journal of Information Science, 23(5), 339-351.

Burger, Robert H. (1993). Information policy: A framework for evaluation and policy research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

"Caught in the Net." (2001). The Economist, 358(8214), 26 [2001 March 24-30]

Chartrand, Robert. (1986). Legislating information policy. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, 12(5), 10.

Doty, Philip. (1998). Why study information policy? Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 39(1), 58-64.

Doty, Philip. (Draft). Federal information policy in Library and Information Studies.

Easton, David. (1965). A systems analysis of political life. NY: Wiley

Eisenschitz, Tamara S. (1993). Information transfer policy: Issues of control and access. London: Library Association Publishing

Hayes, Robert M. (Ed.). (1985). Introduction. Libraries and the information economy of California (pp. 1-49). Los Angeles, CA: University of California at Los Angeles.

Heim, Kathleen. (1986). National information policy and a mandate for oversight by the information professions. Government Publications Review, 13(1), 21-37.

Hernon, Peter. (1994). Information life cycle: Its place in the management of U.S. government information resources. Government Information Quarterly, 11(2), 143-170.

Hernon, Peter, & McClure, Charles R. (1991). United States information policies. In Wendy Schipper and M. Cunningham (Eds.), National and international information policies (pp. 3-48). Philadelphia, PA: National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services.

Mason, Marilyn Gell. (1983). The federal role in library and information services. White Plains, NY: Knowledge Industry Publications.

Overman, E. Sam, & Cahill, Anthony G. (1990). Information policy: A study of values in the policy process. Policy Studies Review, 9(4), 803-818.

Rowlands, Ian. (1996). Understanding information policy: Concepts, frameworks and research tools. Journal of Information Science, 22(1), 13-25.

Stevens, John M., & McGowan, Robert P. (1985). Information systems and public management. NY: Praeger.

Trauth, Eileen M. (1986). An integrative approach to information policy research. Telecommunications Policy, 10(1), 41-50.

Weingarten, F. W. (1989). Federal information policy development: The Congressional perspective. In Charles R. McClure, Peter Hernon, & Harold Relyea (Eds.), United States government information policies: Views and perspectives (pp. 77-99). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.