| http://www.news-gazette.com/story.cfm?Number=10892
Information at risk By GREG KLINE © 2002 THE NEWS-GAZETTE Published Online January 20, 2002 When federal officials told Mary Mallory to destroy a CD of information about the nation's largest water supplies, it was the antithesis of what she believes in professionally and personally. "It's really hard," the head librarian of the Government Documents Library at the University of Illinois said recently. "We're librarians. We don't want to prevent access to information. We feel very strongly about that. That's why we're in the business." Mallory reluctantly de-stroyed the CD, a publication of the U.S. Geological Survey, which ordered its destruction after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Not doing so was likely to have negative ramifications for the UI library, potentially even loss of its federal depository status. The same thing happened at federal depository libraries around the country, most of them at academic institutions, although not at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, which didn't have the water works CD, said Jocelyn Tipton, the librarian there. The federal depository library program is nearly as old as the nation. Established in 1813, the system is supposed to guarantee public access to government information by making it available free of charge at nearly 1,350 designated depository libraries nationwide. Mallory and Tipton haven't been ordered to pull any other materials from their collections, at the UI a vast storehouse of federal, state and other records, publications, statistics and data ranging from a CD titled "Cooking for Groups: A Volunteer's Guide to Food Safety" to the president's annual economic report. But they and other area library officials are worried about the possibility. They're also concerned about the mass removal of government information from the Internet since Sept. 11 and about the potential for law enforcement officials to demand their normally private patron records in investigating and monitoring terrorism. "There is a great concern in the library community," said Sally Duchow, librarian at Danville Area Community College. The issues are prominent on the agenda of the Chicago-based American Library Association's annual winter meeting this weekend. Among other things, library association officials say the USA PATRIOT Act, the anti-terrorism bill passed last year, requires libraries to surrender patron records with no notification of the people affected. "There was a recognition in this country that what you read should be protected," said Emily Sheketoff, director of the library association's Washington office. "Forty-eight states passed privacy laws protecting those records," including Illinois. Sheketoff said law enforcement officials could get a warrant for the records previously, but "there was a pretty high bar they had to pass." That bar is lower with the new anti-terrorism law. "It's much easier for law enforcement to get a court order," Sheketoff said. Champaign Library Director George Sheetz said librarians understand there are legitimate security concerns, but it still disturbs him that an environment now exists where libraries have to think about culling their collections and monitoring card holder reading habits. The Champaign library hasn't removed any materials, nor have the Urbana and Danville public libraries or the Parkland College library, officials said. None of them had the water works CD. Danville library director Barb Nolan characterized the removal of items because they might be remotely useful to a terrorist as a slippery slope. "If they can blow up things with fertilizer," she said, referring to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, "then where do you stop with pulling things they might use?" Critics contend that the federal government, and some state governments, may have gone too far already. The CD covering the largest 437 public water supplies in the nation, for example, could be of use to a terrorist looking to contaminate drinking water. But its intent is just the opposite – to help avoid pollution from development and agricultural runoff, for instance – and its big users have been local planners and environmental watchdog groups. The data was generated as a result of the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act and had been readily available for more than two years. The users of the UI documents library include students and professors doing re-search, and the general public. "We're mandated because we're a depository to serve the public," Mallory said. "We do a big business in helping people find data." The UI library gets calls from as far away as California and New York "because the university is well-known, and it's a large, old collection," she said. Mallory said one call she received recently was typical, someone with a tourism-related business looking for information on tourism grants. She estimated that the UI depository has generally received 95 percent of the information the government publishes in a year, but that percentage began shrinking with the rise of the Internet. In part because of congressional prodding, many agencies have switched to distributing information on the Web instead of in a tangible form through the Government Printing Office and the documents libraries. After Sept. 11, a lot of those Web sites vanished. Data on security violations by airports, reports on chemical hazards at manufacturing facilities and the threat to adjacent neighborhoods, some detailed topographic maps of the United States and materials on nuclear power plants, gas pipelines and dams are among the public information citizens no longer can get on the Web, if at all. Likewise, Illinois took down information on community wells. "There is no system," Sheketoff said. "There is no criteria. It's not clear the government is keeping any sort of record on what they're taking down." Some of the information is still available through a Freedom of Information Act request, and in tangible form at federal documents libraries like the UI's and Eastern's. But not all. The documents libraries themselves, and libraries in general, now rely a lot on the Web to get patrons certain information, because a lot of that information is only published electronically now. Local library officials said that points out a need for tangible materials held in libraries even in the Internet age. A few key strokes are all it takes to purge a Web site, they noted. "If it's only electronic, then it's even easier to take down," said Jan Ison, director of the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, a nine-county library consortium serving East Central Illinois. Federal agencies retain ownership of the material distributed to the documents libraries and can order its removal, as in the case of the water works CD. But the process discourages that. "There's a formal procedure," Sheketoff said. "There needs to be a written letter. Frivolous things, embarrassing things aren't going to be re-moved." |
