Government information and official publications work has an image problem. Think of one word which most people outside the field would use to describe it.

That's right – boring.

Our specialization has long been viewed within the profession as the ugly stepsister of more glamorous fields of librarianship such as reference work or collection development.

Yet the official publications expert straddles both these fields, providing a specialized reference service and building specialized collections at the same time. In fact, an infinite versatility, imagination and a sense of adventure and the absurd are needed to work effectively with materials which can be from any public authority in the world, cover any subject and appear in any format – materials which contain well-concealed nuggets of practical information and hidden treasures of social and historical data, but are most often poorly classified, badly indexed, difficult to acquire and impossible to search. The field should be exciting, a challenge, a Mecca for those seeking professional growth ….

But the material is so boring.

Endless series of ukases, acts, regulations, guidelines, instructions, minutes, committee reports, resolutions, treaties, official correspondence, statistics, inquiries, political analyses, scientific analyses, legal analyses, on matters international, matters federal, matters provincial, matters local, matters of life and death buried among matters that do not matter at all …. Why work with all this stuff, anyway, when you could do something interesting?

Why? Because all this mass of indigestible, ill understood government information is the infrastructure of our modern world.

Governments and intergovernmental organizations, as well as a legion of normative, non-governmental organizations in the public sphere, from the Red Cross to the Legal Reform Foundation to IFLA, make the rules and provide the information which in large measure shape our lives and mould the societies in which we live. If we want to understand and control the social, political and economic forces that manipulate us, then we as citizens need complete and ready access both to information from governments and to information about what governments are doing. The discovery, collection, bibliographic control, preservation and dissemination of accurate information from and about all the host of different public bodies that influence our lives is therefore a sacred trust of the library profession. Arguably, it is the major challenge to socially conscious librarians for the new millennium.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), as the parliament and policy-making body of the world library profession, recognizes the importance of government information and official publications in our lives, through one of its thirty-two professional groupings, the Government Information and Official Publications Section (GIOPS). I am the current chair of the international standing committee of that IFLA Section, and I am here to tell you about the new world order in government information librarianship as we envisage it.

For many years IFLA has carried out its international program of professional work through a succession of medium-term plans, in which the different IFLA sections and round tables evaluate the state and needs of the profession in their area of specialization and undertake international projects designed to provide training, create working tools, or raise professional consciousness. We used to have five-year plans, but like the former builders of socialist economies we found that over so long a period the plan's assumptions became invalid. Now we have switched to a three-year cycle of goals and objectives with revised action plans every year. The medium-term plan for the years 1998-2001, finalized at the Amsterdam IFLA conference in August 1998, contains an new mandate for GIOPS as well as a new statement of professional goals for the section and for all government information specialists, in preparation for the new millennium.

Let me present them to you, with just a slight abridgement:

Governments, intergovernmental organizations, and public non-governmental organizations generate large quantities of documents and information which shape our lives and mould the societies in which we live. The Section promotes the discovery, collection, bibliographic control, preservation and dissemination of information from and about all these public bodies. Persons interested in the Section are drawn from the world community of specialists in access to public documents and public policy. They share the mission of promoting free and equitable access to quality information in order to assure accountability from governments and other public bodies to the people they serve.

I think you will agree that this is a rather challenging order of business! Perhaps also you might say that it sounds very impressive in the abstract, but what does it all mean in practice? There are two answers to that question: the one that we have given, in our action plan for the GIOPS standing committee, and the one that each of you will give, as government information librarians on the front lines in providing service to your clients and your communities. I can tell you what GIOPS is doing; it is for you to decide what you will do.

The current GIOPS international action plan, for the year 1998-1999, has six components, and I think you will find some of them quite interesting.

First in order and in importance is the continuation of the Section`s ongoing series of professional seminars and training sessions for government information specialists in different regions of the world. GIOPS began these regional seminars early in the 1980's and has held them for Latin America, for francophone Africa, for anglophone Africa, for Australasia and the Pacific, and now, just two weeks ago, for public documents librarians from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, from 24 to 27 May 1999 in Moscow.

Our four-day program in Moscow, four years in preparation, was co-sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture and by the Russian State and Parliamentary Libraries, in conjunction with the opening of the new Hall of Official Documents at the Russian State Library. Guest speakers from Canada, the United States, Britain and Germany joined me and participants from Russia, Ukraine and several other countries of Eastern Europe and the C.I.S. in discussion of all aspects of official documents work in their respective countries. Highlights of the sessions included workshops on freedom of information and public access to government information, and presentations on Internet access to Western and international documentation.

We look forward to developing further training packages to help government documents librarians in this part of the world, and if you have ideas for such local training programs please contact our newly elected GIOPS standing committee members from the region, Ms. Emma Voskanian, head of the official documents collection at the Russian State Library in Moscow, or Ms. Eli Popova, head of official publications at the Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, Bulgaria.

As it happens, GIOPS is also preparing another such international seminar for government documents specialists this year. In co-operation with the Dag Hammarskjold Library of the United Nations in New York we hope to present a five-day seminar in September 1999 in Beirut, for librarians from the Arab Middle East.

The second component of our GIOPS work program this year is to create and maintain an up-to-date version on the Internet of the Section's international directory of government information specialists, first published in 1993 in Berlin. We hope to extend this directory to include many more librarians from Eastern Europe, and to help us collect information for it I have provided you with forms which you can complete here, if you wish, or pass on to other colleagues. The forms should be mailed by the end of June to Emma Voskanian in Moscow, who will forward them to our Information Coordinator, Helen Sheehy, in Pennsylvania, for entry into the directory database. I would ask you if possible to provide the information in Roman as well as Cyrillic script, since we have not yet solved all the problems of Cyrillic hypertext markup and in the short term we may have to present the directory on the Internet only in Roman script. A printed version of the directory should be available sometime next year as well, upon demand, from the press of our GIOPS standing committee member in Berlin, Johannes Metz, at the Staatsbibliothek.

A third, and relatively new, component of our GIOPS workplan is to conduct training workshops, in conjunction with the IFLA annual conferences, on Internet access to government information and information from international organizations. We held such a workshop for a full day at the IFLA general conference in Amsterdam in August 1998, and will hold another one for half a day in Bangkok this coming August. As a fourth component of the GIOPS workplan, our publications subcommittee hopes to produce a teach-yourself package based on this workshop, as well as other educational tools to train users and information professionals in means of access to government information.

Two policy initiatives which we are developing this summer complete the GIOPS action plan for 1998-1999. One will be a very Western document, but has important implications for freedom of public information in countries of the former Communist bloc now that everything is being commercialized – it is a position paper on public copyright and on the limitation of user fees for electronic access to public information. The second will be a position paper which is especially important for Third World countries, on the means of deposit of public international documents and information in countries without fully developed electronic information infrastructures. In this paper, which is being written with the assistance of Jane Wu, our newly elected GIOPS standing committee member from the library of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, we hope to take a stand against the trend for Western governments and international organizations to save money by publishing their documentation only on the Internet.

I have told you what the IFLA Government Information and Official Publications Section stands for, and what it is doing. The question now is, how you can carry on this work in your own countries, and how you want us to collaborate with you, to help you build the foundations of a law-based, free society through freely available, accurate government information.

An informed public is the basis of the free, democratic society, where the exercise of state power or capitalist control is replaced by co-operation for the common good. Such true democracy must be nurtured by us, its information gatekeepers – in the Crimea, in Russia and Ukraine; in Belarus and Belgium and Kazakhstan and Kiribati; in Vilnius and Vladivostok and Johannesburg and Jerusalem and Djakarta. It must be nourished at the government information desks of a hundred thousand libraries.