[LINK] ICT Predictions 2009 - little OT (gov't reports example)
Tom Worthington
Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue Jan 13 09:51:18 AEDT 2009
At 11:16 AM 9/01/2009, Anthony Hornby wrote:
>... My library is free issue member of the Federal Library Deposit
>Scheme as are all universities ...
There does not appear to be any legal requirement for government
agencies to send paper copies of reports to libraries. Changing to
electronic copies would save about two tonne of paper per year*.
If the electronic version of a report is the "Best copy" (the
technical term for the most complete version of the work), then that
would be acceptable to supply. Instead of actually mailing, or
e-mailing, electronic copies, it should be sufficient to put them on
the web and tell the libraries where they are.
AGIMO could change the procedures to encourage electronic
distribution, with the paper option retained for the few items where
this is not suitable. If the agencies put some metadata in the
reports to identify them, then specialized crawlers can find them
(such as the NLA and AGIMO ones). The obvious identifier to use is an
ISBN in the appropriate Dublin Core element. The agencies would then
not need to send any report forms or any printed, or electronic,
copies anywhere: just publish to their own web sites and let the
crawlers find them.
Agencies could help the process by improving the quality of their
reports, making them easy and efficient to read online, instead of
just facsimiles of printed documents. This would reduce the cost of
production and distribution.
>All government reports should also be released under a creative
>commons licence to allow us to copy and preserve them with ease. ...
The Queensland Government seems most willing to consider this,
perhaps because the Australian CC experts are at QUT in Queensland.
Jessica Coates talked about it at the Open 2020 Summit last year:
<http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=9&topic=11>.
---
* CALCULATING THE WEIGHT OF GOVERNMENT REPORTS: There are 104
agencies required to send reports
<http://www.finance.gov.au/financial-framework/fma-legislation/docs/FMA-Agencies-List.pdf>.
Each agency is required to provide 39 copies of each report
<http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/service-improvement-and-delivery/publishing-information/lds.html>,
making 4056 copies in total. Assuming each agency produces 500 pages
of reports a year, that is 2,028,000 pages (1,014,000 sheets of B5
paper). A B5 page is 0.044 m2
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html>. So if 50 gsm paper
is used, a sheet weighs 2.2g and the total weight of the paper will
be about 2,231 t.
Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617 http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University
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