Book Talk: Preserving Government Information

Virtual; August 28, 1pm ET / 10am PT

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Join us for a timely conversation with librarians James Jacobs and Jim Jacobs about their new book, PRESERVING GOVERNMENT INFORMATION, covering how libraries and research organizations safeguard public information in the digital age. Librarian Shari Laster will guide our discussion.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

JAMES A. JACOBS (“Jim”) is Librarian Emeritus, University of California San Diego where he served as Data Services Librarian from 1985 to 2006. He co-taught the ICPSR workshop, “Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation” from 1990 to 2012. He served as a technical consultant to the Center for Research Libraries in their audits and certifications of the Trusted Digital Repositories of HathiTrust, Portico, and LOCKSS, among others. He is a co-founder of Free Government Information (freegovinfo.info).

JAMES R. JACOBS is the US Government Information Librarian at Stanford University Libraries where he supports the research needs of the university, and works on both traditional collection development as well as digital projects like LOCKSS-USDOCS and Web harvesting, including the End of Term Archive and FOIA. He received his MSLIS in 2002 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His passion and expertise lie in the realm of digital preservation, digital collection development, FOIA, and the expansion of the public domain and information commons. He is a co-founder of Free Government Information (freegovinfo.info) and Radical Reference (radicalreference.info). A longer bio and list of publications can be found at https://freegovinfo.info/jrjacobs.

SHARI LASTER is the Head of Open Collections Curation and Access at Arizona State University Library. In addition to prior experience as a government information librarian, Shari is a past chair of the Depository Library Council, the advisory body for the FDLP, and a past chair of ALA’s Government Documents Round Table. Since 2017, Shari has worked with the Preservation of Electronic Government Information (PEGI) Project, which seeks to address the preservation of born-digital government information for long-term public access and use.

Early praise for Preserving Government Information:

Our times practically scream for this crucial book from Jacobs and Jacobs. Long respected for their expertise with data, government information, and libraries, the authors apply their considerable skills toward the conundrum of preserving digital government information before we watch it disappear. In artfully critiquing many projects, studies, ad hoc groups, and agencies that have gone before, the authors provide a non-technical introduction to what is needed right away: an open digital preservation infrastructure.

Cass Hartnett, U.S. Documents Librarian, University of Washington

Preserving Government Information examines how preservation practices of the past affect the preservation of digitally published government information today, analyzes publishing and preservation data to characterize the current gaps in preservation, and looks to the future by charting a path to a distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.

The book addresses technical issues without unnecessarily technical jargon. It is designed to be used by LIS students, front-line librarians and archivists, managers of libraries and archives, government workers who publish and preserve government information, and policy makers who design laws and regulations that affect the production, dissemination and preservation of government information.

Purchase or download Preserving Government Information today!