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Dear Netters,
     A colleague of mine forwarded me this from another list.  Has
anyone else heard about this plan?  Should we start swamping the
White House with our thoughts on this?  Ms. Davidson makes some
great points!
                              Bonnie Fulmer, Librarian
                              Spackenkill High School Library
                              112 Spackenkill Road
                              Poughkeepsie, NY   12603
                               gbf1@maristb.marist.edu

--------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------

TO: Colleagues interested in access to government information
FROM: Sue Davidsen, Technology Librarian & Operations Manager, MLink, The
University of Michigan Library
DATE:  21 October 1994

As I was watching last night's Headline News, I saw the piece that covered the
unveiling of the new www.whitehouse.gov web site for U.S. government
information.
Point and click, bells and whistles, pictures, icons, audio -- all of the signs
of a Mosaic client. Then I heard the voice-over say that the administration was
planning to put computer kiosks directly connected to this service in every POST
OFFICE in the United States.

After some calls to the White House and the Postal Service, I found out that our
government is indeed going to put Internet connections in the post offices
of our
country while public libraries are at this point completely left out of the
equation. The post office -- which, arguably, manages information flow in print
form, is going to introduce a fairly sophisticated information delivery system
and get a connection to the Internet while the community library, which has been
an information provider, navigator and access manager for over a hundred and
fifty years in our country, is given a URL.

According to the Postal News Press Release of October 20, 1994, _Service to the
Citizen Kiosk Pilot Program_ "...One of the most important tasks of the Postal
Service is to guard against the risk of creating two societies: the electronic
information 'haves' and have-nots.' ... America's postal system has been the
trusted third party in the communications chain that binds the nation together.
This public trust can now be extended to help the information revolution move
forward." I think there is likely more public trust in a public agency that is
clearly an advocate for free access to information that crosses socio-economic,
gender, religious, age and racial lines and is a much more deeply ingrained
information-oriented cultural icon in a community than a post office.

For more than 150 years, public libraries have been providing government
information to the citizens of this country. Where are they in the grand scheme
of information delivery announced yesterday? I haven't seen or heard the word
library in any of my research on this topic. Most public libraries in the United
States do not have Internet connections. What could that Internet
connection mean
to public libraries? Not only could the public library provide that government
information to the public, but they could train their citizenry how to use the
technology, how to navigate in a hypertext information environment and provide
referrals to the public who have not found the information they needed from the
Whitehouse web site. Communities could also benefit from an Internet connection
at the public library by accessing information to support rural health issues,
education, and economic and community development.

Despite the words of last night's HNN report, using Mosaic as an interface
to the
White House information system is not fast, even on a standard academic computer
network and using hypertext is not a simple easy-to-use navigational tool -- not
when you're looking at the amount of information that the government is planning
to provide and the complexity of the federal government itself.

On page 2 of this U.S. Postal Service document cited above, it states, " The
public's reaction, software and hardware useability, kiosk operation and
support,
usage rates and identification of the most popular topics, and *willingness to
pay for convenience* [my stress] are all factors that will contribute to
evaluating the success of the program." Considering this statement in light of
GPO's planned charge to nondepository libraries for providing connections to GPO
Access, I can't help but hear some warning bells going off.

Please contact Vice President Gore's Office by calling the White House:
202-456-1414; or e-mail: vice.president@whitehouse.gov. to voice your
support for
public libraries as *free* government information providers to their
communities.

I encourage you to forward this message to appropriate lists and people who can
help us with this grass-roots campaign. If you would like a copy of the Postal
News cited above, you can contact Mark Saunders, Media Relations Representative
at 202-268-2171.

Sue Davidsen


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