Developing PEGI Project Principles: Ethical Practices in Preserving Government Information
When PEGI, in our capacity as an independent group, joined others in endorsing the “Statement Condemning Increased Violence and Racism Towards Black Americans and People of Color” issued by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) in May 2020, we asserted:
“As a collective project team, we commit ourselves to use our skills and resources to advance the fight against injustice and urge all in the library community to support and actively work toward these ideals of a society free from structural racism.”
As part of this commitment, we have revised our mission statement to reflect the vision we share of an engaged public and equitable democracy. In this process, we also reflected on how we can better articulate the potential for communities of practice engaged in collecting and preserving born-digital government information to advance social justice.
Following the lead of Documenting the Now as well as other projects and activists, we have sought to understand how ethical practices in digital collection and preservation initiatives, particularly those affiliated with cultural memory organizations, should be interpreted with respect to information produced by government entities.1
In their 2018 white paper2, Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Vernon Mitchell, Jr. examined the ethical issues surrounding efforts to archive social media. This examination was motivated by the need to protect those who face a disproportionate risk of harm based on their social media activity. This potential harm includes content manipulation or misappropriation; targeted harassment or assault; and surveillance, interference, pursuit, or arrest by law enforcement officials or other state agents.
Government information embodies power, and government records (and records management)3 can enact, enable, or conceal violence. At the same time, information resources produced by government entities present an imperfect but nevertheless non-substitutable record of government intent and activity.
Efforts focused on U.S. government information have long encountered barriers and challenges to long-term public access.4 EDGI’s Website Monitoring project has identified governance, access, and content change issues with potential or realized negative impact on the public’s ability to understand and potentially critique structures of power. The control of access to information for political purposes is not a new challenge.5 Government shapes access to its own information and protects its power. There is an oversight function for public access to government information, which is diminished when access is reduced or lost.6 Moreover, we know there is value associated with this content. Many of these resources and records have been collected and disseminated by private companies.7
We consider the 200+ year-old Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) to be an exemplar of collective action resulting in the social good of distributed access and preservation for the print era. For generations, the FDLP enabled members of the public to access as much information as the federal government was willing to provide. The FDLP model shows as-yet unrealized promise for distributed access and preservation for born-digital government information. At the same time, we acknowledge there is fundamental tension in relying solely on the government to work intentionally to preserve and provide access to the records of power.
We want to build a future where collections are stewarded by organizations acting in the public interest. Libraries have a history of preserving and providing access to government information, both in concert with and independently of government activity.8 We believe that libraries have a collective responsibility to pre-emptively preserve historically significant born-digital government information in order to make the roles and actions of governments more clear to the public. We also believe that libraries can be motivated to build government information collections that are relevant to their local communities.
So — what are we doing?
Both as individual practitioners and as a collective, we continue to educate ourselves and to absorb and incorporate the perspectives and work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color into our practice. As an initial entry point, we recommend viewing the “Archiving Protests, Protecting Activists” conversation with Documenting the Now, WITNESS, Texas After Violence Project, Blackivists, and Project STAND, recorded in June 2020.
We need to consider and focus on the greatest needs for long-term access due to the limited resources available to work on critical issues of government accountability. We intend to build relationships with community archives to direct future priorities for government information collections at libraries and archives. We also note that the recent Call to Action: Archiving State-Sanctioned Violence Against Black People published by a group of Black memory workers asserts the imperative for Black memory workers to be supported and given the space and resources needed to document the effects of government activity on Black lives.
While we are still mapping out the future of the PEGI Project, we have recruited an advisory board that will be announced this summer. The scope of the advisory board includes the diversity, equity, and inclusion practices for future PEGI Project activities. We will work with our advisory board to refine and extend how these principles are embedded in our strategies going forward.
1. For an overview of issues pertaining to ethical and historically-informed decision-making for web archives, see Pamela M. Graham (2019) “Guest Editorial: Reflections on the Ethics of Web Archiving,” Journal of Archival Organization, 14:3-4, 103-110, doi:10.1080/15332748.2018.1517589. Panel recordings are available from the National Forum on Ethics & Archiving the Web (2018); “Web Archiving as Civic Duty” is particularly relevant for our work. ↩
2. Jules, Bergis, Ed Summers, and Vernon Mitchell, Jr. Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations. Documenting the Now, 2018. ↩
3. For a recent example, see “Coalition Calls for Urgent Investigation of Destruction of Records on Family Separation Crisis,” which raised attention to Department of Homeland Security records management practices that further exacerbated the humanitarian crisis initiated by the detention and displacement of children at U.S. borders. ↩
4. A series of examples are compiled in the PEGI Project’s Environmental Scan: Lippincott, Sarah K. Environmental Scan of Government Information and Data Preservation Efforts and Challenges. Atlanta, Georgia: Educopia Institute, 2018. ↩
5. For more on this, see the longstanding “Less Access to Less Information” project, now hosted by FreeGovInfo. ↩
6. The 2019 shuttering of ToxMap, the NLM’s toxicology and environmental health information mapping tool, is an example of how public access priorities can be shaped by political agendas. Although much of the underlying data remains available, the loss of this public access portal raises additional barriers to locating and interpreting environmental health data. ↩
7. As part of the transition to the digital era, some federal agencies entered into contracts with private companies to digitize print records without retaining the rights to provide public access to the digital surrogates. For an example, see GAO’s contract with Thomson-West from 2008. ↩
8. For models addressing the former, see Temple University Libraries’ white paper for “Future Proofing Civic Data,” published in 2018. For an example of the latter, see “Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time,” a 2016 account of the End of Term crawl. ↩