Has search technology ad-vanced far enough to overcome the compulsion to categorize and catalog each piece of data? The Office of Management and Budget thinks so—at least in most cases.
That’s why the administration’s new policy fulfilling Section 207 of the E-Government Act of 2002 is drawing the ire of some critics who say that, without sufficient cataloging or metadata tagging, information will be less accessible. The policy tells agencies to categorize information but, detractors say, doesn’t go into enough detail.
The policy is the latest example of the debate over how much categorization is needed to make government information publicly accessible, and whether search technology is good enough to find specific information. In a memo issued last month, Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management, detailed three steps—mostly involving publishing materials online—that agencies must complete by Sept. 1 to meet the law’s requirements.
Further advice
The memo also encourages agencies to use the newest version of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model. OMB released Version 2.0 of the DRM last month.
The memo follows recommendations the Interagency Committee on Government Information, established under the E-Government Act to help implement Section 407, sent to OMB in December 2004.
But at least one federal official, who requested anonymity, said OMB ignored the committee’s suggestions. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the bill’s author, said there are “serious concerns about whether OMB’s new guidelines comply with the act’s requirements.” He added that he intends to ask OMB officials “to explain how the policy meets statutory mandates.”
Patrice McDermott, deputy director for government relations at the American Library Association, called the policy disturbing. “Essentially, what OMB appears to be saying is ... if you put [information] on your Web site or post it electronically, you have fulfilled all requirements of law,” McDermott said. “That is not true. That is not the spirit or intent of the law.”
There were a lot of discussions of the distinctions between publications and records, McDermott said. “That becomes less and less clear on the Web, but the intent was for agencies to do an inventory of all of their information and to categorize or catalog it, and apply some metadata to it so that anyone going in anywhere in government could search across agencies and meaningfully find things.”
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