Faced with an ever-growing mound of data, government agencies are beginning to look to companies for help in expanding online access to nonclassified documents. And although it means more information would be searchable online, open-government advocates worry about the legal implications.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already work with federal agencies through the companies’ site map programs to make more federal documents searchable by Web crawlers. But most agency data and federal records remain in paper form and must be digitized before they can be published and searched online.
The high cost of digitization is spurring deals between digitization companies, search engines and government agencies. Open-government experts are enthusiastic about the ability of those agreements to make more public information available online, but they also worry that deals with companies could change how the public accesses government documents.
“If [agencies] enter into agreements that don’t let them maintain control — not only over the document but also the metadata and the tagging of that record — those documents will not be searchable,” said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org. “You won’t be able to find them unless they’re displayed on an agency site, or you go through a private search engine like Google [or] like Yahoo that may be collecting information about you.”
So far, deals between the federal government and large search engine companies such as Google or Yahoo have been limited. Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said the company has no new digitization agreements with federal agencies to announce at this time, but Google officials “are always talking with various organizations — including government agencies —about ways to make information more available online.”
Google has a pilot program with the National Archives and Records Administration to digitize and make searchable more than 100 films on Google’s and NARA’s Web sites. The company also has an agreement with NASA to make available on the Web what officials describe as the most useful information. Google also plans to collaborate with the agency on real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, and real-time tracking of the International Space Station. Additionally, the company worked with the Library of Congress to digitize 5,000 books and start an international digital library.
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