Official Publishing in the Nineties ... Proceedings of Two One‐day Seminars ...

Citation

Fraser, K.C. (1999), "Official Publishing in the Nineties ... Proceedings of Two One‐day Seminars ...", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 5, pp. 2-8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.5.2.2

Thirty years ago, British government publications were in a stable state. Nearly all were published by HMSO and could be easily traced in its indexes. Their prices were moderate, and their appearance uniform. By the 1970s this stability was beginning to be disturbed. An increasing number of publications did not originate with the Stationery Office and were consequently difficult to trace. In the 1980s, the Conservative government instructed HMSO to act in a commercial manner, giving rise to dramatic increases in price. As a sort of consolation, the introduction of Chadwyck‐Healey′s Catalogue of British Official Publications not Published by HMSO made it much easier to trace those publications. The present decade brought in electronic publishing on a large scale, both of bibliographical tools and of some full texts, a development with enormous potential but bearing new problems in its train.

This potted history of the recent deluge of change in official publishing is sufficient to explain the need for a conference at which librarians might try to make sense of it all. The present volume paints the proceedings of two successive seminars held by SCOOP, the Standing Committee on Official Publications of the Library Association, in 1997. The contributors provided succinct accounts of all the recent developments and some thought‐provoking speculations on what the future might hold. In the first category, there are papers summarising the present state of British official publications; the output of both the Stationery Office and the residual HMSO (the distinction being that the legislative documents published by the latter have the status of evidence in law); the government‐related publications ‐‐ printed, microform or online ‐‐ of Chadwyck‐Healey; and the online services provided both by the Government′s Central Communications and Telecommunications Agency and the commercial firm Context. The librarian who read them would emerge with a more comprehensive understanding of the present complex situation and how it arose. (There is, however, an unfortunate misprint which implies that Acts of Parliament and Hansard were available online since 1966, when the real date is 1996.)

Although several contributors consider future trends, the two final papers, by Howard Picton and Alastair Allan, are particularly devoted to this topic. Naturally, the implications of online publishing predominate. If Government plans to transfer all kinds of information, from White Papers to official forms, onto the Internet are fulfilled, can the network support the volume of traffic involved? Can the country afford the necessary amount of hardware and the associated staff? Will all this information be effectively indexed, or will it disappear into “The Black Hole of Grey Literature” (to use Howard Picton′s phrase)? Can we realistically expect to get access to this material free? If not, how will we pay for it? Will there be a long‐term archive of earlier government documents, or will the authorities be tempted to let embarrassing information from the past quietly disappear? Will there continue to be printed official publications? If not, what will citizens do who have no easy access to computers? When it is also considered that the meeting did no more than touch on the consequences of devolved parliaments, and that the Government′s proposal for a “National Grid for Learning” came too late to be discussed there, all these questions, and their answers, seem to provide enough material for another seminar, which I expect would be as full of interest to official publications librarians as is this book.