Reconciling government documents and e-government: Government information in policy, librarianship, and education

摘要

As aspects of electronic government (e-government) services are implemented by public authorities, several critical questions about digital government information management, dissemination, access, and preservation within traditional library organizations still remain. The widespread acceptance of digital services and resources by public official and citizen leaves librarians little time to consider how to reconcile their traditional bibliographic approaches to government information librarianship. They must now educate future library professionals, as well as sustain existing best practices, within a complicated environment driven by public web-based communications between communities and their government representatives. This gap between theory and practice is particularly acute given that government information librarianship teaching in many Library and Information Science (LIS) graduate programs remains bound by a civic culture born from a paper and print world (Jaeger, 2008). Similarly, many libraries currently focus on government information resources/ services as an act of collection building rather than as a primary public service (Shuler, 2005).