ELECTRONIC GOVERNANCE AND ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY: LIVING AND WORKING IN THE CONNECTED WORLD

CHAPTER SIX:

THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY PROJECT: APRIL 9 AND 10, 2001 LONDON, UK

0. Summary
1. Introductions
2. Presentation of The Concept
3. Architecture
4. Feasibility Study and Pilot Project
5. Recapitulation
6. Way Forward

^{Electronic Governance and Electronic Library Policy - A Knowledge Base for the Developing World.
Hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat
Organised by the Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance
Sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation.}

^{0. Summary}

^{The Electronic Library Project is an integral part of the international programme being developed by the Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance. The Objective of this workshop was to examine in depth the feasibility of a proposal to create a distributed electronic library enabling countries of the Commonwealth to share information between and within governments. Large quantities of information pertinent to policy decisions existed within individual national registries, especially in the developed countries, and could provide a rich resource which would be especially valuable to the developing countries.}

^{Representatives contributing to the event included government officials and advisors from African, Asian, American and European countries. The first session was concerned with exploration of the original concept. A critical look was then taken at the constraints, both tangible and perceived. Although the required technology existed, not all countries had sufficient e-readiness to use it. Limitations were identified in terms of access, affordability and confidentiality. The workshop then proceeded to restructure the proposal to offer a more closely defined project. A small prototype would be developed making available documents relating to a single global issue and used by officials who already had the required knowledge and equipment. This could then be demonstrated and extended into a wider pilot project which, if successful, would lead to gradual roll-out across the Commonwealth and beyond.}

^{1. Introductions}

^{Tom Riley, Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance opened the proceedings and outlined the importance of the workshop within the Centre's programme. He explained that the Electronic Library project was the first of several schemes which the Centre planned to promote over the coming years and he welcomed this opportunity to examine the concept critically and then to discuss how it could be achieved.}

^{He also outlined some of the important information issues in such a project, commenting that the development of information policies are going to be paramount in developing countries. It would be a primary goal of the Centre to provide and develop a culture of sharing of knowledge and information between developed and developing countries.}

^{Rogers Okut-Uma, Chief Programme Officer (Technical), Management and Training Services Division, welcomed delegates to Marlborough House on behalf of the Commonwealth Secretariat. He hoped that ultimately the project would result in a distributed electronic library enabling developing countries to share information between and within governments. He hoped, in particular, that the project would take cognisance of the needs of the developing member countries and be mindful of the embedded sensitivities, which existed in this area concerning access to government information. For some countries, making information available would be a cultural paradigm shift. There would have to be a transition from current attitudes before sharing government information on a wide scale became a matter of routine. Other factors to take careful account of were issues of intellectual property rights, data protection and privacy. These were all important in relation to access to information, but in many Commonwealth countries suitable laws relating to them did not yet exist. He hoped that over the next two days the content, purpose and use of the proposed electronic library would be properly and clearly defined.}

^{2. Presentation of The Concept}

^{Adrian Norman said that as instigator of the original concept he wanted to see it taken apart and put together in better form. He outlined the background to the idea, which stemmed initially from his experiences working within the UK government in the 1980s, when the feasibility of creating an electronic section to government departmental libraries and registries was being considered.}

^{"The case for the electronic library rests on five points:}

^{All governments, at all levels have libraries:}

• ^{When it comes to policy making, small countries need just as much information as do large ones. Government departments have common as well as peculiar needs for information and much of this is also required by both local and supra-national organisations.}
• ^{Almost all information is held in more than one library. There is a proliferation of small libraries within government departments and agencies, each being run at lowest cost. Although librarians have informal networks for sharing unusual information, all acquire the common texts. There are arguments for economies of scale - big libraries exist to share availability and costs.}

^{All libraries now have electronic collections:}

• ^{Public, academic and special libraries make extensive use of the Internet and other electronic services to share the costs of cataloguing, search and indexing. They provide access to many "secondary publications". There are many issues, however, associated with them, such as making sure the document is genuine and has not been tampered with.}
• ^{Sharing electronic information is cheap, but collecting and organising it is expensive. Text is relatively easy to handle and does not need top of the range of equipment - but good indexing, linking and storage are vital. There are now a number of tools available to do that; the technology is ready. The key to handling this is in the use of metadata - i.e. data, which describes data.}
• ^{Commonwealth governments should share a global electronic library.}

^{Most Commonwealth governments work in English so that would be the start up language; others can follow. Costs and revenues would be shared. The resource might become of sufficient value for those outside government to pay for access, which would enable Commonwealth governments to be charged at marginal rates. Aid and charitable budgets could be exploited where relevant."}

^{This, he said, was the original concept and parts of the machinery were already in place and would provide some of the required standards, practices and protocols to demonstrate how the systems would operate. The case would have to be made to governments in the right way, at the right time and it would be important to draw in information scientists through their professional associations so that a model was created setting global standards.}

^{Discussion of the concept focused first on what resources already existed and whether many of the objectives could be met simply by making them more widely available. It was agreed that while Freedom of Information initiatives in various countries required public listing of many government documents, that did not, in and of itself, provide access to them. Nor did it include any of the material distributed internally prior to a policy decision being made.}

^{The purpose of the electronic library concept related solely to policy-making activities, which involved only a small proportion of all civil servants. Those representing their governments at international forums were very dependent on access to pertinent work done by other countries, but largely could not access it to help their own preparations. Their requirement in this situation was similar to that of a lawyer preparing a case.}

^{There was a need to establish the readiness of individual countries for e-government and e-commerce. While some governments in the developed sector were moving towards intranet, this was generally not true for the rest. Another relevant indicator within each country was the extent to which information sharing was encouraged amongst its different layers of government. They would find it easier to accept making information already in the public domain available electronically than if they were asked to share their ideas with others. The key would be that if a government was already happy to share this information internally, then there was unlikely to be a problem about extending it further.}

^{When, for example, preparing for international conventions, the index in the electronic library would enable official delegates to come up to date quickly and permit greater co-operation between governments instead of each one developing policy from scratch.}

^{Although a large amount of relevant government information was now available on public websites (albeit for a fairly short time period), finding it was difficult because in most cases there was no metadata and search engines were simply not good enough to meet the need. There would thus be enormous value in making information already in the public domain available in a structured way and this might be all that was done at the first stage. Content management was the key.}

^{The next stage would be to make available, on a controlled basis, information that was not yet public and this might include the interactive sharing of policy ideas between officials from different countries. A confidence building exercise would be required before this stage could be implemented.}

^{3. Architecture}

^{Anne Foster outlined the current position with electronic documents. There were, she said, now widely established standards for creation and dissemination around the web with agreed rules on how information should be created. This made it easier to exploit. The new standards were quite simple because instead of defining how a document looked they defined how data was put into it. She was concerned, however, about how discipline could be imposed on what information was used. There was an analogous situation with print and that led to the copyright environment. The next significant set of letters would be DRM - Digital Rights Management. Projects such as this provided a potential opportunity for government to have control of their own material.}

^{If the library succeeded it would make a significant contribution to standards but it could be a significant nuisance if done the wrong way. DRM could control access to classified as well as copyright information. Practices developed in a library for officials would probably, be adopted by others because they were widespread and well known, even if they were not the best. This placed a duty on projects like this to make sure that best practice was being used and that such practice was relevant to the wider public, not just to officials.}

^{Robert Smith referred to some similar initiatives to that proposed, in particular a European Library project that had EU funding over the next two years. They were considering how to share electronic material and systems, examining data standards, technical requirements and the building of bridges and relationships across the national libraries of Europe. Language was a major issue. Business models were being prepared on how the service should operate to provide a pan-European library dedicated to making the resources of them all available to all. The will to achieve this existed; experimentation was now required. The need was not so much to develop standards as to decide which ones to use. There would almost certainly be some useful fallout for the e-library. There were some other international projects but they were mainly small initiatives concerned merely with extending linkages between existing libraries.}

^{The scope of the project took in registries and knowledge bases, as well as libraries, and the description of the project perhaps needed extending to recognise that. Physical libraries were, however, now concerned with a wide range of information processing. Standards like XML had made it easy for them to combine internal and external information for their clients. Portals often had a search engine attached and this could be focused on the needs of officials.}

^{The operation of national electronic registries could be key. Documents going into them would provide the superset from which the library was built. If metadata were included from the start, it would be self-cataloguing. The technical tools for creating metadata and linking to objects were available for use. It was now an organisational issue.}

^{Information was now stored in the way that was easiest to put it in and tools were used for extraction. Users' needs no longer had to be known in advance. In looking at the architecture, there was a need to focus on the people being served and the classes of information involved. Officials currently made extensive use of personal contacts to gather information.}

^{There had to be a clear understanding of what type of information was involved and who would be using it. Digital Rights Management had the ability to handle access rights as well as copyrights. The technology existed to ensure that documents meant only for a small group could actually be restricted but there was still a problem of people's lack of confidence that this was so. Those providing data would also be concerned that those people deemed fit to have access really were so. This raised the related issues of identification and authentication. The highest levels of protection should be available from the start of the project, even if they were not essential for the first stage, so that they were known to exist and to work.}

^{If all registries could be logically linked there would be no technical need to pass data to a separate agency. Portals would enable the catalogues of individual registries to be accessed. There would be three possible levels of information linked to each document: full access to it; knowledge that it exists (and could be seen if specific permission were granted); a general user cannot even be told that it exists. An important feature would be linkage with the author of a document; knowing that someone was working on something was part of what the knowledge base would produce. The natural way of working in government was consistent with this approach.}

^{Some governments would not be prepared to connect their repositories to a global network, but should, in principle, be willing to share information by putting it on a separate server for the purpose. An alternative approach was to download, to a single source, information on where to find any document. The central server then retrieved the document from its source for the reader. Where there was a need to certificate the reader before releasing the information, a privilege management infrastructure could handle this using certificating technology. A combination of peer-to-peer and the central holding of data could be used as a means of separating sensitive information from the rest.}

^{This implied a very open system working in double harness with a more closed one. Realistic options would be to develop the open one first but ensuring the means to operate the second were included, or to start with a small knowledge base only serving a small, but widely distributed group, and put both public and restricted access on the same infrastructure. Officials would appreciate the easy retrieval of non-restricted material through the public portal, but they would also have a private back door to be used for some purposes. The expensive part of the system was the way in which information was dealt with and that would be the same for both parts.}

^{The session concluded that on the technical side current architectures were available that could manage the processes required. A wide, open system and one for a small group of restricted officials could share architecture. The most sensitive and difficult part was the correct use of metadata for rights management, either access or copyright.}

^{Metadata could be attached by authors working to policy guidelines, by registry officials or by specialists in information and library services or knowledge management. Standards were critical to all and must be such that information described by metadata at one time for one purpose could be used at another time for another purpose. This was considered a difficult but possible challenge for information scientists.}

^{The scheme as postulated appeared to be innovative. It would be breaking new ground as we could not pick up and adapt an existing system.}

^{4. Feasibility Study and Pilot Project}

^{Once started, this would be a massive project. Technology was still changing significantly so the project had to build in flexibility and innovation. The proposed first stage was a feasibility study examining the scope of the project and the barriers to overcome. This was the classic way to roll out such a project, and would be followed by the building of the business case before creating anything tangible.}

^{An alternative approach would be to go straight to a prototype - to build and demonstrate a one-off pilot - and then get support. This seemed the more appropriate way as the long- term effectiveness of this type of project depended on involving several countries and governments right from the start. The "origin" of a project was critical to its success; it was important for ownership to be in the right place. The initial trial could be built around an activity in which developing member countries were already involved. That would give credibility to the results, which would be seen to be relevant.}

^{It would help if the lead came from people interested in seeing the project work rather than the technologists wanting to spend their money. The support of the user community was vital and the knowledge area chosen for the pilot should not be a technical one. It was critical that any model demonstrated from the start that the security worked. Cost to the users was also important and it must not shift power without consent.}

^{The conclusion of the session was that the first step should be to prepare a prototype in a small area of knowledge and demonstrate that at a suitable event to key people from a wide range of countries. Skipping the business case, the priority would be to show that it existed and worked and then to get commitments to joining in - an easier decision than agreeing to help start something still hypothetical. The project would start on a limited scale but could grow rapidly if initial enthusiasms infected others. It was important to stay mindful of the primary objective to give developing countries a practical shared resource at a sensible cost.}

^{5. Recapitulation}

^{The second day started with a review of the refined concept. The key points were:}

^{The use of the word "library" could be misleading as there were also elements of computer supported co-operative work in what was now being proposed. Discussion had centred on how pan-Commonwealth officials could better exchange ideas and information to improve the policy making process and, specifically, to prepare for international meetings. The emerging system combined a portal - being the way into and onto knowledge - with supporting processes for interaction during the development of ideas and policies. This would be greatly helped by the adoption of common standards and practices.}

^{There was concern that such a shift in the purpose of the project would mean that it no longer had an identity distinct from the more general objectives of CCfEG and it was agreed that, whereas the library aspects in the narrow sense were not a sufficient definition, they were a very necessary component thereof. Great care would be needed in finding the right title and description, making sure that all words chosen had their most widely understood meanings.}

^{It had been established that there were no technical barriers to the feasibility of the project. The systems proposed were definitely within the state of the art but they might not, however, be within the competence of all those who wished to use them.}

^{Related to this was the issue of e-readiness. There were many questions to be answered on the ground before implementation could be achieved. In some countries the infrastructure simply did not exist.}

^{The classic conventional way to launch a project was not appropriate in this case. The process of developing the concept had to be different if we were to have the support of those whose involvement was essential for its success. Instead of undertaking a feasibility study followed by preparation of the business case, the first step would be to establish a demonstration project.}

^{To meet the needs of different countries, the overall project would probably need to be multi-technology and multi-layered. However, remote access was difficult where the Internet was not available and the extension of the project would have to be linked in with the roll out of necessary equipment. The lack of very simple facilities could easily frustrate such a project.}

^{The project would take three to five years to roll out from successful demonstration and during that time the tools could be assembled to provide access where it was not currently available. This might be more worthwhile than seeking temporary "fixes" with older technology.}

^{It would be preferable to start by bringing together a group of officials with the necessary skills, equipment and enthusiasm and then gradually spread it out. While there was considerable common ground, different countries would recognise different principal benefits. For many developing countries, access to the knowledge base would be sufficient justification to participate.}

^{By placing the project within the electronic governance theme there should not be any major problem in convincing people it was worth doing. However, the content used for the early stages of the project should deliberately not relate to technical issues but should be concerned with matters of core importance to all governments, such as taxation or trade issues.}

^{The project could begin with a small number of countries and involve a single issue or there could be a deliberate effort to choose topics that mattered to most countries and draw in a wide range of participants from the start.}

^{The great value at the early stage would be in making available some of the vast amount of public information that was not secret but which was currently not accessible. The sharing of private thoughts should be for a later stage of the project.}

^{The most difficult task for governments would be to establish the taxonomy and process for classifying the documents, which it would be of interest to put on the network. The countries with the easiest access to information were often those who had most difficulty making it available. This would change as, over the next decade, governments started to adopt practices already commonplace in multinational corporations. Officials who were doing jobs similar to those of planning and policy implementation people in the private sector should have access to the same tools.}

^{It was critical not to have too wide a scope initially, but to focus on a narrow target group, not to involve the whole world at the beginning.}

^{6. Way Forward}

^{The agreed requirement was to put in place a small pilot exercise. Decisions were needed on topics and participants. Only people who were technically ready and willing should be included at the first stage but it should be made easy for others who were interested to join if they wished. A demonstration could be run from within the CCfEG. While small, this had to be large enough to show others that it made sense. Part of the process of gaining support would be to show off the results in a forum at the right time and place and to the right people. This could be a session within an existing event or something specially organised for the purpose. It should take place in a major Commonwealth country other than the original dominions. The demonstration might focus on how officials from several countries had worked together on preparing their papers for an international convention. (It was possible that Tata, the software firm in India but also based in London and internationally, might host an event in India.)}

^{It was important to identify problems that government actually needed to solve and to have a clearly defined target. Some governments were now adopting resource management techniques and these would be relevant to this. The issue was whether the process of gathering and organising information and then sharing it helped to develop better public administration.}

^{A possible topic would be a survey of e-readiness in the Commonwealth, which would provide an overview of technical and human problems involved. There had been a major study across the European Union and that report would be a valuable document to submit, along with any studies by individual countries of both their government's and their citizens' e-readiness. It was understood that the next conference of the International Institute of Administrative Scientists would also be addressing this theme.}

^{Collaboration with private sector bodies seemed to be an important aspect of the project and the better sharing of information between sectors could be a valuable outcome of the e-library project.}

^{The key issue for moving forward was funding. A realistic plan was required to get the work done and to have the capacity to make it happen. There was a need for surveys and a practical example. Research, project management and travel costs all had to be funded.}

^{In terms of organising a specific event this could be achieved by asking major businesses to buy enough tickets ahead of time to cover the fixed costs, thus underwriting the event. Individual governments could then be asked to provide travel bursaries to enable key officials to attend as speakers and/or delegates. If the theme were suitable, there could also be commercial sales and the World Bank might provide some help. International organisations could also be invited to participate.}

^{The purpose of the event would include moving from a demonstration to a more solid proposition and agree issues relating to ownership and distribution of the project. There should be flexibility in how the project could be implemented in different areas.}

^{A steering group would be required to set up such an event. Their tasks would include taking soundings to find out the best people to be invited to attend. These should mainly be individuals actively involved in policy making. It was not an event for technical staff. An attendance of about 50 would be ideal.}

^{The purpose of the demonstration was not to display the technology and how it worked but to show how real officials could share information in a real live context and then test the results of their doing so. Care would be needed in finding a suitable issue on which people willing to be involved were already working. A theme meeting would be needed to establish the scope of the exercise and the initial sources of material. Work would then be required to add the metadata and the way in which that was done would be an important part of the demonstration.}

^{A "virtual" steering group would be established with a view to achieving an event in 6 to 18 months time.}

^{© Copyright Commonwealth Centre For Electronic Governance 2001}