Getting Government’s Message Across

Jennie Grimshaw

www.bl.uk 2

Official publishing

transformed

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Change in the Air: UK Government

Mid-1990s:Government commits to making information

available electronically (Cm

3438, 1996)

Proliferation of ever-changing

government websites

Launch of GOV.UK as single point of access to UK Government on January 31st

2012

Websites disappearedWebsites were redesigned

Documents were removed and lostLinks were broken

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Change in the Air: Parliamentary PublishingWhen? What? Where? By whom?From Feb. 2014 Command papers

and other papers laid before the House by departments and agencies

Published free on GOV.UK landing page as list with newest at top – no official print publisher

Loaded by government departments and agencies

From April 2016 Papers produced within Lords and Commons, e.g. Select Committee reports, Hansard

Published on Parliament website – no official print copy available to public - scattered

Lords and Commons staff

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Change in the Air: The National Archives

UK Government Web Archive

• Launched as solution to broken links problem

• Crawls entire UK Government webestate at least 2-3 times a year

• Enables users to be redirected toarchive instead of receiving 404error message

• Includes themed collections &Video & Twitter archives

• Preserves datasets

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In the Marketplace

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Enter Commercial Publishers: Dandy

Public Information Online

• UK Parliamentary papers,Bills & Daily Hansard in pdf

• Scottish Parliament

• Northern Ireland Assembly

• Key non-Parliamentary papers

• Civil Service Yearbook

• Historic Lords papers 1901-2005

• Print available on demand

www.bl.uk 8

Enter Commercial Publishers: Proquest

UK Parliamentary Papers

• 18th, 19th, 20th & 21st centuryCommons papers online

• C19 Lords papers

• Licensed in perpetuity by JISCfor HE

• Institutions still need to payaccess fee

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Enter Commercial Publishers: TSO

Official Publications Online

• Legislation (Acts & Sis)

• Gazettes

• Hansard

• Commons & Lords papers and Bills

• Current Act & Command papers, legislation, gazettes & historicParliamentary papers available in print

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Emerging Formats

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Good-bye PDF, Welcome ODF

• Preferred format to be used across government

• Chosen by Cabinet Office & Government Digital service

• Unfortunately, we can’t process it (yet)!

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Good-bye PDF, Welcome HTML

• Documents published as HTML pages

• Constantly changing and being updated

• Concept of definitive bounded document lost

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Good-bye Loose-leaf, Welcome Website

• The FCA Handbook now presented as linked html pages

• Use table of contents to browse

• Navigate using internal links

• Use search to find content by topic

• Use timeline options to see different versions

• Has some pdfs embedded

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Good-bye Document, Welcome Database

• Gazette has become a searchable database

• Search for companies, honours, wills, insolvency or all notices

• Special section on World War I notices

• Can browse all notices back to 1665 (if you insist)

• Now disaggregated – no real concept of issue

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The Future is Dynamic: GOV.UK

• To move away from confusing proliferation of versions:– GDS is working towards showing how guidance has

evolved – Aim to ensure that citizens can understand how guidance has

changed over time– Aim to make GOV.UK self archiving– Not yet scoped!

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The Future is Non-text Based

• Commons is considering accepting papers in non-traditional forms:

– Command paper published as a video– Report a hybrid consisting of sound, video, data + text in a

wrapper– Being investigated by Ways and Means Committee

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Riding the Tiger

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Challenges: Version Control

• Loss of concept of authoritative final version

• 9 November 2016 5:18pmRevised - figure 6.4 has been corrected due to errors in the formula used to create the index

• 17 March 2016 4:23pmTable and chart added showing raw material consumption up to 2013, as a result of ONS publishing "How much material is the UK consuming?“

• 26 January 2016 9:30amFirst published.

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Challenges: Relating Documents

• NHS Digital, beta version

• Offers report, summary infographic, data tables, data collection forms, data quality statement presented with summary of key facts

• Need to be seen together, in time series

• URL probably won’t stay stable

• Solutions:– Web archiving?

UK Government Web Archive– DOIs?.

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Challenges: Disaggregated Documents

• UK Parliament: Committee Evidence

• Published as separate documents on Inquiry web page, not collated into pdf

• May include links to video of evidence sessions

• Role for commercial publishers, e.g. Dandy

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Challenges: Broken Links

• BL current strategy is to link out to foreign national government & IGO documents on the web

• Plan to run regular checks to see if links are broken

• First check run in September 2016 showed 4,358 of 288,359 links broken:

– 2,414 links to EU documents broken due to URL change– 1,835 links to US Federal Government documents broken

due to USGPO not having updated purls

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Direction of Travel: Find out More

• Inside GOV.UK – what GDS is doing

• Second Reading – House of Commons Library blog – brief posts on current issues

• OfficialPapersUK – “a place for librarians and information professionals to share information and keep up to date in the world of parliamentary and government publishing”

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Thank you