Public access

“ Librarians and governing bodies have a public and professional obligation to provide equal access to all library resources for all library users."
6. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use."
The Internet provides the equivalent of electronic meeting rooms and virtual exhibit spaces. Public libraries will offer access to all comers, regardless of their status. ”

“ An Act to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens to secure access to information under the control of public authorities, in order to promote transparency and accountability in the working of every public authority, the constitution of a Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. ”

“ For all these reasons, there is an increasing tendency across Government and other bodies, both in the UK and elsewhere, to regard the information generated by researchers as a public good; and to promote the reduction, if not the complete removal, of barriers to access. ”

“ It has the daunting task now of transforming our government into an agile bureaucracy that is responsive to the needs of the public, provide good and solid data to ensure informed decision-making, as well as allow secure and seamless access to public services. ”

“ They should not be placed for public use in ordinary libraries to which all persons have access, though there is no reason why subscription libraries and kindred institutions should not have them for the benefit of their members. ”

“ Information concerning deliberations, examinations or consultations internally conducted by or mutually conducted between state organs, Incorporated Administrative Agencies, etc., local public entities and Local Incorporated Administrative Agencies, where disclosure is likely to cause unjust harm to the open exchange of opinions or the neutrality of decision making, cause unjust confusion among citizens, or bring unjust advantages or disadvantages to specific individuals. ”

“ Making it easy for researchers, students, and the general public to learn about and make use of the billions of items in our collection is clearly a challenge. Free and open access to the records of government will always be the work of this agency. ”

“ Support the rollout of open access through a centralised support point that provides capacity building tailored to projects and problem solves across the sector, and by publishing the templates and outputs produced, such as checklists, contracts and data collaboration agreements, as public resources. ”

“ Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government. ”

“ Let us at the very center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which, having as its basal object the collection, preservation and popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past, may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder on which the community may mount to still better things in the future. Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the public library? ”

“ Of later years it has become a compelling force, reaching out into the community by a thousand tendrils and attaching them to whatever individual, or body of individuals, seems to be in need—often without knowing it—of library service. The public library’s relations with the schools, with the business man, with the industries, with the military service—you will find these all discust over and over again, not only in the technical magazines devoted to library work, but in the public press. ”

“ In other words, how to stimulate organs of local government to see past the ends of their own noses about the broad issues of information freedom and access. Those are the people we’re going to need ten years from now, and we’re not going to be able to educate them ten years from now. ”

“ He lives because he took his wares to his audience. And without its public, as we have already said, the public library, too, would soon pass into oblivion. It must look to the public for the breath of life, for the very blood in its veins, for its bone and sinew. What, then, is the part that the community may play in increasing the efficiency of a public institution like the public library? Such an institution is, first of all, a medium through which the community does something for itself. The community employs and supports it, and at the same time is served by it. ”

“ People will use a library, not because, in others' opinions, they ought to, but because they like to. See to it, then, that the new library is such as its owner, the public, likes; and the only test of this liking is use. Open wide the doors. Let regulations be few and never obtrusive. Trust American genius for self-control. Remember the deference for the rights of others with which you and your fellows conduct yourselves in your own homes, at public tables, at general gatherings. ”

“ And the point being made here is that not every citizen realizes when they are looking into their health, their business, education, or housing, that government provides a service that is relevant. And that is why it is critical that all of the information of the Federal Government that is public be in all search engines possible and not simply through USA.gov, where a user is consciously looking for information from its government. ”

“ Members of the public entitled to library service, the amount of which has been limited by the rules to ensure proper distribution and to prevent monopoly, manage to get two or three times as much as they should get, by applying to different departments, or to the same department under different names. ”

“ In short we may safely affirm that public libraries are studying the needs of their communities as never before, and that the somewhat vague notion of aiding the 'public' is fast being replaced by concrete and tangible assistance to organizations and individuals. ”

“ With a simple and inexpensive equipment, somewhat like that included in these eleven items, backed by wide advertising in the local press, a public library can attract the business men of a town to use the institution they support, an institution which should be turned to by everyone in the municipality as the very first source of information. ”

“ Still further, curiosity about other people’s affairs may be legitimate, as, for instance, when one is responsible for their proper conduct in greater or less degree. In the same way the trustees of a free public library, representing the public at large, by whom the library is supported and carried on, have a right to know all possible particulars regarding the way in which their librarian has carried on his work and the results he has reached in it, and the municipality in turn should require of the trustees a strict account of the funds that they have administered. ”

“ In every place are found many who are quite ignorant of the stores of knowledge which lie at their doors in the free library. And among those who do know it and resort to it, are many who need to have their interest and attention aroused by frequent notices as to its progress, recent additions to its stores, etc. The more often the library is brought before the public by the press, the more interest will be taken in it by the community for whose information it exists. ”

“ It aims to bring into existence such information and materials as will aid in the formation of public opinion and will assist officials particularly those of the National Government, in their efforts to put the public administration upon a more efficient basis. ”

“ The good that a public library may do, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may assume in a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which it is administered and the resources at its disposal. ”

“ The first exercise of that power should be the securing of publicity among all great corporations doing an interstate business. The publicity, though non-inquisitorial, should be real and thorough as to all important facts with which the public has concern. ”

“ In general, then, the matters of which the publication should be repressed may be described as those which concern the private life, habits, acts, and relations of an individual, and have no legitimate connection with his fitness for a public office which he seeks or for which he is suggested, or for any public or quasi public position which he seeks or for which he is suggested, and have no legitimate relation to or bearing upon any act done by him in a public or quasi public capacity. ”

“ Do not assume that for some occult reason you must classify and catalog your library precisely like some large public library with which you are familiar. Do not assume, if you are a trained cataloger, that there is any virtue, for instance, in subject cards. One subject heading that brings the book in touch with your public outweighs a dozen that do not affect it. To bring together man and book break all rules and strike out in all kinds of new directions. Your particular locality and your particular public may have special requirements that are present nowhere else. ”

“ Publish Government Information Online — particularly high-value data and through an open gateway for agency activities. 2. Improve the Quality of Government Information 3. Create and Institutionalize a Culture of Open Government 4. Create an Enabling Policy Framework for Open Government We are working through the mechanisms at the National Archives to embrace these goals and principles, and we will release a first draft of our plan on April 7. At the heart of the plan is a flagship initiative to develop web and data services that are worthy of the American people. ”

“ If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term 'open access' in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of 'pay-to-say' publishing. ”

“ The public library is public property, owned and controlled by the citizens. Every citizen, therefore, should be interested in setting standards for it and playing his part toward making it conform to them—in seeing that its governing body represents him in also recognizing those standards and trying to maintain them—in laboring for such a due apportionment of the public funds as shall not make an attempt to live up to such standards a mere farce. ”

“ Our great circulating libraries are our free public libraries. Do authors or publishers or booksellers recognize the public library as a force to be reckoned with, either apart from other readers or as indicative of what other readers will think or do? I once made an investigation of this question and I was compelled to acknowledge, as I am still forced to admit, that there is no such recognition. Neither author nor publisher consciously does anything different, because there are public library readers, from what he would do, if all our public libraries were wiped off the face of the earth. ”

“ None the less is it the duty of the head of every great institution to strive continually to attain and maintain it; to increase it if{166} possible and to guard it jealously. There he is in the hands of his subordinates and such system as he may bring to bear may and should be directed toward creating and keeping alive within them a proper esprit de corps. The library that succeeds in creating a public impression that it and all connected with it are honestly trying to be of public service, to win public esteem, and to gain a place in the public heart, has two-thirds of its work done already. ”

“ The public library, then, is a means for elevating and refining the taste, for giving greater efficiency to every worker, for diffusing sound principles of social and political action, and for furnishing intellectual culture to all. ”

“ When consideration is also given to the fact that an arbitrarily fixed lower rate is granted to a favored station itself controlled by another instrument of public communication-a newspaper-the ultimate possibilities for control of the channels of public communication and information are apparent. ”

“ A private Intelligence-office, kept in the superintendent's own house, cannot be interfered with, unless it can be proved a nuisance; and how difficult it is to abate a nuisance I need not tell anybody who has ever tried the experiment.
The keeper of a General or Public Intelligence-office makes application for a license to the city government, sustained by a certain number of respectable vouchers, and pays, I believe, a yearly fee of one dollar. ”

“ I am persuaded that the laws relating to the publication and distribution of public documents should be carefully revised and simplified.
In my judgment, provision should be made for supplying gratuitously all the important public libraries of the country with copies of every valuable publication issued by the Government, while individuals should be required to pay cost-price for the same, exception being made of persons in official position, who should be provided with such documents as are essential to the proper discharge of the duties of their office. ”

“ No one expects that the community will require that every one within its borders shall use the public library so many times a month, or, indeed that it shall be used at all. The nature of the institution precludes such compulsion. But it should require that every effort be made to see that no section of the books on the library shelves shall lie idle and that no section of the{247} community shall fail to use books, either through ignorance or through doubt of a welcome. ”