Digital libraries supporting digital government

Abstract

The needs of society have long been addressed through government resea rch support for new technologies-the Internet representing one example. Today, under the rubric of digital government, federal agencies as well as state and local units of governments at all levels have begun to leverage the fruits of these research investments to better serve the needs of their constituencies. Government agencies apply these technologies in a variety of settings including emergency response, health and safety regulation, financial management, data gathering, and hosts of information dissemination needs. In addition, governments are investigating ways to use technology to encourage citizen participation. There is a growing digital government community of practice that strongly parallels the evolving digital library community. These parallel developments are not surprising because libraries and governments share service missions for their overlapping constituencies.Governments at all levels create enormous volumes of information for use by citizens and have long depended on libraries to organize, disseminate, and preserve this public information. There is an inextricable link between democratic government and libraries stemming from the 19th century creation of public libraries as democracys offer to citizens to learn, to grow, and to participate. The idea of sharing knowledge to enable good citizenship engenders many cross-currents inherent in social-political policy, and today this idea is given new incarnation in the global Internet environment. Digital library projects in national and local libraries were in many ways the precursors of digital government initiatives and it is particularly instructive to examine a selection of digital government projects through the lens of digital libraries. This panel presents overviews of several digital government projects and initiatives that combine the technical and conceptual threads composing these mutuall