Statement Regarding S. 2813 and H.R. 2772
to the
Senate Committee on Rules and Administration
and the
House Committee on Administration
by
Richard P. West
Associate Vice President
Information Systems and Administrative Services
University of California
Chair, Steering Committee,
Coalition for Networked Information
July 23, 1992
Introduction
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committees, thank you for the opportunity to
address you today on an issue of vital importance for education and American
society.
I am Richard P. West, Associate Vice President, Information Systems and
Administrative Services, for the nine campuses of the University of California.
As a senior member of the Office of the President, I have overall information
and telecommunications responsibility for the 165,000 students, 150,000
employees, and $7.5 billion operating budget of those nine campuses. Included
in the development efforts of my office is the backbone of the University-wide
library information system known as MELVYL. I serve as a member of the Board
of Directors of Advanced Networks and Services, Inc., the not-for-profit
contractor that currently operates the backbone of the National Science
Foundation Network. Today, I am appearing as Chair of the Steering Committee
of the Coalition for Networked Information.
The Coalition for Networked Information was founded in March 1990 to help
realize the promise of advanced networks and high performance computing for
information access and delivery. The Coalition was established by the
Association of Research Libraries, an association that promotes equitable
access to, and effective use of, recorded knowledge in support of teaching,
research, scholarship, and community service, and CAUSE and EDUCOM, two
associations dedicated to the introduction, use, and management of information
technology and related resources in research and education in general and
higher education in particular. This Coalition formed a task force of
institutions and organizations able and willing to contribute resources and
attention to the mission of the Coalition. This Task Force now provides a
common vehicle by which nearly 170 institutions and organizations are pursuing
a shared vision of how information management must change in the 1990s to meet
the social and economic opportunities and challenges of the 21st century.
Members of the Task Force include higher education institutions, publishers,
network service providers, computer hardware, software, and systems companies,
library networks and organizations, and public and state libraries, truly a
diverse partnership of institutions and organizations whose range of expertise
encompasses all that is needed to develop networked information resources and
services.
Interest and Support
I am here today to offer observations on the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative
drawn from the experience of the Coalition and its members, experience that
taps the expertise of the library and computing communities as well as the
publishing and networking communities.
The current environment for the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative is extremely
favorable. The passage into law of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991
(PL102-194) with its provisions for the construction of the National Research
and Education Network (NREN) is particularly noteworthy. Traffic on the
Interim Interagency NREN (IINREN) has been growing at a rate of 15 - 20% per
month for the last two years, and the connectivity provided by the IINREN,
particularly the connectivity provided through the global Internet of which the
IINREN is part, has grown by a total of 500% during the same period. The NREN
will provide new levels of network performance and new approaches to network
management to this rapidly diversifying population of network users and their
portfolio of network applications. It is also particularly noteworthy that the
cost and performance of computers, digital displays, and storage media
continues the pattern of offering more power for less money that has been the
hallmark of these technologies throughout the last forty years. The
Coalition's members have begun to offer networked information resources and
services in this environment and are planning and building digital libraries as
well. The Nation as a whole is rapidly acquiring the tools and the skills that
it needs to realize the democratic ideal of citizen access to public
information via electronic media. Federal Government efforts to provide broad
access to its information resources in the networked environment are well-timed
and enthusiastically welcomed by the Coalition and its members.
I am also here to encourage that the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative be
developed in a manner that is compatible with the environment in which the
Coalition and its members are working. Coalition members are responsible for
integrating a wide variety of information resources and services in print as
well as electronic formats. They want to be sure that the GPO WINDO / Gateway
initiative is designed and implemented to provide access to information in a
way that is complementary with efforts already underway in the Nation. Many
Coalition members are also members of the Federal Depository Library System and
would as a result be directly impacted by the shape eventually assumed by the
GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative. Moreover, the constituencies served by
Coalition members span the makeup of the entire Nation, from elementary and
secondary students to post-doctoral fellows, from small business persons to
divisions of Fortune 100 firms, and from farmers interacting with
agricultural extension agents to urban-dwellers seeking assistance from social
service agencies. For all of these and other reasons, the Coalition wants to
help to make sure that the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative uses superior US
information technology to improve access to and delivery of Federal information
in a manner that leverages related efforts being undertaken by the Coalition's
members.
Observations and Recommendations
The Coalition and its members believe that the goal of all information access
and delivery strategies in this new and very favorable environment should be to
strive to locate and bring data and information resources together through easy
to use interfaces that provide convenient access to powerful and reliable
networks.
It is also the experience of the Coalition and its members that good ideas
require good plans to ensure good results. A technical plan is particularly
important for determining the costs and benefits that will result from the GPO
WINDO / Gateway initiative. A technical plan would not only present and
analyze technological alternatives for some of the key components of the system
implied by the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative, it would also draw upon
information about the availability of Federal agency files in machine-readable
form and about the readiness of Federal agencies to participate in the GPO
WINDO/Gateway initiative.
To assist this technical planning, the Coalition and the American Library
Association are engaged in a joint project to explore the costs and benefits of
alternative models of how the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative could be
implemented. The Coalition and its members are particularly interested in
models that use the National Research and Education Networks (NREN) and the
global Internet as the network infrastructure for the GPO / WINDO Gateway
initiative. This interest not only derives from the High-Performance Computing
Act of 1992 (PL102-194), which calls for the NREN to be used to improve
dissemination of Federal agency data and electronic information, but from the
fact that work on networked information resources and services is at it most
advanced stage in the IINREN and the global Internet.
The GPO WINDO / Gateway legislation needs to call for a technical plan to frame
and address the wide range of costs and benefits to both the Federal Government
and to GPO WINDO / Gateway users that could conceivably flow from the GPO WINDO
/ Gateway initiative. That plan should be prepared with the assistance of an
advisory board with expert participation by institutions and organizations that
reflect the community of users as well as other institutions and organizations
able and willing to contribute to the development of such a technical plan.
The Coalition would be pleased to help with the formation and support of such
an advisory panel.
The Coalition and its members also subscribe to the belief that partnership
relationships and incremental development are key success factors in projects
like the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative. Coalition members are very aware of
the need for and the difficulty of focused and agile program planning and
implementation in the contemporary environment of rapidly evolving information
technologies and the opportunities and challenges presented by those
technologies. Coalition members believe that the need for such program
planning and implementation in such an environment will continue for the
foreseeable future. The strategy favored by Coalition members in this
environment is to design and undertake initiatives in a partnership setting and
to implement and evaluate initiatives in an incremental fashion. Partnership
relationships are favored because they allow the relatively rapid mobilization
of a wide range of perspectives and resources. Incremental development is
favored because it allows the relatively rapid delivery and evaluation of
carefully defined sets of benefits which, in turn, allows new sets of benefits
to be defined and delivered at succeeding stages of development.
The Coalition encourages the developers of the GPO WINDO / Gateway to provide
for a mechanism by which such partnership relationships can be established and
maintained by the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative, and to specify a set of
deliverables and benefits (specific Federal agency databases, for instance)
that should guide the initial stages of program planning and implementation for
the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative. In this latter regard, the Coalition
welcomes the special attention drawn to the Federal Register and
Congressional Record in S.2813, and observes that both of those
databases are already available via a commercial information provider
accessible through the IINREN and the global Internet. Other Federal agency
databases are also already accessible through the IINREN and the global
Internet as a result of the efforts of the agencies involved as well as those
of a variety of non-commercial entities.
Finally, it is never too early to commit effort to the process of
standardization. As mentioned before, Coalition members are responsible for
integrating a wide variety of information resources and services. The
Coalition and its members invest a substantial amount of money and energy in
standardization processes that frame and address the need for systems and
services that can interoperate in an open and efficient manner even though
those systems and services have been built using many different types of
hardware and software. The efforts of the National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are
particularly praiseworthy, and the rapid implementation and evolution of the
Z39.50 inter-system search and retrieval standard is especially critical. The
Coalition encourages the involvement of the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative in
the standardization processes and recommends that the relationships between the
GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative and the National Institute for Standards and
Technology (NIST) and various standards efforts like the Computer-Aided
Logistics System (CALS) be defined. The Coalition welcomes the special
attention drawn to this subject in S.2813.
Thank you Mr. Chairman; that concludes my remarks. I would be happy to answer
any questions that you and other members of the Committees may have.
Endorsements
Association of American Universities (AAU)
Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
CAUSE
EDUCOM
National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
Attachments
Diagram: Summary System Model
Diagram: Summary Component Model
Members of the Coalition Task Force
Coalition Key Contacts
Coalition Program Strategy
Coalition / ALA call for statements of interest and experience regarding
cost / benefit analyses of the GPO WINDO / Gateway initiative
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