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Back List: 39 years ago in Quill & Quire

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In 1977, when phones were still attached to walls and the birth of the World Wide Web was more than a decade away, Harry Rensby, writing in Quill & Quire‘s February issue, predicted what a part of our current discourse would sound like. Rensby’s article, “Digging out from under the the information avalanche,” examined the coming onslaught of publicly available government documents.

“A burgeoning amount of information is available nowadays,” Rensby reported. “The question is how to handle it.” A proposed access to information bill was expected to pass that year that “could make available a paper landslide. Is there money in it? How is the increasing mass of data going to be directed to interested people? How will library services be affected by the provision of more information? … Are pay libraries inevitable in the face of increasing information and demand for it?”

Also of concern: “Who will profit from public information, and how?” Jim Feeley, treasurer of the free-information group ACCESS, said government documents should be indexed and available upon request, with an outside arbiter assessing instances of potential national security breach. Conservative MP Ged Baldwin, founder of ACCESS, said wider availability to government documents would lead to a more careful analysis of government programs. “Most major programs launched by governments are done so on costs estimated with gross negligence, deceit or ignorance.”

Four decades later, more information than could have been imagined by 1977 data miners is available to a digitally connected public, and library services remain mostly free. Canada’s Access to Information Act eventually passed in 1985, with many other countries following suit around the same time – which doesn’t mean all information is easy to obtain today. This month, Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks – an organization dedicated to releasing classified government documents – said he would surrender to authorities if a U.N. working group ruled he had not been unlawfully detained in the London Ecuadorian Embassy where he has lived in exile for three and a half years.

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February 4th, 2016

3:12 pm