In August 2008, the U.S. Government Printing Office issued a request for proposals to digitize its legacy collection of 2.2 million documents, back to founding of the country. Last week, GPO announced it would not award a contract, explaining only that it couldn't make an award "in the allocated timeframe".
There was at least one bid for the contract. The Internet Archive filed a proposal, partnering with the Law Library Microform Consortium and the University of Florida Libraries. The proposal seems to meet the major requirements of the RFP: most importantly, that the digitization would occur at no cost to the government. In addition to providing free digital copies of the files to GPO, the Internet Archive also proposed to host them OA online.
According to Gary Somerset, GPO spokesperson, GPO did make a recommendation for an award, though he didn't say which bid was recommended. (I don't know if there were other bids besides the Internet Archive's.) Here's the catch -- quoting from Somerset via email:
... GPO does not have the statutory authority for this project and would need the approval of [the Joint Committee on Printing, GPO's Congressional oversight committee] to proceed. GPO briefed committee staff and they indicated they were likely to recommend approval for a project of defined scope in order to test the project's process, identify costs, evaluate protections for [personally identifiable information], and monitor progress. Before GPO could submit a formal request to the committee for approval, the bid acceptance period expired before an award could be made. The Public Printer [director of the GPO] requested an extension of the offer but the offerer declined to provide it. Since then, GPO has received expressions of interest in this project from different parties and is in the process of evaluating its next steps.
The response I received from Judith Russell, dean of libraries at UF (and former Superintendent of Documents at GPO) suggests the bid under consideration was the Internet Archive's:
I do not know if GPO had other proposals under active consideration, but the proposal in which I participated was extended multiple times at the request of GPO, with the final extension expiring on September 30, 2009. Internet Archive and LLMC declined to extend beyond that date.
I'll post more information when I have it. If you know something, please let me know. (You may request to remain anonymous if you wish.)
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/14/2009 08:03:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
