Newsletter No. 83
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Free Pint
"Helping 35,000 people use the Web for their work"
http://www.freepint.co.uk/
ISSN 1460-7239 15th March 2001 No.83
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IN THIS ISSUE
EDITORIAL
MY FAVOURITE TIPPLES
from Duncan Parry
FREE PINT BAR
In Association with Factiva
a Dow Jones & Reuters Company
Reviewed by Simon Collery
TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
"XML - the DNA of the Internet"
By Neil Smith
BOOKSHELF
"How to survive the eBusiness downturn"
"Executive's Guide to eBusiness"
"eBusiness and ERP"
"How to write a .com business plan"
Reviewed by Charles Oppenheim
FEATURE ARTICLE
"Freedom of Information"
By Richard Wakeford
EVENTS, GOLD AND FORTHCOMING ARTICLES
CONTACT INFORMATION
ONLINE VERSION WITH ACTIVATED HYPERLINKS
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/150301.htm>
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>>> ABOUT FREE PINT <<<
Free Pint is a community of business professionals who use the Web for
their research. Members receive this free newsletter every two weeks
packed with tips on finding quality and reliable business information
on the Internet. Signing up at <http://www.freepint.co.uk/> provides
free access to the substantial archive of articles, book reviews,
industry news and events, with answers to your research questions and
networking at the "Free Pint Bar" and "Student Bar". This newsletter
is best read when printed out and viewed in a Courier font.
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EDITORIAL
I regularly bring up the subject of money, or the lack of it, in my
editorials. In the last issue for instance I sympathised with the
large number of dotcoms who are currently laying off staff or folding.
It was great therefore for me to able to spend the whole of last week
pretending I was a wealthy movie financier in our local operatic
society's production of "Mack and Mabel". We played five performances
to 1200 people in which I could pretend to be a wealthy and
influential 1920s Hollywood tycoon.
The reason I bring this up is because I see a lot of parallels between
this leisure activity and the Free Pint community itself. It takes an
awful lot of effort to produce a show, as it does to run Free Pint,
but we very rarely get direct feedback from our audience about how
we're doing. I'm in my fifth year as Chairman of the society, as well
as performing on stage, but I very rarely get any direct comments
about how much people enjoy what we produce. It's always hearsay.
It therefore takes quite a lot of self-reassurance to keep doing what
we do. I mean, we must be doing something right as our society had a
capacity audience for every performance, whilst Free Pint still grows
at 900 new members a month. Both of these are achieved almost entirely
through word of mouth recommendation.
So I guess I'm worrying about nothing. It is interesting though that
the success or failure of many things are measured by intangibles. I
suppose that if a venture is self-financing and growing then you must
be doing something right, but no one will ever point that out to you.
I wonder if a few struggling dotcoms could have done with some such
reassurance before following the rocky road of external finance.
We've packed some great articles and tips into today's Free Pint. Two
super articles introduce you to the worlds of XML and freedom of
information. The ever popular Charles Oppenheim treats us to four
reviews in one as he looks at a range of eCommerce strategy books. We
also roundup the latest happenings at the Bar and Student Bar.
My thanks to all those who've been spreading the word about our
community. We always ask new Free Pinters how they heard about us and
8 out of 10 new members quote a personal recommendation. If you enjoy
today's edition then feel free to pass it on to your colleagues.
Cheers
William
William Hann BSc MIInfSc
Founder and Managing Editor, Free Pint
e: william@freepint.co.uk
t: +44 (0)1784 455435
f: +44 (0)1784 455436
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market intelligence products and services available. For more
information, click on the link below or call +1-212-807-2629 (USA).
http://www.marketresearch.com/redirect.asp?progid=1010
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MY FAVOURITE TIPPLES
from Duncan Parry
* Google Internet Explorer Search Bar - I guess most Free Pinters have
heard of Google - well this freebie adds a Google search box to
your browser, with some of Google's search tools including 'Page
Info' and 'Ranking' quickly accessible.
<http://services.google.com/navclient/welcome.html>
* Lockergnome Ezine - Got a Windows PC? Get Lockergnome! Published
every week day, Lockergnome's free newsletter offers brief, quirky
reviews and links to free and shareware software that really is
useful, as well as tips & tricks, industry news and more.
<http://www.Lockergnome.com/>
* About - About employs expert guides in a wide range of fields (70 in
20 countries apparently) ranging from web design to fashion to local
travel guides. <http://www.About.com/>
* How Stuff Works - Useful articles and diagrams on how 'stuff' like
Computers, the Internet and Electronics work. If I'm miffed by a
bit of kit, this is the place I start looking for an explanation.
<http://www.howstuffworks.com/>
* Moreover - One for webmasters - they offer a vast range of free
newsfeeds for your site or application, which can be customised to
blend in to your design, with no adverts. <http://www.moreover.com/>
Duncan Parry is a category editor for the directory of Lycos UK
<http://www.lycos.co.uk/> and is also developing a new site, RailFind
<http://www.railfind.co.uk/> which is a guide to UK railways online.
He also undertakes web site design work
<http://www.digitalstrike.co.uk/>, and is currently studying with the
Open University.
Tell us about your top five favourite Web sites. See the guidelines at
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/author.htm> or email <simon@freepint.co.uk>
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ROI Facts For Your Marketing and Strategic Planning
Did you know that the intellectual assets of a corporation are
usually worth three or four times its tangible book value? You
will find that and other useful facts about ROI in "Measuring
and Assessing the Return-on-Investment for your Information
Initiative". This and other presentations are at
http://www.factiva.com/infopro under White Papers and Presentations.
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>>> DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHO YOUR SUPPLIERS AND CUSTOMERS ARE? <<<
Most business transactions are based on trust and are therefore
inherently risky. You can minimise this risk by verifying that the
companies you are dealing with are really who they say they are.
It is free to search our database of all registered UK companies and
see basic details. You can purchase more detailed financial reports as
required, and there are no setup or monthly fees. Why not try it out?
http://www.freepint.co.uk/icc/
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FREE PINT BAR
In Association with Factiva
a Dow Jones & Reuters Company
Reviewed by Simon Collery
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/150301.htm#bar>
Free Pint Bar - <http://www.freepint.co.uk/bar>
[Note: To read a posting enter the message number in place of XXXX in
the address <http://www.freepint.co.uk/bar/read.php?i=XXXX> or enter
the number in the "Jump To" box on the Bar homepage]
Whenever I cast an eye over the last two week's Bar postings I look
out for a dominant 'flavour' or theme and there's been a notable
interest in search tools recently. Not whether they find what you
want quickly or not but how they look and feel (7942). Personally, I
like ones that find what you want quickly and easily (8059) but this
is not the first time I have been reminded of how much taste varies.
Search engines are changing all the time (7907, 8085) and, in many
cases, improving. Many of them are offering new features, such as
streaming media (8093) and other non-textual searches. And despite
being a little slow sometimes, Amnesi, a domain name search tool, is
still in operation (7894).
The themes of advertising, marketing and related pursuits have been
equally popular too. One often hears questions about how many Web
site visits are converted to sales (7879). But according to a recent
edition of Clickz, which concentrated almost solely on this sort of
question, there is more to the Web than instant sales (7880).
At least one Free Pinter seemed to be aware of this (8050). As well
as making sales through Web sites there are also the matters of
building brand awareness and supporting existing customers. CRM
(customer relationship management) was probably in the mind of the
Free Pinter who wanted to know the provenance of the saying "Nobody
wants a relationship with the phone company" (8015). There were
further marketing questions from people selling stain removal products
(7945), selling to the armed forces (7900) and finding startups
(8075).
Recommended and reviewed resources include a fascinating site about
visual representations of cyberspace (8021), a collection of timelines
(7991) and a site listing radio stations around the world (8099). Then
there were resources on UK recruitment agencies (7929), free UK photos
on the Web (7987) and women lawyers in the UK (8012).
There have been library and information questions about competitive
intelligence training courses in the UK and what they are like (8092),
corporate information policies and information sharing (8100), what
exactly knowledge management consists of (8082) and producing library
documentation (7904).
Quantitative data was sought on European and Asian search engines
(8113), customer segmentation terms such as 'silver surfer' (8052),
historical prices for computer memory (7956) and the cost of
accommodation to companies (8040). Free Pinters were told where to
find data on investment in IT companies by banks (7976), chemical
production statistics (7891) and Internet share trading statistics
(7955).
Technical and Web mastering questions that still require answers
include ones on automatic indexing packages (8051), data organisation
tools (8048) and language filtering in news tickers (7881).
But suggestions have been made about link policies (7935), PDF readers
for Psion 5MXs (8074), open source ebook readers (7949), enewsletter
formats (8020), IE timeout settings (7882), frames (7916), Javascript
(7979), transferring a database onto a Web site (7876) and converting
PDF files to JPEG or GIF format (7943).
Recent miscellaneous questions have been about setting up new
businesses (8025), the lyrics for the Pushbike Song (7997), a list of
European laboratories that specialize in amino acid analysis (7924),
PR jobs in the healthcare sector (8017), working alone and
telecommuting (8062), corporate Christmas card companies (8081) and
the number of patients who sustain injuries in hospitals through
mistakes in diagnosis or treatment (7973).
And still to be answered are queries about how to license software and
how much it costs (7931), online learning materials for engineering
(7906) and online terminology research and products (7875). We look
forward to hearing from Free Pinters who know about such things.
Free Pint Student Bar - <http://www.freepint.co.uk/student>
[Note: To read a posting enter the message number in place of XXXX in
the address <http://www.freepint.co.uk/student/read.php?i=XXXX>]
On the Student Bar the subjects raised have been pretty diverse,
ranging from Harrier AV-8B aircraft drawings (1181) and UK political
constituency information (1183) to Library and Information Science
Abstracts (1188) and technological change in developing countries
(1201). Someone is also looking for contacts to help with research
into outsourcing in corporate libraries (1199).
There have also been questions about ecommerce marketing (1202),
Internet use in university libraries (1224), ecommerce business to
business models (1184) and engineering companies that sponsor students
through university. If you think you can help with any of these, do
pop into the Free Pint Student Bar.
Simon Collery, Content Developer <simon@freepint.co.uk>
If you have a tricky research question or can help other Free Pinters
then do post a message at the Bar <http://www.freepint.co.uk/bar> or
the Student Bar <http://www.freepint.co.uk/student>.
Visit daily for "Today's Tipple" - a different Web site reviewed every
working day at the Bar. Every Tuesday there is the "Pub Crawl", a look
at full text articles from a range of information and Internet
publications. Access the archive of Tipples and Pub Crawls at
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/portal/content/tipple.php3>.
To have the latest Free Pint Bar postings sent to you every other day,
send a blank email to <digest@freepint.co.uk>. For the Student Bar
Digest send an email to <studentdigest@freepint.co.uk>.
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Advertising space in the Free Pint Newsletter is being snapped up
earlier and earlier as advertisers report a tremendous response from
the messages they place here. The page for advertisers therefore now
gives advertiser testimonials and we show the amount of space
remaining in future issues on the Publication Dates page. Shouldn't
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TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/150301.htm#tips>
"XML - the DNA of the Internet"
By Neil Smith
Everyone by now has probably heard about Extensible Markup Language,
or XML. This is my attempt to explain what XML is and the effect I
think it will have on our world.
A little history is essential here. We all know Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1990 while at CERN. Not content
with this enormous contribution to science, he went on to found the
WWW Consortium, or W3C, hosted at MIT, with continuing support from
CERN, the EC, and The Defense Advance Projects Agency, inventors of
the Internet. The stated purpose of the W3C is to lead the Web to its
full potential.
The W3C enjoys the full support of all the major software houses, and
is the acknowledged official source of leadership in all matters
relating to the Web. This unusual mixture of academics, scientists
and commercial giants is leading a project which is changing computing
and business for ever. The significance of these developments is
comparable in my opinion with the moon race or the genome project, and
will have consequences as great as either. HTML, the language of the
Web, describes the appearance or layout of information on the browser,
but says nothing about the content of the data.
Information is effectively published to the Internet and then sits
there. It is a read only, one way publishing medium. Very little
interactivity is possible. Something was needed to permit data to be
described accurately to permit machines to process it. The answer lay
in a modified version of SGML, a markup language invented by IBM
thirty years ago and widely used in publishing. XML, approved by the
W3C in 1998, was the result. XML is a meta language for describing
markup languages. It provides a facility to define tags, which
describe data, and the structural relationship between the tags. The
tags are the metadata.
The rules of XML permit six types of markup, including free text
comment and processing instructions, and the main type of markup is
the element, which can have attributes and values. The rules for the
creation of these tags are precise, but note again that the meaning of
what is in the tags is left up to the processing software. What XML
encoded data leaves you with is pre-packaged, self describing
information, ready for consumption.
The metadata is in angled brackets, of which there are two pairs,
opening and closing and describes the data enclosed between them. It
is this combination of accurate description and structure which makes
it so important. XML is completely extensible, that is, new tags can
be created at any time and can be used to create an infinite variety
of document types, whether from text, voice, film or a combination of
these.
Because XML data is completely independent of presentation, and can be
read by any XML enabled system, it means that any data from any source
can be processed, exchanged and delivered to any type of XML enabled
application and hardware. The output of data into different formats,
again infinitely flexible, takes place via stylesheets, to any XML
enabled appliance. For example, a news article could be retrieved via
your PC and sent to your daughter's school E-workbook, or a movie
selected and paid for using your PDA and delivered to mother's TV.
On top of the native coding in XML, we have a family of XML languages
which are currently being finalised by the W3C. These will cover
matters which are essential for the future growth and success of the
Internet. XML Schemas are one of these, and are essentially shared
vocabularies and rules for defining the structure, content and meaning
of similar types of XML documents.
Schemas are being written by interested parties in many industries to
define classes of documents useful to their industry. For example,
there are schemas for weather reports, news reports, and from my own
industry, financial accounting (XBRML) and investment research (IRML).
We might for example see future annual reports with balance sheets,
video clips and graphics delivered, immediately upon publication,
directly to an investor's PC, something not possible in a paper
format. Data will become completely inter-operable, reusable, and
available in real time.
The complete extensibility of XML will permit the creation of new
types of information product which combine data of different types,
e.g. text and video and audio. In other words, we will see a new
generation of products which do not have an earlier existence.
The Semantic Web
----------------
Berners-Lee's objective is to produce a semantic Web, the purpose of
which is to permit machines to help people use data. In order to
accomplish this, several other elements are needed. Most are still
under construction and some are briefly mentioned below. The W3C site
has further details. Pretty much all these things are written in XML,
the building block of the future Web. The semantic Web takes place at
a level above the data level and involves adding meaning to data
resources, both by people and by machine. Once this is widespread,
machines will be able to exchange data and complete transactions
automatically.
A key aspect of this is the Resource Description Framework, RDF. This
is written in XML, and is a method of coding structured metadata in
the form of statements about properties and relationships of things on
the Web (resources). This results in RDF descriptions. By these
statements, meanings can be given to data and how to use it.
Of course, there are schemas in RDF also. Schemas in RDF, as in XML
itself, contain vocabularies of terms used to describe resources. The
most famous is the Dublin Core <http://purl.org/dc/>. These will be
widely used within communities to describe particular types of data
which are common to them. A query language is required to search and
retrieve this RDF metadata. XML Query is in development and will
enable 'XML files to be searched as databases' (W3C at
<http://www.w3.org/>). This means that the whole Web will become a
database!
URIs, a universal system of addressing Web resources, and Namespaces,
identified by a URI - collections of the names and rules used to
define the element types and attribute names used in XML documents -
are integral elements of the semantic Web and terms which are coming
into general use. XML is causing a move away from proprietary
operating systems onto the Web, where data, functions and transactions
will take place in a global environment.
It is instructive to look at Microsoft's plans for Windows 2000, which
is XML based and .NET which is based on the Web. The services and
applications we are seeing being described under .NET closely parallel
the development of the open standards of the W3C in which Microsoft
itself participates. Gates has openly acknowledged that we are moving
into an Internet world based on XML. Anyone wanting to read more about
Gates's vision can do so at
<http://www.microsoft.com/business/vision/gates.asp>.
The Internet will become one network, a huge database of knowledge
and the place where business is conducted and knowledge exchanged.
Certain prerequisites are required for the semantic Web to be
complete. All the above standards and a number of others will be
needed. There will, for example, have to be security, encryption and
privacy safeguards to enable transactions to take place without
unauthorised access to data, to prevent fraud, theft and violation of
people's rights to privacy. E-commerce cannot thrive until these are
complete. The W3C is working on measures to cover all these aspects of
life on the Web. Anyone interested can read about this at
<http://www.w3.org>.
Also needed, and likely to reach fruition at about the same time as
the completion of the standards coming out of the W3C, we should also
see the arrival of true broadband data transmission, including the
resolution of the local loop, or last mile, and 4GL wireless.
Once these are in place we shall see true E-commerce with machines
able to communicate with each other and personalisation of our own
information profiles. And of course, search engines will work with
extreme accuracy and speed! It should prove possible to find the
exact piece of information you want first time.
Because of the inherent advantages of XML, in the future almost all
data will originate as native XML (legacy data can be converted to
XML), and XML will become the DNA of the Internet. With self
describing data being generated, the world's knowledge base will
become far more user friendly, and the uses to which it can be put
will grow accordingly. To such an extent in fact that machines will
begin to understand how to use it and we should see the gradual
development of machine intelligence.
By a delicious quirk of history, I think we will see the encoding of
the world's information in XML taking place at the same time as
Nature's information in DNA is being decoded. If I really wanted to
stick my neck out and make a bold statement, I would suggest that
before this century is out we shall see computing and biology
converge.
Sources of information on XML
-----------------------------
<http://www.w3c.org>
<http://www.xml.org>
<http://www.ibm.com/developer/xml>
<http://www.xml.com>
<http://www.softwareag.com>
<http://www.oasis-open.org>
<http://www.sun.com/>
<http://www.zdnet.com>
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Neil Smith is the Library Manager at Newton Investment Management.
Newton are part of the Mellon Financial Corporation (US) and run
institutional pension funds, unit trusts and private client funds. He
has been there for eight years and introduced the company to the
Internet.
His main interest has always been electronic information systems. He
worked for a time at BT Research Laboratories where he learned a great
deal about online. After this came ICL where they operated an online
information service using email only, i.e. no paper, which was quite
novel about 15 years ago.
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Related Free Pint links:
* "XML : Perception to Practice" article in Free Pint No.63
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/250500.htm#feature>
* "Webmaster" links, articles and resources in the Free Pint Portal
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/portal/industry/industry.php3?category_id=183>
* Read this article online, with activated hyperlinks
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/150301.htm#tips>
* Post a message to the author now at the Free Pint Bar
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bar>
* Access the entire archive of Free Pint content
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/portal/content/>
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Global Gold can deliver database-specific solutions for your web
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and grow your business TODAY!
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>>> FREE PINT FACT <<<
Server downtime is always a major worry for online companies as it
means your whole business is unavailable from the second the server
crashes. We recently found this out when one of the network cards in
our primary server gave up the ghost having been worked a little too
hard. However, it only took seven minutes outage to fit another one,
and since the server had managed a total of 201 days without needing
rebooting we weren't too upset. Shame we're not now going to join the
top of the pops <http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html>
William Hann, Managing Editor <william@freepint.co.uk>
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FREE PINT BOOKSHELF
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf>
"How to survive the eBusiness downturn"
"Executive's Guide to eBusiness"
"eBusiness and ERP"
"How to write a .com business plan"
Reviewed by Charles Oppenheim
These four books are typical of a spate of books that have appeared in
the last 12 months on setting up and running a dot com company and/or
creating an eBusiness. As someone who has been the non-executive
director of a start-up dot com company and who has seen the turmoil
involved at first hand, I was particularly interested to see how
helpful these books might have been to me, and my fellow directors,
had I had a chance to read them earlier. Would they have offered a
clear strategic vision and would they have shown the things to do and
the things not to do?
Overall, it must be said that the quality of the books was somewhat
disappointing. One was good, two were badly written and one was
dreadful. So let's go through them in that order.
"How to survive the eBusiness downturn"
C. Barrow. ISBN 0471498319
The good one is Colin Barrow's, and ironically, it has a misleading
title. It isn't actually anything to do with surviving a downturn and
everything about how to set up a successful dot com company. It
contains a nice mixture of UK and US case studies, all pretty up to
date, to highlight the points it makes. It's a 220-page paperback
written in a fluent style by an academic at the Cranfield School of
Management. It's in five parts, entitled "One step forward, two steps
back", "Upgrading marketing", "Management", "Real money for virtual
firms" and "Abandon ship". The advice is sensible and reassuring, and
includes action checklists and tests to be done by the reader. It
includes a fairly basic index and some guidance for further reading.
Someone setting up, or running a dot com company would not go far
wrong by starting with this book, and then going on to the further
reading as needed. It covers all the major issues that need to be
taken into account.
"Executive's Guide to eBusiness"
M.V. Deise et al. ISBN 0471376396
"eBusiness and ERP"
G. Norris et al. ISBN 0471392081
The two badly written books are those by Deise et al. and Norris et
al., curiously enough both by a group of authors from
PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Perhaps it is something about PWC and its
house style, but they clearly believe that long sentences, silly words
and heavy reliance on the language of systems is what sells books.
Having in a previous incarnation worked as a middle manager for 12
years in large international companies, I know that middle and senior
managers in those companies have little or no time for this style of
work, and I doubt it is appropriate for those in smaller companies
either. In addition, the Deise et al. book has a misleading title, as
it does not cover all the issues to do with eBusiness (hardly
touching at all on personnel issues or legal issues, for example).
It has the redeeming feature of a useful Appendix on the eBusiness
value chain and a good index. The book may well be excellent for MBA
students, but managers will simply get frustrated by its approach and
dense language.
The Norris et al. book is a plug for a proprietary software apparently
promoted by PWC. This software is designed to enhance the company's
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), a concept that is clearly
explained in the book as a method of optimising a company's internal
value chain. Unfortunately, the book is based entirely on the premise
that you accept ERP is a good thing and that you accept that software
is necessary to achieve this ERP. Because of the lack of balance, it
can only be recommended to those who have already been sold this
particular management concept. As readers of this review may have
realised, the authors failed to sell the idea to me.
"How to write a .com business plan"
J. Eglash. ISBN 007135753X
At least it can be argued that the Deise et al. and Norris et al. are
clearly heavyweight books intended for a limited audience, and are
simply not appropriate for those starting up a dot com company. Not
so Eglash's book, which is aimed at those setting up a dot com company
for the first time and needing advice on writing a business plan. It
is a typical book in its genre - written in a gee-whizz style, and
covering the USA only. It pretty much ignores what is surely THE key
part of a business plan, namely the financials. It tells you how to
write an Executive Summary, a Mission Statement and discusses how to
write about competitors, the marketplace and the customers. It tells
you how to describe your products and services, marketing and
operations plans. And then we come to the chapter on financials -
nine pages long out of a 190 page book. It tells you what items you
should have in your financials, but then stops. It gives you not the
slightest idea what figures to put in, how to present them in the best
light, what predictions to make, how they should be calculated. No
advice whatsoever on the nitty gritty of preparing the financial data.
The author provides a model business plan from an imaginary company,
called turnips.com. Guess what - it doesn't include a financial
section.
That's bad enough, but the author also believes you can find
everything you need about your market and the competition using a
small number of Web search engines. She clearly knows little about
competitor intelligence searching, has no idea how bad Web search
engines are and has never heard of online or CDRom databases. The
best that can be said for this book is that it provides a bare bones
introduction to the art of business plans, and that having read it,
one should get some professional advice from a qualified information
professional regarding the marketplace and competitive position; and
talk to accountants about creating the financial side of the business
plan.
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Charles Oppenheim is Professor of Information Science at Loughborough
University. He's had a varied career in both academia and the
electronic publishing industry. He is a Fellow of the Institute of
Information Scientists and the Library Association, and is a frequent
contributor to conferences and journals in the library and information
science area. His main professional interests are in legal aspects of
information. He's on a lot of committees and editorial boards, and in
his spare time, he enjoys doing book reviews. He is the owner of an
identical twin brother. Most of his hobbies are unpublishable. Tel
+44 (0)1509-223065.
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Related Free Pint links:
* Find out more about these books online at the Free Pint Bookshelf
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf/4in1.htm>
* Read about other Internet strategy books on the Free Pint Bookshelf
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf/strategy.htm>
* Publisher and ISBN details for these four books can be found at
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf/4in1.htm>
* Search for and purchase any book from Amazon via the Bookshelf
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/bookshelf>
To propose an information-related book for review, send details
to <bookshelf@freepint.co.uk>.
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Every week Free Pinters have access to the "Pub Crawl" where we review
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FEATURE ARTICLE
<http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/150301.htm#feature>
"Freedom of Information"
By Richard Wakeford
The Freedom of Information Act
------------------------------
"Freedom of Information will signal a new relationship between
government and people: a relationship which sees the public as
legitimate stakeholders in the running of the country ..."
Tony Blair, 1996.
Labour arrived in government in May 1997 with a manifesto commitment
to introduce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It kept the idealism
bred of opposition long enough to publish a widely welcomed and
radical White Paper "Your Right to Know" in December 1997
<http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/caboff/foi/foi.htm>.
The legislation set out here would for the first time establish
people's right in law to have access to a wide variety of official
records and information. Central to its message were proposals that:
* All government departments, public bodies and private organisations
carrying out statutory functions would be covered;
* There would a very limited number of specific exemptions;
* Strict tests would be applied to ensure that information would be
released except where disclosure would cause substantial harm to a
limited number of specific "interests" or would be against the
public interest;
* There would be an independent Information Commissioner with the
powers to order the disclosure of information.
David Clark, the Minister responsible, travelled and consulted widely
and produced proposals that were dubbed a "second generation" freedom
of information (FOI) approach, drawing on the experience of countries
such as USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden. An
independent website supported by the Government was set up to allow
the public an additional means of providing the Government with
feedback on the proposals within the White Paper. The site is no
longer regularly updated, but you can still read submissions and David
Clark's responses to site users at <http://www.foi.democracy.org.uk/>.
However the whiff of radicalism on the air was enough to stir Sir
Humphrey to action and Ministers were soon brought to their senses.
David Clarke returned to the back benches and the task of steering the
FOI Bill through Parliament passed to the Home Office. The Act
finally emerged in December 2000 - the full text is at
<http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/20000036.htm>. However key
proposals had been watered down so that:
* Broad umbrella exemptions were incorporated. For example, the
Security and Intelligence Services are entirely exempt. This means
that although no-one would ever expect access to operational
information there is also no public scrutiny of administrative
affairs such as the costs of the expensive new headquarters
buildings for MI5 and MI6.
* The test of "substantial harm" has been replaced by one of "harm" -
only one word has been lost but it is a critical one in guiding
judges when assessing where the balance of public interest should
lie.
* The Information Commissioner can make recommendations but has no
powers to enforce disclosure.
In the opinion of many commentators these changes have thwarted the
original thrust of the White paper and left the FOIA a weakened
instrument - see the Campaign for Freedom of Information
<http://www.cfoi.org.uk>. The Act may even in places be weaker than
the voluntary Code of Practice on Access to Government Information
that was introduced by John Major in 1993 - see
<http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/foi/coderept.pdf>. The course of the
debates surrounding FOIA can be followed in the Guardian's Freedom of
Information archive at <http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/freedom/>.
The process of implementation of the Act is now underway and is due to
be completed within the next 5 years. The responsibility of the Office
of the Information Commissioner has been assumed by the Data
Protection Commissioner - see <http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/> and
each department and body affected will be putting FOI mechanisms in
place. A full list of the relevant organisations can be found in
Annex 1 of the Act.
The FOIA applies within England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Proposals
for separate legislation will be forthcoming from the Scottish
Executive <http://www.scotland.gov.uk/news/releas99_6/pr1311.htm>. The
signs are that the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament may
take a more open approach. If Scottish and English FOI law does
conflict then some interesting situations should in time arise.
Currently there is little guidance available on how the FOIA will
operate. The Office of the Information Commissioner has published a
short booklet in plain English but has not yet posted it on its web
site.
The text of the FOIA itself is not the easiest of reading, written as
it is in that peculiar convoluted hypertext beloved by Parliamentary
draftsmen and comprehensible only to lawyers. One issue that received
little attention in the debate leading up to the Act is that of
information retrieval - how in practice will the public know what to
claim? Will information be indexed and how far will civil servants act
as intermediaries to interpret enquiries and search out information?
Disclosure through the Public Records Office
--------------------------------------------
Official documents are subject to the 30 year rule under Public
Records Acts and retention and release is administered by the national
archives. The Public Record Office (PRO) <http://www.pro.gov.uk> is
the national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom,
housing records from across UK central government and, in smaller
numbers, from the central courts. The National Archives of Scotland at
<http://www.nas.gov.uk/> and the Public Record Office of Northern
Ireland at <http://proni.nics.gov.uk/> play this role in the
devolved administrations.
Records held by the PRO may be closed for periods longer than 30 years
("extended closure"), or retained by the government department
concerned. There are various reasons for this; some records may
contain distressing personal information about people and events; or
release may damage national security or international relations, or
records may have been supplied subject to certain confidential
undertakings. The release of other types of information may be barred
under legislation which overrides the provisions of the Public Records
Acts. Typical extended closure periods are 50 years, 75 years and 100
years. An example of an extended closure record is census returns,
which are closed for 100 years. In recent years it has been the policy
to accelerate release and the PRO's February 2001 list has files
extending back to 1910 (on capital punishment) and to World War II (on
signals decrypts and Tito). Release of Treasury files relating to
decimalisation has also been brought forward to coincide with the 30th
anniversary of "D Day".
The Wider Legal Framework
-------------------------
Since 1911 the Official Secrets Act has been the primary instrument
restricting freedom of information (although non-disclosure clauses
are present in some 400 other statutes) but in recent years
prosecutions have been rare. The law on confidentiality and on
copyright is increasingly used by government to deal with publications
written by ex-employees as shown by actions taken against the recent
swathe of books written by SAS soldiers and intelligence officers.
The case of Richard Tomlinson, the ex MI6 agent, can be followed on
his publisher's site at <http://www.thebigbreach.com/news/>. The ex-
MI5 agent David Shayler's site at <http://www.shayler.com> now evokes
an "Error 403 - Access forbidden" network response. Is this
significant, and who would know why?
Recent legislation that will make a significant change in the ability
of individuals to go public in the public interest are:
* The Human Rights Act 1998 - full text at
<http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980042.htm>
which has yet to be tested in court but provides a defence on the
grounds of freedom of expression (Article 10 of the Convention on
Human Rights); and
* The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 - full text
at <http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980023.htm>,
which gives legal protection to whistleblowers.
The Freedom to Care campaign site has an extensive list of
references to whistleblowing cases at <http://www.freedomtocare.org/>.
Only environmental matters have benefited from a UK statutory freedom
of information regime in recent years - an example of the beneficial
effects of EC Directives. Access to environmental information is now
formalised in an international convention, known briefly as the Arhus
Convention, or more lengthily as the Convention on Access to
Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to
Justice in Environmental Matters. The Convention was drawn up by the
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and signed by 39 states
and the European Union in 1998. The full text of the Convention and
associated resources are at
<http://www.unece.org/env/pp/welcome.html>.
A Change in the UK Culture on Openness
-------------------------------------
The FOIA may be a catalyst for changing government and the public
sector towards working in a more open way. In time as the official
culture adapts, the natural response will be to make information
available rather than retaining it. Openness perhaps comes more
readily to scientists and Sir Robert May, when Chief Scientist,
embedded the open approach in "The Use of Scientific Advice in Policy
Making"
<http://www.dti.gov.uk/ost/ostbusiness/index_policy_making.htm>.
The Phillips Inquiry into the BSE crisis <http://www.bse.org.uk/> made
a number of forceful comments and recommendations concerning the
government's handling of information. The Food Standards Agency
<http://www.foodstandards.gov.uk/> which was established following the
Inquiry is starting life with a clean and open slate, deliberately
distancing itself from the secretive attitudes of MAFF. The FSA is
publishing full details of its advisory committees together with their
papers and minutes and publication of a Code of Practice on Openness
has been announced.
Europe
------
Freedom of information in the European Union is in danger of going
into reverse. A Code of Access to Documents has been in place since
1993 and has been subject only to very specific exemptions. However an
initiative started in Amsterdam in 1997 to enshrine this code in
European law has been taken as an opportunity by the Commission, the
Council and the Parliament to introduce a series of blanket
exemptions. These will cover any discussion documents, any documents
relating to third parties and any documents about military or foreign
policy or "non-military crisis management". A watching brief on the
European situation is maintained by the magazine Statewatch at
<http://www.statewatch.org/>. Quoted here is the ineffable comment of
a European official who refused to release documents on the grounds
that they "could fuel public discussion on the subject".
Freedom of Information Elsewhere
--------------------------------
Freedom of Information legislation has been established for the last
30-40 years in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Sweden is a
special case having had a Freedom of the Press Act since the
eighteenth century. Chapter 2 - On the Public Nature of Official
Documents can be read at the International Constitutional
Law Project at <http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/law/sw03000_.html>.
Even summarising the working of FOI world wide would provide material
for a substantial book but examples of procedures in practice can be
seen at sites such as the State of Tasmania's public access FOI page
at <http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/justice/info_foi.htm> or the
Queensland Information Commissioner's decisions at
<http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/infocomm/listdec.html>.
It is perhaps in the USA where freedom of information has most claim
to be part of the national culture but statistics of claims made under
the FOIA show that it is business and the press rather than the public
who make most use of their rights. Government department and public
agency commonly maintain a FOI area on their web home pages: a list
of Federal agency FOI sites can be found at
<http://www.citizen.org/litigation/foic/schbook.htm>.
As in so many areas FOI practice in the USA is characterised by an
active public interest sector. One of the most sophisticated resources
is that provided by the National Security Archive which was founded
in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who, obtaining
documentation from the U.S. government under the FOIA, sought a
centralised repository for these materials. Over the past decade, the
Archive has become the world's largest non-governmental library of
declassified documents at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/>.
In debates on FOI in Britain the USA is often held up as the land of
free access. However the US government, state governments and federal
agencies receive heavy criticism at home for their failures of
openness. See, for example, the project on government secrecy run by
the Federation of American Scientists at <http://www.fas.org/sgp/>.
Several bulk declassification programmes have been launched by Federal
Agencies in recent years. One collection holding politically
contentious documents is that relating to US operations in South and
Central America in the 70's and 80's and made available by the State
Department at <http://foia.state.gov/vstateSearch.asp>. The .pdf
files, however, show extensive use of black marker pen and the reader
is left wondering what real progress in freeing information has in
fact been made. The material has a role to play in the truth and
reconciliation process but the inadequacies of FOIA are made
poignantly apparent in an account by a torture victim of her
unsuccessful attempts to get at the truth behind her suffering
<http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pavr/harbury/archive/1996/050696.html>.
On a less serious note US experience shows how impossible it is for
governments to prove that they have released all that they do hold.
The National Security Agency maintains a page at
<http://www.nsa.gov/docs/efoia/> on "Frequently Requested UFO Related
FOIA Information" which baldly states that "No Records Exist. The
following terms have been searched in response to requests for
information on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Paranormal
Events, but no responsive material has been located". Nevertheless "X
File" conspiracy theories continue to thrive.
And finally - although governments are seen by the public to be the
guardians of secrets, few people appreciate how much information
really is at loose in the public domain. A recent exercise to
demonstrate this point was undertaken by the US Air Force and its
wonderfully named Space Aggressor Squadron which found everything
needed to build a backyard satellite jamming system on the Internet.
A summary is at
<http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/nsci-ayn041900.html>
but unfortunately there are no construction details!
Freedom of Information Resources in the UK
------------------------------------------
Campaign for Freedom of Information
<http://www.cfoi.org.uk>
Charter 88
<http://www.charter88.org.uk/home.html>
Democratic Audit UK
<http://www.fhit.org/democratic_audit/index.html>
Guardian Freedom of Information archive
<http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/freedom/>
Freedom to Care
<http://www.freedomtocare.org/contents.htm#contents>
Home Office Freedom of Information Unit
<http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/foi/foidpunit.htm>
Index on Censorship
<http://www.indexoncensorship.org/>
Lobster (the journal of parapolitics)
<http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/>
Statewatch
<http://www.statewatch.org.>
Resources Outside the UK
------------------------
Freedom of Information Review
<http://www.comlaw.utas.edu.au/law/foi/foi_rev.html>
Freedom of Information Sites on the Internet (University of Tasmania)
<http://www.comlaw.utas.edu.au/law/FOI/bookmarks/FOI_Index.html>
Human Rights Library (University Minnesota)
<http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/>
Resources on Freedom of Information Issues (Syracuse University)
<http://web.syr.edu/~bcfought/foires.html>
Riley Report (Riley Information Services)
<http://www.rileyis.com/index.html>
Secrecy News (Federation of American Scientists)
<http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html>
US State and Local Freedom of Information Issues
<http://listserv.syr.edu/archives/foi-l.html>
Further Reading
---------------
Article 19 and Liberty. "Secrets, Spies and Whistleblowers: Freedom of
Expression and National Security in the United Kingdom". 2000
<http://www.article19.org/docimages/791.htm>
Tony Bunyan "Access to documents could fuel public discussion"
(also Deirdre Curtin "Authoritarian temptation seduces EU decision-
makers" and Aidan White "How Journalists Have Spiked NATO's Secrecy
Guns") Essays for an Open Europe. 2000
<http://www.statewatch.org/secret/essays.htm>
Peter Hennessy. "Accelerated History? Whitehall & the Press since
1945". James Cameron Lecture 2000.
<http://www.charter88.org.uk/pubs/brief/0011hennessy.html>
George Kennedy. "How Americans got their right to know:" 1996.
<http://www.johnemossfoundation.org/foi/kennedy.htm>
Andrew Neil. "Britain's Free Press: Does it have One?"
Andersen Lecture. 1988.
<http://www.wpfc.org/HWA%2088-Andrew%20Neil.html>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Richard Wakeford is Head of Science and Technology Information
Services at the British Library <http://www.bl.uk>.
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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About this Newsletter
- Publication Date: 15th March 2001
- Plain text
- Link: https://www.jinfo.com/go/newsletter/83
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