Thanks to George Franchois, Coordinator of Library Services, U.S. Department of the Interior Library, for the this article: Cobell v. U.S. Department of the Interior: How an Internet Shutdown Helped Change the Course of the DOI Library. This article was originally published in the 2009 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Change: Managing It, Surviving It, Thriving on It. The 2009 edition includes 60 articles and other submissions provided by more than 50 contributors from librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.
Read on...
Change can be forced upon a library due to shifting conditions beyond your control brought forth in its supporting organization. When a drastic change in services for your organization occurs, its library must be ready to accept the changes and find a way to still serve its users under sometimes difficult circumstances. Perhaps there may even be opportunities to enhance the status of your library that result from your organization’s new situation.
Such a change occurred at the Department of the Interior Library in the late fall of 2001. Winds of change were sweeping across federal libraries and the entire federal government in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. As a result, federal government agency information technology offices became preoccupied with insuring the security of their computer systems and networks in the hope of averting an unwanted infiltration of their data via a terrorist hacker.
At about the same, a five year old lawsuit brought by a descendant of a legendary Blackfeet Indian tribal chief was creating a typhoon of problems for the IT office at the Interior Department. Back in 1996 Eloise Cobell; great-granddaughter of Mountain Chief, a legendary 19th century leader of the Blackfeet Nation; and her co-plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against the Interior Department and Treasury Department on behalf of more than a quarter of a million Native Americans. The suit alleges that the federal government mismanaged Native American trust fund accounts from the time of the Dawes Act in 1887 to date, resulting in the loss, misdirection, and unaccountability of several billion dollars that were supposed to be held in trust by the United States for Native American beneficiaries.
As a consequence of the lawsuit, and in light of general concern about the security of government information systems, the federal court hearing the Cobell case wanted to find out if Indian Trust Funds accounts could be accessed and manipulated by an unauthorized user. A court appointed hacker was hired to attempt to get into the Interior Department’s network via the Internet and access these trust fund account files. They were successful in doing so. As a result, in December 2001, the federal judge overseeing the case ruled that the entire Interior Department must shut down its access to the Internet until such a time as they could prove that their trust fund account files were secure and could no longer be hacked into.
Obviously, a sudden and drastic change like this had serious consequences. For the DOI Library, it meant that we could no longer access our online database subscriptions from our desktops or from our patron workstations. Frantically, we reached agreements with neighboring libraries so that in emergency circumstances, we could send members of our staff or library patrons to their libraries to do necessary Internet research. LexisNexis was also kind enough to allow library staff in their training facilities on 18th Street in Washington to do work on the web. Our cataloger had to go to the Library of Congress a few times a week with new books in hand in order to catalog them. Similarly, our Interlibrary Loan technician made trips to the Library of Congress to process interlibrary loan requests on OCLC.
Even though we had come up with some stopgap agreements with other libraries and institutions in the area to get emergency access to the Internet when needed, the DOI Library still needed to put together a strategy to deal with the new reality of no web access. We decided to shift our budgetary resources from online access to the purchase of more print materials to fill in research gaps created by the shutdown. Most of the print materials purchased were in the legal and legislative fields, as the largest impact of the shutdown was the fact that attorneys in the Department’s Solicitor’s Office no longer had access to Westlaw or LexisNexis at their desktops. We felt that it was our responsibility as the Departmental Library to provide them with these resources in print for as long as the shutdown continued. We also did increase our acquisitions of scientific and technical materials that could be used by Departmental scientists and researchers to do the field work that is so important to the Interior Department.
Additionally, we initiated a series of new training programs for our users. These training sessions, which continue today, were originally intended to teach our patrons how to utilize the print resources in the library in place of the now inaccessible Internet resources. Because many had either forgotten how to use many of these print resources, or because some younger patrons may have never learned, these sessions proved to be very popular. The number of visitors to the Library increased as more Departmental employees had to rely on the print resources and services of the Library in order to do their jobs.
Read the entire article starting on page 109 of the 2009 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Change: Managing It, Surviving It, Thriving on It.
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