7 Tales of Bureaucracy
folks—including congressmen—everybody else has to pay to access the U.S. federal legislative histories.
The deal wasn't really no cost to the government since it took a huge amount of effort to pack these 60 million pages of paper up and send them to the vendor. The vendor got a sweetheart deal: an exclusive lock on a vitally important government database. The government got snookered.
For my next bureaucracy, I want to talk about one of those public-private partnerships, this one being a deal that the National Archives cut with Amazon. In December of 2009, I got a call from Congress asking if I could testify as part of the inaugural hearing for the new Archivist, David Ferriero.
As part of the research, I looked at the deal the Archives had cut with Amazon. This was part of Amazon's new DVD print-on-demand service, and what they had done was digitize about 1,800 government videos which they were making available for about $10 per DVD.
I've got nothing against Amazon selling DVDs, even DVDs of public domain video. But, if you went to the government site, there was only a 2-minute preview of each video, in a Microsoft proprietary format, and a 320x240 picture. Next to the 2-minute preview was a government statement saying you could buy this video from "our partner" Amazon.Com.
Rick Prelinger—creator of the Prelinger Library and the real pioneer in rescuing government video—had FOIA'd the contract behind this arrangement, and it looked like that while the National Archives got a DVD of their video
