Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 22:38:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: James McDonough <epin@access.digex.net>
Subject: EPIN Summary

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     SUMMARY OF ELECTRONIC PUBLIC INFORMATION NEWSLETTER
                  VOL. 5, NO. 9; May 5, 1995
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INDEX:

1. NTIS: NATIONAL OPEN MEETING BUGS HAVE BEEN CLEARED UP
2. C-SPAN GOVERNMENT INFORMATION PROMOTIONAL SPOT IS UNDER FIRE
3. COMMERCE WEIGHS PUTTING THE COMMERCE BUSINESS DAILY ONLINE

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1. NTIS: NATIONAL OPEN MEETING BUGS HAVE BEEN CLEARED UP: Technical
bugs that plagued the federal sponsored national electronic open
meeting were cleared up by the end of last week, according to Don
Johnson, Director of the National Technical Information Service
(NTIS). The open meeting is being run through FedWorld, NTIS's
electronic gateway to federal information. "We are pleased at the
way the technology bugs are coming to the surface and being worked
through; they were entirely expected although not anticipated in
very case, but we received good support from a lot of volunteers,"
Johnson said in a telephone interview. He added NTIS had corrected
most of the problems, which had surfaced on Monday and Tuesday
(5/1-2). "We are going through an exercise now to determine the
weak links in this kind of distributed system. And one can only do
that by getting enough traffic on the system so that you see where
the traffic begins to cause some operational problems," Johnson
said.

2. C-SPAN GOVERNMENT INFORMATION PROMOTIONAL SPOT IS UNDER FIRE:
C-SPAN is willing to update a controversial "promotional vignette,"
which totes free public access to congressional information via the
Library of Congress' THOMAS system and a paid subscription service
via the Government Printing Office's GPO Access system. The
promotional spot makes no mention of the free GPO Access gateway
service that now available through around a dozen of the nation's
depository libraries. GPO has notified C-SPAN that it would like to
the spot revised to include mention of the free gateways. Mark West
of C-SPAN recognized that it "would be a good thing for us to list
all the (free) gateways that they (GPO) have running." He said the
spot should be updated, but could not say when or if C-SPAN would
produce a new promotional vignette on the subject.

3. COMMERCE WEIGHS PUTTING THE COMMERCE BUSINESS DAILY ONLINE: The
U.S. Department of Commerce is set to decide by the end of this
month on whether or not to mount the Commerce Business Daily (CBD)
on its online Economic Bulletin Board (EBB) under a new project
called GLOBUS. The decision is controversial because it would put
the EBB in direct competition with private sector online vendors
who are currently supplying online versions of the CBD.


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James McDonough, Editor
Electronic Public Information Newsletter
epin@access.digex.net; Tel:/Fax: (301) 365-3621