Keeping a Reading Room of Their Own

By Cindy Skrzycki
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times."

This was Machiavelli's view, and it's one held by professional researchers, librarians and U.S. government reading-room regulars. They have been lobbying to preserve access to historical documents at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Alarm bells went off last year when they learned that the agency might archive, discard or otherwise send off-site a trove of materials in preparation for a move to a new building with less space.

The agency, which is part of the Transportation Department and is charged with regulating vehicle safety, has maintained a public document room since it opened in 1970. Like many other federal agencies, it allowed the public to request materials, read and copy them.

Visitors to the reading room have had access to some 20 million pages of research reports, investigative files, recall campaigns, consumer complaint letters, service bulletins that date to 1968 and a docket of agency rulemakings and comments.

Even though some of the agency's more recent filings, dating to the late 1980s and 1990s, are available online, the prospect of losing easy access to the entire collection set off a campaign to save them.

Those who have used the documents for years argue that the materials are key to building a legal case, updating an old rule or crafting an accurate comment on a regulatory proposal.

"It would be catastrophic to have it taken away for manufacturers, defendants in lawsuits, everyone," said Susan Longacre, president of Longacre & Associates, a technical safety research service in Annapolis.

Toyota Motor and other automakers said they are occasional users, and the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, a group of major automakers, said most of the documents it needs already have been retrieved and copied.

Erika Jones, a partner with the law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, which represents the auto industry, said the room is richer in resources and better at retrieval than those at other agencies.

Federal agencies are required to make certain documents available to the public for inspection and copying, and documents from after 1996 have to be stored electronically, as well.

The prospect of the reading room becoming a casualty of the move was real. In 2006, nary a square foot was allotted for a NHTSA reference room in the building that will house most of the Transportation Department.

That bothered regular users who said that documents leaving the agency would be buried at the National Archives and that it would be impossible to retrieve them quickly. Or the public would be forced to use the Freedom of Information Act, which requires government disclosure of certain documents, or pay for NHTSA research ($38.73 an hour plus copying fees).

"It's great they are archiving things, but that is not public access," said Tara Olivero, a lobbyist in the American Library Association's Washington office. The association wrote a letter to Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, saying the needs of researchers should take precedence.

Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, a motor vehicle safety research, consulting and advocacy firm in Rehoboth, Mass., began hounding the agency in November to share its plans for the reading room. He mobilized other users and three professional library associations to get more information on its fate.

In a Jan. 5 letter to Margaret O'Brien, NHTSA's chief information officer, Kane said shipping records to the National Archives would harm public access and add to the agency's "missing documents" problem.

Kane and other researchers said the agency can't locate certain documents, imperiling their use in legal cases. Two databases haven't been functional since last year.

"Your plans to destroy or remove records deemed duplicative or old continues without input from the public or users who understand the content and their importance," the letter said.

The agency responded on March 16, saying a decision had been made to carve out space for the room. O'Brien said, "The issues raised by yourself and other safety partners should no longer be of concern." O'Brien added that the agency is taking steps to make more records available online.

Problem resolved? Hardly.

The user group wanted a sit-down meeting to flesh out exactly what the disposition of the files would be.

On April 2, members met with O'Brien. They came away skeptical, wondering if the agency had a plan for what would be preserved and if documents older than five years would be considered applicable to today's vehicle safety issues.

In response to questions about the specifics of the move, NHTSA said in a statement that it "will continue to operate a public reading room to provide relevant information on the agency's programs."

On April 12, the agency announced it would move everything in the current location to the new one. Said Rae Tyson, a NHTSA spokesman, "Things will only end up in archives if there isn't enough space."

Kane, still skeptical, won't consider the move complete without the old computerized databases, which are considered technologically outdated. "It's not the technology we are concerned about," he said. "It's the content."

Cindy Skrzycki is a regulatory columnist for Bloomberg News. She can be reached atcskrzycki@bloomberg.net.