The Impact of Information Policy: Measuring the Effects of Commercialization of Canadian Government Statistics

Citation

Dorner, D. (2002), "The Impact of Information Policy: Measuring the Effects of Commercialization of Canadian Government Statistics", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 220-220. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.3.220.1

To write The Impact of Information Policy: Measuring the Effects of Commercialization of Canadian Government Statistics, Kirsti Nilsen undertook what most recent PhD graduates would consider to be hell on earth – she returned to her PhD dissertation to rewrite it as a book. In this book, Nilsen examines the impact of de facto information policies on access to government information in Canada. De facto (or latent) information policies, as Nilsen explains, are not specifically aimed at information but nonetheless affect its production or on access to it. For example, government policies aimed at cost cutting or revenue generation can be considered de facto information policies. More specifically, Nilsen looks at the impact of commercialisation of information in the form of price increases and format changes adopted by Statistics Canada during the mid‐1980s on the output of social science researchers.

The book is divided into four parts, covering the background to the study and its methodology (Part 1), government information policy and Statistics Canada’s response to it (Part 2), the effects of Canadian government information policy on social scientists (Part 3), and what we have learned from the study (Part 4). For anyone investigating the development of information policy as an area of study in library and information science Nilson’s literature review in Part 2 provides an excellent starting point.

The book’s strengths lie more in what Nilsen learned about the types and sources of statistics used by social scientists in different disciplines and of different levels of experience than about the effects of information policy on the social scientists’ research output. Using the bibliometric techniques of citation analysis and text‐based analysis, Nilsen examined a sample of 360 research articles published from 1982‐1993 in journals from disciplines that make regular use of statistics such as economics, education, geography, political science and sociology. She also conducted a survey of the authors of the sampled papers as a follow‐up to the bibliometric study, to obtain qualitative data. In the bibliometric study Nilsen found that researchers who used non‐governmental sources of statistics tend not to make use of government statistics. She also found that authors writing in geography journals, followed by those in economics and sociology journals, were most likely to use statistics obtained from Statistics Canada. Of course, given the depth and breadth of the study, there were many other findings, but the main conclusion drawn from the study was that “Statistics Canada’s specific policies with respect to pricing and formats of its information did not cause researchers to change the frequency of their use of the agency as a statistical source”.

The book’s main weakness is that the writing reflects its heritage as a PhD dissertation. Unfortunately for the reader, this heritage involves an excessive use of the passive voice (e.g. “agency officials were interviewed”, “a survey of social science researchers was conducted”), numerous third person references to “the investigator” or “the researcher” when the author is in fact referring to herself, and at times what seems to be excruciating levels of detail. While many academics still adhere to this formal form of writing, it makes for boring reading and needs to be changed when a dissertation is being turned into a book.

Given its narrow focus and its origins as a doctoral dissertation, The Impact of Information Policy will have a very limited readership. Having said that, I will also add that anyone interested in information policy research, especially from an LIS perspective, will find some value in Nilsen’s book – even if it is only to make use of her literature review which ably introduces the subject area, or to investigate the thoroughly detailed methodology that she employed for her study.