Government Information Belongs to Everyone: Democracy’s Library in 2026 | Internet Archive Blogs

Governments produce an abundance of information and put that information in the public domain, but often the public can’t easily find or access it. The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project is helping by preserving critical information and publications produced by governments: federal, state, provincial, and municipal– and making them available to anyone wanting to build new services on them.

Since the program’s launch in 2022, the Internet Archive has built on this already strong foundation by becoming a designated Federal Depository Library—joining 1,100+ peer libraries—and by utilizing Democracy’s Library as a means to connect to libraries, archives, and patrons with purpose.

What’s in Democracy’s Library?

Examples of what is in our growing collection of over 11 million items include recent additions like the the Supreme Court Records & Briefs, which joins established varied and important collections such as those from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, government documents from the nation of Aruba, NASA Technical Reports, the End of Term Crawls, the IGS/UC Berkeley California local government documents project, records from the US Census, the Canadian Government Publications Portal, and more.

Although it would be convenient to tie the practice of preserving government information to the messy birth of the United States, grounded as it was in principles around liberty and democratic process, we lack pithy quotes from the founders on this exact topic. What we do see is recognition in the very first Congress that citizens needed access to documentation of the business of their government.

In 1789, the House of Representatives provided for the printing and distribution of the laws and proceedings of the new Congress. From this modest beginning, the US Government rapidly rose to become the largest publisher in the world. Over the following century, a series of legislative milestones followed: the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1860, and the Government Printing Act of 1895, which centralized GPO’s authority as the primary channel for distributing the federal record.

Taken together, these efforts reflect a consistent, if imperfectly realized, principle: that government information belongs to the people and that information should be freely distributed to its citizens for their own use. It is important to note that libraries were identified as the natural and primary means of getting that information into the hands of citizens.

Who are the audiences for government information?

First and foremost, government itself; it is essential that law and policy makers understand prior law and policy. With an abundance of outputs, governments are not always the best record keepers and frequently turn to libraries to find appropriate documentation.

Second, we see serious researchers (including journalists) as those that rely on access to government information. These users seek authoritative sources and want assurances around provenance and reliable sources; libraries provide that authority.

Third, we see curious and motivated citizens. Users in this category include genealogists but can also include people like property owners seeking to understand current or prior ordinances in their jurisdiction, or people seeking to understand the history of their house or neighborhood.

Finally, an emerging category of user is machines; research methods mediated and assisted by computers have been on the rise for some time, but with the advent of LLMs and generative AI tools, a human assisted by a machine is emerging as a distinctive category of user. Looking across these categories, we can assert that government information not only belongs to everyone, but it is for everyone.

Why is Democracy’s Library important today?

Democracy’s Library is more than just collections – it is also a movement to bring people together in common cause, to take action, and to build momentum around increasing access. The Information Stewardship Forum, hosted by the Internet Archive in March, was one such gathering and we look forward to more in the future.

One of the themes that emerged from the Information Stewardship Forum is that, especially in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment, public access to government information cannot be left to chance. As the United States marks 250 years, Democracy’s Library exists to make sure it isn’t. Please join us.

Let us know how we can help you by collaborating to digitize and preserve collections, to build services on existing collections, and to support each other in areas of mutual interest. I welcome your emails at any time. I will be attending GODORT meetings at the June 2026 American Library Association meeting in Chicago, and you can find me there, as well as at the CNI meeting in December in Washington DC, or at our headquarters in San...