I am delighted to be here this morning to talk about the e–government agenda and the contribution that can be made by government librarians.

Modernising government is about 5 things:

• Professional policy making
• Public services focused on the citizen
• Extending access to government services
• Promoting best practice and excellence

• Utilising new technology to improve and transform government

It will also bring about some of the most significant changes in the way civil servants work for generations.

E-government is one of the key strategic drivers of this modernising government programme. I believe you all have copies of the document, e-Government: a strategic framework for public services in the information age. This shows how we are going to utilise cutting-edge technology to help us realise the twin visions of

• making the UK the best place in the world to do e-commerce
• bridging the digital divide. Ensuring all citizens have access to all government services, by whatever means suits them best.

We are not content with simply setting the vision, so we have translated it into hard targets. You will know that the Prime Minister has announced that by 2005 all government services will be available on-line. He also set an interim target of having 25% of these services on-line by 2002. A few weeks ago I was able to announce that we have already met this target, more than 2 years ahead of schedule. We have 42% online NOW.

This early success is due to the very hard work of civil servants in all government departments. It demonstrates the real value of our policy of working together right across government, at all levels.

At ministerial level we have set up a network of ministers from across government. Both myself as e-Government Minister and Patricia Hewitt as e-Commerce Minister are members of this Ministerial Team.

This is in turn supported by 40 senior Board level Officials from across Whitehall and the Public Sector Agencies, Local Authorities, and Devolved Administrations forming the Information Age Champions Group. This group is chaired by the e-Envoy.

We have already made good progress. But we must not be complacent. We have ambitious plans.

To ensure that everyone in our society benefits from the new technology and the new economy we must make sure all citizens have ready access to the internet. We must put government information on-line. In many cases we will have to re-engineer the services we provide, to citizens and civil servants, so that they can be provided electronically.

Developing joined-up, coherent systems that work across the public sector is the key to delivering these better services and meeting the needs of the citizen and business.

Making information and services readily available to all will involve reconfiguring massive amounts of data so it can be easily found from a single point.

Citizens shouldn’t have to know which organisation to approach for the service or information they need. They shouldn’t have to be familiar with the work of each government department and agency and research organisation and mysterious obscure committee. They shouldn’t even need to know if its central or local government they need to deal with. And lets not pretend civil servants themselves are familiar with all of the organisations that make up the government machine, and know immediately which one to go to.

So what are we actually doing to achieve this? You will be aware of our very substantial UK Online Programme within which we have delivered the Citizen’s Portal and more recently the Government GatewayThe Portal engages and serves our citizens in ways that have not been attempted before. For the first time, the public services are organised around the needs of the customer. It is a virtual "one stop shop" bringing all public services together, whether provided by central or local government.

It provides both information and on-line transactions through a single personalised entry point. A key feature is "Life Episodes" – an innovative approach to service delivery which helps the customer to navigate the complexities of public services at important times of change – such as "Having a Baby" or "Moving Home". This simplifies life for the citizen, putting information and services in one place. It will constantly change and develop, with more life episodes due to be added during the coming months, and the entire structure, all of the services and information provided, to be kept relevant and up-to-date.

Behind the scenes we have the Government Gateway. This complex system will allow secure online transactions with UK government departments, and is essential if a full range of services is to be provided online. Only last week I announced the completion of the Gateway's infrastructure. Three government departments expect to start offering transactional services "within a few weeks".

Making all of this work means that that information needs to be organised in such a way that it appears where it should, in a format everyone can understand. Information is your profession, you will all fully appreciate the enormity of the task ahead.

Not everything that the citizen will ever need from us will fit into a particular ‘life episode’. Other services and information will also have to be made available. For citizens to find what they need on the internet, that information has to be put where they can find it, or tagged so that a search engine can find it. People shouldn’t be prevented from seeing what they need simply because they don’t know the right words to use.

They should be able to find the latest reports on BSE without having to be able to spell ‘bovine spongiform encephalopathy’.

They should be able to find the latest rules on tax allowances for landlords without having to know it is all listed under ‘capital allowances’. And they should be able to find out how their local hospital is performing without having to know if it’s the Department of Health or the local Health Authority or the hospital itself that can tell them. They certainly shouldn’t have to go to each of those organisations in turn and piece together bits of data from each before they can get a clear picture.

Even within government itself, we don’t have well developed systems for sharing information between departments and agencies, let alone with local authorities. That is why we are working hard to correct this, implementing the Government Interoperability Framework (or e-GIF), which I launched late last year. The main thrust of e-GIF is to lay down clear technical standards and policies that will apply to all of our new information systems and portals.

It gives clear guidance to government departments and to private sector organisations, setting out what will be expected for connecting to and working with Government. It specifies interconnection standards, a lot of which means very little to most of us!

But we know it does mean that, once everything is plugged in and switched on, the files we send to each other, and to citizens around the country, and the web pages we look at, and the forms we download, will make sense to the machines used to read them. And that means digital TVs and kiosks as well as computers.

We are also developing the GSI, publishing our documents on the web, and of course there’s the ever present e-mail. But this is really in its infancy. Not all departments, let alone all of the smaller organisations, are on the GSI. There are still staff without e-mail! And even when all of these wonderful facilities are available, will we be able to find what we need, or will we just have a bigger pool to drown in?

Technology can solve some of these problems for us. Our determination to stay at the leading edge means we are making the most of search engines to make it easier for citizens to navigate their way around the mass of data and documents available. It also means we are aware of the limitations of technology.

You may be wondering where you come into this, and what these grand schemes have to do with government librarians and other information specialists.

One of the main strands of the whole modernising government agenda is better policy making. Accurate, up to the minute information is crucial if we are to achieve this.

Joe (McCrea, first speaker of the day) and his team at the Knowledge Network have done sterling work improving the background data that we ministers and officials use to make and share policy decisions. He has done this with the help of information scientists, who have helped find ways to navigate through the oceans of documents it holds.

Karen Lewis (second speaker of the day) at CMPS has been contributing to the briefings for no10 and cross-cutting units, using information management techniques and working with the government library network to find material for briefings on subjects that cut across many government departments. The partnership between information and research specialists within CMPS has proven highly successful. It is a fine example of how information specialists can bring their skills to play in different arenas.

Information is the fuel of the knowledge economy. Government information must now be regarded as a valuable economic asset.

Way back in 1997 the information market in the UK was estimated to be worth about £17.4 billion. Information derived from government forms the largest single information resource in any developed economy. By making sure the information we hold can be found and passed between the public and private sectors we can help to make the most of this asset, thereby driving and stimulating our economy.

The Office of the e-Envoy has been charged with making the UK one of the worlds leading knowledge economies. One of the projects supporting this aim involves making sure government information is configured so that maximum value can be gained from it.

Earlier on I described the Government Interoperability Framework, or e-GIF. Anwar Choudhury (speaking this afternoon) and his team have developed this to cover the technical side of transferring data from one organisation to another.

The team is also developing the Government Metadata Framework. Metadata is data about data, it’s a description of the information contained in a document or a database or a web page. I’m sure I don’t need to tell librarians what metadata is, as you practically invented it, but I can tell you that the Framework lays down the policies and systems that will make sure

• the use of metadata, or information tagging, is more consistent across government, supporting our aims of joined-up government
• citizens, and civil servants, can find government information more easily
• documents can be managed more easily.

The development of this Framework is yet another area where information scientists are involved, drafting the document itself and providing expertise in the organisation and description of information resources.

One of the major components of the Metadata Framework is the proposed Pan-Government Thesaurus. This is something librarians in government departments have been pushing for, for many years. However, it is only in the current environment, with the policies of joined up government and the determination to provide the best services for citizens that the climate has been right for this type of development.

This is highly specialised area, and one in which librarians are uniquely qualified. I am sure it is something you will all want to contribute to, and that you will be closely following its progress and implementation.

Another way in which we are stimulating the Knowledge Economy is by making sure anyone can find out what information the government actually holds. This will greatly help those publishers and dot.com companies who want to take official information, repackage it and make it available in a form more useful to citizens and businesses.

While most departments now publish a considerable amount on the internet and elsewhere, they don’t publish everything. This is sometimes for security or confidentiality reasons, but also often for practical reasons. Yet it is this type of information that is most sought after by the key players in the knowledge economy.

We have therefore created the Information Asset Register, a list of our unpublished information resources. This involved government departments and agencies creating metadata describing their resources and making it all available from a single web site. Here again a major contribution was made by librarians, both in developing the overall strategy, designing the system, and creating the metadata.

Modern government, with its emphasis on service delivery and putting citizens first, is an exciting, challenging place to work. All civil servants will be called upon to make a full contribution, to make the most of their skills, talents and knowledge, to contribute to the changes ahead.

Librarians are wonderful people. You know what metadata is. You know why Roget’s isn’t a real thesaurus. And, I hope, you know you have a real contribution to make to modernising government and thereby making life easier for all citizens.