Benjamin Gilman: “I am pleased to present H.R. 3916 to the House. This bill, which was cosponsored by my colleagues from New Jersey, Mr.…”

“I am pleased to present H.R. 3916 to the House. This bill, which was cosponsored by my colleagues from New Jersey, Mr. Andrews and Pennsylvania, Mr. Fox, will permit university-level linguistic researchers to use Voice of American and Radio Marti transcripts for the purpose of research. The authority provided in this bill sunsets after 5 years. This legislation is necessary since the U.S. Information Agency is forbidden to disseminate domestically the materials it produces. This legislation waives this prohibition, allowing USIA to provide computer-readable multilingual text and recorded speech in various languages to the University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium. The authority to release the VOA transcripts is carefully targeted to the university-level research community. All the data to be received by the Consortium will be processed in electronic form by computers to create statistical tables and models of speech and written language, from which content is not recoverable. Thus there is no question of the data being redistributed as news or as any kind of product other than a data base for linguistic research and development.”