According to the NY Times, the US Department of Justice has just released their Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (22 USC 611) requires people who are under foreign control to register with the Department of Justice before swaying public opinion.

The Sunlight Foundation has some evaluation of the database. FARA would like feedback so please try it out and let them know what you think of the database.

Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA is a disclosure statute that requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.

Check out Digitization Diva at http://digitizationdiva.blogspot.com. According to blogger Christy Allen, a librarian at the North Carolina State Library, this blog "focuses primarily on the topics of digitization and Web 2.0 in a government library setting."

Recent posts have included a write up of a Best Practices Exchange 2007 session on Web 2.0 in State libraries that I wasn't able to attend and a listing of some interesting looking image collections and how they were promoting themselves via web 2.0 technologies.

I've been reading a textbook called Social Psychology by Thomas Gilovich, et al and looking at its companion website. I wanted to share some ideas from the book that I think will be of real use to librarians and other government information professionals trying to persuade people to take action to ensure access, preservation and privacy with respect to government information. It may also be of use to people trying to raise awareness and usage of government information, library websites and libraries.

So often activists put out calls to action that either seemingly fall on deaf ears or make people aware of issues without taking action. Why is this? It could be because of the way people tend to change their attitudes. In chapter 7 of Social Psychology, we are told that people are open to persuasion on two levels -- a central route and a peripheral route. The central route of persuasion is what is most familiar to us -- "People attend carefully to the message, and they consider relevant evidence and underlying logic in detail." Speaking for myself here, this is the way I tend to try and convince others. I attempt to lay out the evidence to convince people of my point of view or to understand why I think something is under threat. I use statistics when I can and logical-sounding thought experiments when I don't have statistics.

If you look at campaigns to increase library use or use of library-purchased electronic resources, I think you see a similar pattern -- "You should use the library because we have x and y and you'll save time and money."

But it turns out that people only use the central route under certain conditions -- "when the message is relevant to them, when they have knowledge in the domain, and when the message evokes a sense of personal responsibility."

What happens when people don't feel like a message is relevant, when they don't have a lot of knowledge in a particular area and/or they feel no personal responsibility? They take the peripheral route of persuasion -- "people attend to superficial aspects of the message. They use this route when they have little motivation or time or ability to attend to its deeper meaning. In this route, people are persuaded by source characteristics (such as attractiveness and credibility of the communicator) and message characteristics (such as how many arguments there are and whether the conclusions are explicit)"

Looking that two two methods of persuasion in detail, I see immediate problems in the efforts of librarians in general and documents librarians in particular to get people to care and be good stewards of our resources. I'd like to outline these problems specifically for those helping to stimulate the building of local digital collections and invite librarians in other disciplines to see how these different routes might explain disconnects with their audiences.

I believe that I and others in the "digital deposit" movement have been obsessing over crafting ever better "central route" messages without realizing that much of our core audience (other documents librarians and other government information users) are in fact at the peripheral level though no fault of their own. Let's look at the "central route" factors again:

1. Relevance to audience;
2. Audience has knowledge in the domain;
3. Audience has sense of personal responsibility.

Relevance -- This factor could go either way. Docs librarians understand a message of digital deposit is relevant to them because it is about government information or it's not relevant because the word "digital" makes it an IT concern and not theirs.

Knowledge -- While documents librarians have tremendous knowledge of government information products and fine knowledge of how to use Internet-based products, general IT skills and knowledge of local/remote repository options (LOCKSS, dSpace, OAIS, etc) is low. We at FGI have heard from people concerned about the problem, but have no idea what to do and aren't sure where to look for answers.

Personal Responsibility -- My personal sense is that this area is the greatest challenge to any "central route" approach of persuading depository librarians to build the geographically distributed depository system of the future. Although the Government Printing Office (GPO) has zero track record in preserving government information over the long haul and in fact no onsite collection at all until very recently, it now proposes to be the sole preserver of federal government information through its Future Digital System. Since this public commitment seemingly absolves libraries of their traditional preservation responsibilities, a majority of our documents colleagues say "GPO's got it covered, why do I need a local collection. Their problem, not mine." And so any message based on library responsibility to preserve materials regardless of format gets tuned out.

Obviously I wouldn't be blogging about this if I thought the correct course of action in light of the above was to throw in the towel, go home and kick back with some Alaskan Amber and a good salmon dish. So, what do we do if we are librarians either interested in getting our colleagues to build locally-housed, but Internet shared digital document collections or if we're trying to educate the larger public about the
availability of government information, specialists willing and able to help them (librarians), and the need to protect both?

As I see it, I think it's using the peripheral route to convince people that government information is relevant to them and they've got responsibility for its continued availability. We also need to provide clear direction as to HOW people can use government information AND keep it available for the future. Once we've done that and people have relevance, knowledge and responsibility, we can go back to the "central route" arguments to solidify our gains.

But how to use the peripheral route? Let's look at its characteristics again: "people are persuaded by source characteristics (such as attractiveness and credibility of the communicator) and message characteristics (such as how many arguments there are and whether the conclusions are explicit)" So perhaps we can hire Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones to be spokespersons for government documents. :-)

Or perhaps we should focus on credibility of the communicator and message characteristics. Perhaps we could lobby ALA or other library organizations to come out in favor of local digital collections, or at least provide an information clearinghouse on the subject. If we as "digital deposit" advocates can get our message out through existing organizations, their credibility might help the cause. In the case of depository libraries advancing their case, they might try to get a prominent citizen or some other respected person to publicly talk about the value of federal depository libraries.

In terms of message characteristics, researchers have found that short messages combined with instructions have helped increase a desired action. For example in 1967, Leventhal, Watts, & Pagano found that people who watched a film about smoking dangers AND were given smoking cessation tips smoked only a third as much as people who where just given tips or who just saw the film.

Part of the short messages should be stories, sort of like the ones we've been trying to collect under our Depository Success Stories, stories about libraries being collected by ALA, or even just blogging about how we answered a question on average tariff levels. Lobbyists have been trying to get us to be storytellers for years. Social psychologists have understood the power of persuasion for so long, they even have a name for it -- the indentifiable victim effect.

The other part of our message should be about what librarians and other people can actually DO. Here at FGI we've tried to answer part of that question at least implicitly by having pages about remixing government information, blogs of government documents librarians, and resources for capturing digital resources and producing video clips promoting resources.

Any ideas about how we put this all together? Get GODORT to hire attractive people to put together a YouTube series called This Old Depository where we give step by step instructions on building your very own globally accessible local digital collection? Let's all think about it together and start a new season of persuasion.

CBS reported that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security has a website that listed groups they consider possible terrorists. However, after the agency received complaints from people, some Web pages were removed from the list.

The original list of the groups that the agency considered possible terrorists were:

• Environmentalists
• Anti-Genetics (those opposed to genetically-altered crops)
• Animal Rights
• Anti-Abortion
• Anti-Nuclear
• Anti-War
• Pro-Gay Right

This is a classic example of the abuse that can occur when a politically motivated governmental body controls information without any sort of vetting process. I am wondering if any library or individuals were able to capture the removed websites. Or will this be a permanently lost document? I did a quick, not thorough search in the WayBack Machine but no luck.

Update 5/29/2007

Thanks to Valerie for pointing out this page has been saved by a library/archives agency.

In response to a request made on bibliocasting-L, we recorded a three minute promo for the FGI podcast. I explain how we create the podcast and what we hope to do with it.

Show Notes:

I mentioned the following in our podcast:

• Bibliocasting mailing list
• Audacity
• Ourmedia
• Feedburner
• PodSafe Audio
• Creative Commons

Music

• Our theme music came from Set Me Free by DJ Topshelf and downloaded from Podsafe Audio.
• The background music was "Hobbit & Lord of the Rings" by the Brobdingnagian Bards

A lot of information packed into a small space, so please consider listening. And stay tuned for our June podcast.

In a new discussion over at the Library 2.0 Government Documents group, librarian Dreanna Belden comments on how the University of North Texas libraries have ramped up usage of their locally housed digital document and photograph collections by adding relevant links to Wikipedia. For example, they added a link to Congressional Research Reports about Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to her Wikipedia entry.

What has been the result of adding article-appropriate library links to over 600 Wikipedia articles? Dreanna says (emphasis mine):

Since adding links back to our collections into over 600 Wikipedia articles, we have experience dramatically increased usage of our online collections. In the past year over 400,000 unique users have clicked through Wikipedia into our digital collections.

Way to go UNT! If there other libraries doing this sort of thing, let Dreanna know what kind of response you're getting. Or leave a comment here and we'll send it her way.

If you're not up for adding your collection links to Wikipedia, or if you don't have a local digital collection to link to, consider blogging your reference questions and watch what you found on average tarrif levels rise to the top of Google.

Government in your hand, By David Stephenson, FCW.com, May 21, 2007. "Governing in the YouTube era will change relations between government and citizens."

The combination of powerful, networked personal communications devices and groups working together in social networks linked by the net and by cell phones can transform the public's relationship with government from a passive recipient of services into an invaluable collaborator. "Some call it 'sousveillance,' which happens when people turn the tables and monitor government."

Yet another reason for us to fight for open formats and freely-accessible, freely re-usable, free government information.

As citizens increasingly need access to broadband and wireless Internet connections to fully participate in democracy, it become increasingly important for government information specialists to be aware of changes in local policies and initiatives in this area. Two sites that help are the Municipal broadband map from News.com and the MuniWireless site.

Municipal broadband nationwide. News.com. "Government-sponsored projects to provide fiber-optic or wireless networks are taking off across the United States, as are efforts to legislate the issue in state capitols."

Notice that the above site says "Last updated: April 25, 2005." I don't know if they are keeping this up to date or not, but another site, MuniWireless, tracks similar information and seems to be updating its information daily. See, the Initiatives page for some of the same information tracked on the News.com map. MuniWireless describes itself this way:

"This site is devoted to municipal broadband projects worldwide that are funded or supported by cities and towns, especially those projects that incorporate wireless technologies. These range from downtown hot-zones & city- and county-wide wireless broadband networks, to country-wide deployments. Although we often use the word “city," rural municipalities receive equal coverage, because they are leading the fight for affordable, fast, universal access to the Internet. We also cover the products, technologies, and standards that comprise public broadband networks, and the organizations that design, install, and maintain them.

There are some amazing data sets at this web site. These could be useful for patrons seeking data or faculty looking for free data sets for students to use on class projects.

NASA Global Change Master Directory, Discover Earth Science data and services

The mission of the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is to enable the scientific community to discover and access Earth science data and services through distributed, integrated information technology systems. The GCMD offers authoring tools to achieve this mission, which conform to international standards. Tools are available to write, directly submit, and directly update metadata records.

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. This nationwide data publishing effort is known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The NSDI is a physical, organizational, and virtual network designed to enable the development and sharing of this nation's digital geographic information resources. FGDC activities are administered through the FGDC Secretariat, hosted by the National Geospatial Programs Office (NGPO) of the U.S. Geological Survey. The NGPO oversees other geospatial programs of national importance including The National Map and the Geospatial One-Stop activity.

The FGDC hosts a FGDC Clearinghouse Registry. This registry is a database of all clearinghouse nodes participating in the clearinghouse activity. This site provides access to registry functions including: adding a new node to the clearinghouse, browsing through the existing node information, modifying of existing information in the database (password required by node administrator), and some administration functions (clearinghouse administrator only). You may search the database and see what agency is your local clearinghouse.

Scanning Registries

Map libraries across the country have been scanning maps for many years. Scanned maps are distributed to patrons, printed out for patrons and in recent years, are being posted online as digital collections (all depending on copyright restrictions). Many libraries are working with state agencies to scan large topographic map collections while other libraries scan their rare and unique maps as a measure for preservation as well as access. Map librarians struggle to keep track of who's scanning what and so two professional organizations have created map scanning registries to track major scanning efforts.

ALA Map and Geography Round Table (MAGERT) Map Scanning Registry goals are to:

• Find out what scanning is being planned, in process, or complete for a particular geographic area
• Head off any duplication of effort
• Provide a resource to use for finding a particular digital image
• Provide a resource for reviewing the various technical parameters used in different projects

The Western Association of Map Libraries has established the WAML Scanning Projects Clearinghouse This Clearinghouse is an effort to create a union list of digitization projects. Its goal is to increase knowledge of and accessibility to scanned items and avoid duplication of efforts.

Online Map Collections

Many libraries are creating beautiful digital map collections. These collections often provide full metadata and zoomable/panable images. Collections are often announced at the Map Librarian discussion list Maps-L.

Here are a few examples of some digital map collections online:

• American Geographical Society Library, UW Milwaukee
• Another AGSL, UWM Collection of Wall Maps
• Map Collection at Gettysburg College
• University of Chicago Map Collection
• University of Illinois Library & the University of Illinois Press Historical Maps Online
• University of Utah, J.Willard Marriot Library Sanborn Fire Insurance maps
• University of Tennessee online historic topographic maps
• New York Public Library American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850

NGA's document "Geodesy for the layman"

What is geodesy? Who needs it and why?

These are some of the questions asked by many people. Actually, geodesy is nothing new having been around for centuries. Webster defines geodesy as "that branch of applied mathematics which determines by observation and measurement the exact positions of points and the figures and areas of large portions of the earth's surface, the shape and size of the earth, and the variations of terrestrial gravity." It is a specialized application of several familiar facets of basic mathematical and physical concepts. In practice, geodesy uses the principles of mathematics, astronomy and physics, and applies them within the capabilities of modern engineering and technology. A thorough study of the science of geodesy is not a simple undertaking. However, it is possible to gain an understanding of the historical development, a general knowledge of the methods and techniques of the science, and the way geodesy is being used to solve some Department of Defense (DoD) problems.

Visit here for the full NGA document "Geodesy for the layman"

Perhaps old news - but a reminder never hurts. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has a current, detailed map of Baghdad available for download or to view online. The map is a special reference map of Baghdad, Iraq, produced as a tool to help NGA public affairs office and other government public affairs offices in their efforts to discuss issues with the media and public that might be related to the area depicted. The map is unclassified and also referred to as a reference graphic. It is suitable for reference use only and should not be used for any other purpose (not for navigation, etc.). Electronic versions of the Baghdad map are available in .JPEG and MrSID formats. NGA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a member of the National Intelligence Community. The Agency's mission is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of our national security. Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., NGA has major facilities in the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and St. Louis, Mo., areas with NGA support teams worldwide.

A few years ago I started an e-mail list where I sent people listings of newly cataloged Alaska State Publications and Federal Publications about Alaska. In hopes of spreading the news about "Governmental Alaskana" and giving an example for other states to consider, I've set up a blog which may or may not replace the mailing list.

Try it. If you like it, please subscribe at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GovernmentalAlaskana and tell your friends. Feedback on the blog is welcome, too.

Consider commenting on the documents you see at the blog.

According to a White House Personnel announcement:

The President intends to nominate Robert Charles Tapella, of Virginia, to be the Public Printer. Mr. Tapella currently serves as Chief of Staff of the United States Government Printing Office. Prior to this, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the United States Government Printing Office. Earlier in his career, he ran Kelly Communications. Mr. Tapella received his bachelor's degree from California Polytechnic State University.

Update 5/25/2007, 5:20pm AST by Daniel

A little more background on Mr. Tapella can be found in GPO's press release issued on his appointment as Deputy Chief of Staff in January 2003.

He is described as having several assignments on Capitol Hill:

From 1996 to 2000, he served as professional staff on the House of Representatives Committee on House Oversight, where he supervised the Office of Member Services; Chief of Staff to Rep. Bill Redmond (R-NM); and Special Assistant to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, where he worked on strategic planning for re-engineering the information technology infrastructure of the House legislative process and developed plans for major information technology initiatives for the Office of the Clerk. Tapella gained his first legislative office experience from 1986 to 1993, when he worked as district representative for Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA).

And for whatever reason, in 2003, GPO thought it was important to note that Mr. Tapella was a Young Republican:

A California native, Tapella is a past National Board member and current member of the Young Republican National Federation, Inc., an alumnus of the American Council of Young Political Leaders, and an alumnus of Leadership Sunnyvale’s Class of 1995. He resides in Alexandria, VA.

A November 2005 Seybold Report has a few comments from Mr. Tappella, although these appear to be simply GPO policy of the time:

Tapella said the GPO is beginning to evaluate how it will publish information in the future. The trend, he said, is toward an electronic delivery method because of an increase in demand for information in electronic form. "Half of all our documents are never printed," he said.

Tapella doesn't envision that print will disappear in the coming decade, but the GPO is developing a model for storage and output via the Web and is using print-on-demand technology. A very important aspect of this system will be maintaining the security and authenticity of all documents in electronic form.

AND

"The number of documents continues to grow," Tapella said. "It's not going down." To keep up with its mission of keeping the public informed, the GPO will need to continue to rely on external partners, which will mean plenty of opportunities for companies that can provide the services, supplies and printed materials the agency needs."

Source:
Title: Government Printing Office Needs a Few Good Printers.
Authors: Joss, Molly
Source: Seybold Report: Analyzing Publishing Technologies; 11/16/2005, Vol. 5 Issue 15, p18-19, 2p
For EBSCO Subscribers: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=19163213&site=ehost-live

USGS Pilot Project Makes High-Quality Landsat Data Available Through Web

As of June 4, 2007, the USGS will be releasing selected Landsat 7 image data of the United States through the Web (glovis.usgs.gov or earthexplorer.usgs.gov). These data are of high quality with limited cloud cover.

This Web-enabled distribution of new and recently acquired data is a pilot project for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), currently projected for launch in 2011. The project will allow the Landsat data user community to help refine the distribution system planned for the upcoming LDCM. Each scene will be registered to the terrain, or “ortho-rectified,” prior to
being placed on the Web. Copies of these data will also be available on CD or DVD at the cost of reproduction.

Landsat data have proven useful for a wide range of applications. From disaster monitoring after Hurricane Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami to global crop condition analysis, Landsat data are being used by scientists around the world. The Web-based distribution system will allow the user community easier access to Landsat 7 data.

The pilot project will be carefully examined. Customer response will be evaluated and their insight will influence the future distribution system.

I just became aware of a handy feature of the University of North Texas' collection of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. You can create RSS feeds of search results.

For example, here is a feed to CRS reports mentioning "government information"

http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/rss/?q=%22government+informat...

Once you have your RSS feed, you can plug it into your favorite application or into something like feed2js like this:

The only drawback is that neither UNT, Open CRS or any other public source of CRS reports is complete. As readers of FGI know, Congress has chosen to hold back these valuable reports. Thankfully groups like the Open House Project are trying to change this.

Ok, this is probably only a lunchtime listen for those of you on the West coast, but oh well. Howard Rheingold, who wrote "Smart Mobs", has put together a video on "Cooperation studies: A New Story About The Way Humans Get Things Done." Check it out; it's quite fascinating! And on a side note, Howard's hosting the video at Blip.tv, a free video hosting service that's far easier than setting up your own streaming server.

Click To Play

Over the past couple of weeks, I've written about my experiences at the 2007 Best Practices Exchange in Chandler, Arizona. You can find all of my other postings at
http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/339.

I wanted to close my coverage with a note of praise for my fellow state documents librarians and archivists. While we could have simply have linked to agency resources and allowed them to control libraries' level of access, most people working in state libraries and archives recognize their responsibility to collect, describe, preserve and provide meaningful enduring access to their state's publications. Whether we try to disburse the publications as Alaska does using LOCKSS, or make their publications available for easy downloading like other states, we are libraries taking custody of electronic government publications. We make mistakes, but we try and in many cases are starting to build examples for others to follow.

So, if you're involved in federal government information, review our presentations at the Exchange and see if you might be able to start to take custody of the high-profile federal publications that might not stick around if left to the government's devices and short-sighted funding priorities.

As I mentioned in my previous posting on the 2007 Best Practices Exchange, we had two keynote speakers.

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was our second keynote and was an inspiration for those of us trying to be good custodians of electronic government information. Brewster told us that our generation had the opportunity to build "Universal Access to All Knowledge" that will be "Free to All." He then worked his way through different kinds of tangible media to demonstrate how they could be digitized cheaply and easily. He waived away copyright concerns, which I accepted since he was talking in terms of technology.

I found Brewster most convincing about digitizing audio and video. He estimated that it would take roughly 20-40 million dollars to digitize existing analog audio and noted that the Internet Archive already had 100,000 items in over 100 collections. Moving images could be scanned at the rate of $200/hr and video for $15/hr.

I found him the least convincing about digitizing text, even though he seemingly spent the most effort on it.

Briefly, he stated that the Library of Congress held 28 million books containing about 28TB of data. At the current cost of hard disk storage, just $60,000 would be enough to store all 28 million books. The Internet Archive has been able to make great strides in digitizing equipment and Brewster said that they can digitize 12,000 books a month at a cost of $30/book. He stated that at those costs, the entire LC collection could be scanned for approximately $800,000,000, a very reasonable figure.

However, he failed to mention that at a rate of 12,000 books a month, it would take a little over 194 years to digitize 28 million books. That figure might have been in the back of Brewster's mind because he stated that although $800 million would be enough to digitize all of the Library of Congress, digitizing one million books might be enough to significantly advance knowledge. This figure could be accomplished in as little as seven years and aside from social/political concerns is very doable.

About those concerns, Brewster faced them head on after taking us through the technology. He quoted someone as saying that "technology is easy, people are hard!" He talked about the Internet Archives work in fighting the seemingly
unlimited extensions of copyright and their efforts bringing orphan works into the public domain. He framed the issue as one of whether the future should be public or private; open or proprietary. Perhaps the right phrase, Brewster suggested is "public or perish." He certainly won't get an argument from us folks at Free Government Information on that.

A few other items from his talk:

• The $100 laptop is real. Well, it's $175, but it is real and has a very clear readout. Brewster passed around a laptop with a children's e-book on it. You paged through it with buttons.
• The Internet Archive has developed a bookbinding machine that can print books fro $0.01/page or a 300 page book for $3.00. We saw slides of the machine in action in the developing world. We saw a finished product and it seemed like a decent binding.
• A library at the University of Illinois is scanning items from their microfilm collection at the rate of 10-30 reels a day. Internet Archive provided the scanning equipment free and the library provides staffing.

You should have been there. If you get the chance to listen to Brewster, take
it! The next best thing is looking at his presentation
slides. Or watch him speak at the Library of Congress in 2002.

Two recent changes for the US government's government search engine, USAsearch.gov:

• In the Advanced Search option, the option to limit a search to federal websites has been removed. USAsearch.gov searches both federal and state websites. An option previously available under the Advanced Search option of "Search In" allowed a researcher to specify that they were only interested in results from federal websites. The option never worked cleanly. I had dubbed it a "leaky limit" because some state website results always seeped in. Now there is no federal-only option. Fortunately, once you have your USAsearch.gov results, the agency-sort option makes it easy to view just those results coming from federal agencies.
• On the plus side of the equation, USAsearch.gov now indexes the USDA Forest Service websites that use the .fed.us domain. Any search engine can limit results to those that have a .gov or .mil domain suffix. But some federal websites are exceptions to that rule, as was the case with www.fs.fed.us. Now your searches will find that Forest Service information. I had often run a search in training classes for information about "remote sensing." It was a good way to show how many agencies were involved with this technology, and to show off the agency sort option. Now I have one more agency showing up in my results!

This is a much-watch video. In a supreme act of irony, Eric Faden, Professor of English and Film Studies of Bucknell University, has just created this amazingly informative review of copyright principles delivered through the words of Disney characters. Nicely done!

Here's another mirror.

Carl Malamud has challenged Smithsonian Institution restrictions on use of the images at the Smithsonian Images website. The Associated Press reported today on the action by Malamud's Public.Resource.Org site.

If you rely on Google, you'll want to read about the changes the search engine is making to how it sorts, displays and integrates search results:

Google 2.0: Google Universal Search by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, May. 16, 2007.

We had a double keynote at Best Practices Exchange 2007: Former legislator and current Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jeff Hatch-Miller and Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle.

Both gave such good presentations that they deserve separate blog entries. This is Jeff's.

Jeff Hatch-Miller was an engaging speaker who was invited to help us figure out to build support for our various state initiatives. His experience as a legislator provided an insider's perspective. His talk centered on three themes:

1. Getting noticed - in a good way
2. Getting Legislative attention
3. Getting into the "recommended budget"

My notes aren't complete enough for a section-by-section recitation of Jeff's points, so here are some impressions:

Jeff started his talk by reading us mission statements from three organizations. He wanted us to pick out the one that best described "who they are and what they do." The only one that stuck with me was the one chosen by the audience "At Sheldon Clinic, we give people back the use of their hands." Jeff told us that we have to be that clear about who we are and what we do because there are MANY agencies and organizations doing quite good work competing for legislative time and attention.

Another statement that really resonated with me and the rest of the group was Jeff's statement (paraphrased) - "It's not about you. People give to you because you MEET needs, not because you have them." He also said it was more important to communicate the "why" rather than the "what". Funding is about relationships, which you need to build while being subtle.

A major tip for getting favorable attention is relating yourself to K-12 education. How can your collections relate to k-12? Are there stories about students and teachers using your resources and services that you can pass along to your funding authority?

Programs tend to be part of yearly recommended budgets if they have constitutional or statutory authority behind them. Some funding efforts can take years. It's important to visit legislators in their home districts for relationship building, which is hard to do in the pressure cooker of a legislative session.

Finally, never ever burn bridges. Your enemy today maybe the ally you need tomorrow.

If you are organizaing a conference that needs a speaker to talk about raising money from legislative bodies, I highly recommend Commissioner Jeff Hatch-Miller. He can be reached through his web page at http://www.azcc.gov/commissioners/hatch-miller/index.htm.