VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS

This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases welcomed FIVE new volunteers who have publicly claimed their pages and are already hard at work:

Joel Rane - California
Janice Wilson - Connecticut
Blaine Redemer - Illinois
Adrienne Walker - New Mexico
Barbara Bren - Wisconsin

Vermont is in the process of being adopted, leaving the following orphan pages waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist:

District of Columbia
Indiana
Mississippi
New Jersey
Texas
West Virginia

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/SADATFS_Volunteer_Guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.

WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

California (Joel Rane)

Watershed Groups in California - This database, created by the University of California, Davis Information Center for the Environment, covers over 500 watershed groups in Davis. Keyword search can be performed for group name, county, or mission (e.g., "to protect and restore wild trout and steelhead"). Entries may include details such as membership information, data collection (and availability of data) by the group, contact information, and projects in which the group is involved.

Idaho (Beth Downing)

Idaho Outfitter Guide - Find a guide for your next outdoor adventure. Search for a specific guide by name or for any guide in the state by type of activity, hunting, fishing, boating, recreation, winter or all guided activities. Each separate form allows for more specific searching and allows limits to particular areas of the state.

Michigan (Michael McDonnell)

Michigan Summer Food Finder - The Department of Education's Summer Food Service Program web site allows users to find locations where school age children can obtain nutritious meals during school vacations when National School Lunch or School Breakfast Programs are not available.

New Mexico (Adrienne Walker)

Contracts - Searchable database for contracts in excess of $20,000 entered with the State of New Mexico.

Wisconsin (Barbara Bren)

Locate in Wisconsin - provided by the Wisconsin Economic Development Association and the State of Wisconsin Department of Commerce to facilitate searching for sites and buildings information for businesses seeking to relocate or expand in Wisconsin. Click on the search type, then on "Refine your search." (alternate site from Forward Wisconsin, powered by the LocationOne® Information System (LOIS))

DATABASES REMOVED

New Mexico

eIdea - provides access to Air Quality, Ground Water Quality, Solid Waste, Petroleum Storage Tank, Food Safety Program and Hazardous Waste information for individual facilities throughout the state.

Bill Mandates Publishing Agency Reports to Congress, By Joseph Marks, NextGov TechInsider (07/27/11).
"The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday introduced companion legislation to the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. The measure would require the Government Printing Office to publish agency reports to Congress online within 30 days of their submission."

See also: Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (ACMRA) Heads to House Floor

House Questions Future of Government Printing Office, OMB Watch (July 27, 2011)

The House Legislative Branch appropriations bill for FY 2012, H.R. 2551, passed on July 22. The bill cuts $27.3 million from the FY 2011 funding level for the agency -- a 20.2 percent annual decrease, $40.4 million less than the agency's request. These cuts, which are considerably deeper than other legislative branch agencies face, would constrain GPO's ability to publish, digitize, and disseminate important public records. For example, GPO requested $5 million specifically to continue the development of FDsys, but the entire line item was cut from the bill.

...Certain provisions of H.R. 2551 suggest that some members of Congress seriously question whether GPO is needed at all.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is redesigning its web site. You might want to check for broken links in your catalog.

• the legacy NTIA website. (Note: When visiting legacy website pages where content is already migrated, you may be redirected to the new website.)
• the new NTIA website
  NTIA is the Executive Branch agency that is principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues. NTIA's programs and policymaking focus largely on expanding broadband Internet access and adoption in America, expanding the use of spectrum by all users, and ensuring that the Internet remains an engine for continued innovation and economic growth.

More:

• New Website Notice

  We are in the process of launching a new website to better serve you. While most content has been migrated, some content is not yet on the new website and will not yet appear through the search feature.

Here is an interesting story about preserving British government information.

• From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA), by Bernard M. Scaife, Ariadne, Issue 67 (4 July-2011)

Bernard M. Scaife, Technical Services Librarian at the University of London Institute of Education, writes about dealing with the broken links in their catalogue. Finding that ten percent of the links to external resources in their bibliographic records referred to documents which no longer existed and that many of those were official publications from government departments, he started looking for a way to eradicate their link rot problem. Since they already had Eprints software running on campus, they decided to use it:

It occurred to us that this software could enable us to eradicate our link rot problem, whilst building in a core level of digital preservation and increasing the discoverability of these documents. We were convinced that a citation which linked to a record in a Web archive was far more likely to survive than one which did not.

They knew that government budget cuts were increasing the risk of losing content from government departments. The article describes their experiences and summarizes what they learned:

• Placing files in a repository gives digital preservation to key documents in the subject field and eradicates the link rot problem.
• Adding high-quality metadata enhances the resource and allows it to hold its head high and become an integral part of a library's collection.
• A specialist library can play an important role in preserving domain-specific government content as part of its long-term strategy and ensure high-quality resources remain available.
• Provided you are prepared to get to grips with its complexity, the EPrints software is well suited to the task and provides good interoperability with other legacy systems for importing metadata
• The added value of being able to search the full text provides a potentially very rich resource for data mining whether by current or future researchers of educational history.
  

The Sunlight Foundation has posted the first in a series of blog posts about congressional committee websites:

• Congress Online: Evaluating Congressional Committee Websites, By policy interns Eric Dunn and Jacob Hutt, Sunlight Foundation (July 25, 2011).

  Recently, we went through all forty-five House, Senate, and Joint Committee websites and evaluated them based on a transparency checklist made by Sunlight in 2010. In this first of a series of blog posts, we reveal general trends from our evaluation and highlight the websites that stood out, the ones that need some work, and a few that were just awful.

Among the "Just plain awful" and "painful" websites:

The websites for the Joint Committee on Printing and the Joint Committee on the Library are by far the worst of them all - they have not been updated in years. Half of the committee members pictured on these websites are no longer in office.

Direct to Blog Post with Links to Download apps (via INFOdocket)

1. National Ocean Service (Mobile Web)
From NOAA
Cost: Free

In collaboration with the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Standards of Care Directorate of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE)the National Center for Telehealth and Technology (T2) developed a smartphone Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Pocket Guide to provide care providers with a comprehensive, quick reference that includes clinical practice guidelines for assessing and treating service members and Veterans who have sustained a mild TBI.

Direct to Blog Post with Links to Download apps (via INFOdocket)

Just Released:

Full Text Reference Book (Free)
343 pages; PDF

The 2011 African Statistical Yearbook was prepared under the overall umbrella of the African Statistical Coordination Committee set up by major continental organizations dealing with statistical development namely the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), the African Union Commission (AUC), and the United Na tions Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in the framework of the implementation of the Reference Regional Strategic Framework for Statistical Capacity Building in Africa (RRSF).

As with the previous two editions, this third edition presents time series showing how African Countries performed on several economic and social thematic areas over the 2002 to 2010 period. We have continued our efforts to privilege the use of data sourced from countries national sources, validated through a rigorous process.

Direct to Full Text Report (343 pages; PDF)

Via: InfoDocket

Congrats to Mary Minow!

From a San Mateo Daily Journal Article:

A new state law that takes effect Jan. 1 will add an extra layer of privacy for library users in the digital age.

The bill was authored by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, but inspired by Librarylaw.com founder Mary Minow, who also manages the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website.Minow proposed the legislation as part of Simitian’s “There Oughta Be A Law” contest.

Read the Complete Article:

VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS

This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project welcomed Julie Huskey as our latest volunteer documents specialist. Julie has adopted Tennessee and has fixed a number of broken links.

That leaves the following pages as orphans waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist:

Connecticut
District of Columbia
Illinois
Indiana
Mississippi
New Jersey
New Mexico
Texas
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.

WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights:

SUBJECT PAGES

We have several "subject focused" pages of state agency databases. We moved this list to the front project page. In additon, the Biographical Databases page has been updated. We fixed the Colorado link and added resources from Florida, Indiana, and North Dakota. If you spot problems with any of the other "subject focused" pages, please let me know. Preferably with new links to replace broken ones.

REFORMATTING

The State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project simply wouldn't be viable without our volunteers. So we've reformatted all the state pages so that the volunteer name and contact information stands at the top of the page above the table of contents.

DATABASES ADDED

Kentucky (Glen McAninch)

Kentucky Financial Incentives Project Database - From the web site, "is a searchable database of all projects approved for incentives by either the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) or the Bluegrass State Skills Corporation (BSSC), which are active as of January 1, 2008 through the present.

Missouri (Annie Moots)

Active Missing Persons Map - Click on a county to see a list of missing persons along with details about them.

Tennessee (Julie Huskey)

License Verification - From the website, "The Tennessee Health Related Board's website verification system is the official licensure verification site of the Health Related Boards. The site contains data obtained from primary (original) sources and is updated daily"

Washington (Marilyn Von Seggern)

Cleanup Site Search - A searchable inventory of sites currently being investigated, cleaned up, or that have already completed the cleanup process. Sites can be searched by ID number, name, and location (address, city, county or zip code).

DATABASES REMOVED

Missouri (Annie Moots)

Uniform Crime Reporting Statistical Analysis - Searchable by time frame, year, type of report, and geographical area.

The National Archives is apparently preparing to reverse a long standing policy of providing free public access to Census Schedules when it releases the 1940 Census next year. (See "Update" below for additional information.)

Early next year the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) can make the 1940 Census Schedules available to the public for the first time. (See "Background" below.) NARA has digitized these files and created metadata for them in preparation for making this valuable trove of information accessible on the web. It now only remains for NARA to decide who should provide access at what cost to users. Should NARA provide free access? Or should it contract this service out to a private company that will imposes fees on users and make a profit by providing access to this public information?

The answer should be obvious. For decades NARA has provided free access to Census Schedules at regional archive facilities and has sold microfilm to libraries that provide free access to their users. Now that online digital access is possible, NARA can provide better access online without having to maintain physical access at its regional facilities. It can distribute digital files to libraries for little or no cost so that libraries could further increase access and functionality for all of the information or subsets of it.

It seems, however, that NARA is choosing privatization instead of free public access. In an eight page RFI (Services Request for Information (RFI) NAMA-11-RFI-0004, 1940 Census [Microsoft Word .docx] or see the PDF version] NARA is seeking "industry input" for a "no-cost contract" to provide managed hosting and online access to the 1940 Census. The RFI is intended to explore options and "may or may not lead to a solicitation" for an actual contract. This means that NARA could, apparently, make a decision to do this work itself, but it is exploring the privatization route first. (Presumably, libraries could respond to the no-cost RFI as well. Responses were due on June 22.)

According to NextGov, the "no-cost contract" means that "the vendor would do the work for free and then charge the public a fee to access the records." (Archives Wants to Put 1940 Census Online, by Joseph Marks, NextGov TechInsider, July 15, 2011

The RFI does not explain why NARA is pursuing this path or what advantages it sees to privatization. I would guess the most likely reason is that NARA does not anticipate that it can get adequate funding to host the data online itself. But has it asked for funding? Has it made the case for continuing its historic provision of free public access to Census Schedules? Has it justified privatizing public information?

We have seen NARA follow this path before. NARA partnered with footnote.com to digitize selected holdings. This resulted in access restrictions including membership fees, per-page charges for downloading, and age restrictions to these digitized public documents. NARA partnered with Ancestry.com to make public records available for a fee. At the time, a spokesperson said that budget constraints and other priorities kept the Archive from making this information available itself.

"In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would be up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything." -- Ancestry.com unveiled more than 90 million U.S. war records, New York Times (May 24, 2007).

In 2008, NARA contracted with TGN to digitize and provide access to some of NARA's holdings. The contract restricted free public access for five years. We've written about this here at FGI before (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent) and believe that deals like this remain bad for NARA and bad for the country. We believe these kinds of deals set a bad precedent -- a precedent that is now being unnecessarily followed with the 1940 Census.

Those past deals were different from this one in one key way, however. They involved digitization of materials by the private contractors. In the case of the 1940 Census, the materials are already digitized, according to the RFI. The arguments we heard in the past were that digital access was so much better that it was worth privatizing access in order to get the digitization done. Without privatization, it was argued (even by some librarians and archivists), the materials could not be digitized and we'd be stuck with analog access. This is not the case for the 1940 Census since the materials are already digitized. The decision for online digital access has been made. The only question now is whether to make the existing digital files freely available or available through privatization.

Of course, the cost of any project providing access to all the 1940 Census Schedules and maps will not be insignificant. According to the RFI, NARA has created 3.8 million JPEG images, comprised of 20 terabytes of data.

Twenty terabytes is a lot of data, but it is fast becoming an almost modest size for a digital library. For comparison, the HathiTrust has over 3 billion pages and over 400 terabytes of data, OCLC has an over 600 Terabyte capacity, the Wayback machine contains 100 terabytes, the Library of Congress web archive is 235 terabytes, the University of California Curation Center has 70 TB in its Merritt digital preservation repository, and NARA's own Electronic Records Archives (ERA) has more than 90 terabytes. These terabyte-scale digital libraries are virtually the new norm and petabyte-scale digital libraries are already being built. Some of these are the Shoah Foundation Institute's digital library (8 petabytes), the Stanford Digital Repository anticipating a capacity of petabytes, and the Digital Hammurabi Project which is building a petabyte-scale digital library and museum of virtual 3D cuneiform tablets.

But the cost of providing access to microfilm at 13 regional offices was not cheap either. To me the question is whether or not the government is willing to continue its historic mission of providing free access or if it is ready to abandon that mission to the private sector.

There have always been those who argue that the fee-based private sector should take precedence over the public sector free-access. But, privatization of access to Census schedules would represent a reversal of long-standing policy. What was once an unquestioned government function is now, apparently, being considered a commercial function. Where, in the past, it was the government that provided free, public access to census schedules, now, when access can be improved, the government is abrogating its role and turning access over to private companies that will provide the information for a fee. The issues are not new. The precedents for providing free public access exist and have a long and respectable history. The only thing new is that NARA seems to have accepted privatization as inevitable.

Will there be funding for NARA to provide access to 1940 Census Schedules? There may not be. We have argued here at FGI for years that relying solely on Congressional funding for permanent, free public access to government information is risky because there is always the chance that Congress will not fund it. In these highly-politicized, economically troubled times it is easier to imagine a lack of any funding that to imagine adequate funding for the long term.

But this does not mean that privatization is the only option. There are precedents for government projects that are supported by donations and public-private partnerships. The American Memory Project is one notable example. And individual libraries or groups of libraries could step in and offer to provide free public access.

Now is the time for NARA, supported by researchers, libraries, and archivists to actively promote and pursue free public access solutions. There is no reason to accept privatization as inevitable.

Update: Note that the NARA website 1940 Census page says that "The digital images will be accessible at NARA facilities nationwide through our public access computers as well as on personal computers via the internet." Additionally, a comment on the Ancestry World web site said: "NARA will make the digitized copies of the 1940 Census population schedules available to the public, free of charge, on April 2, 2012 through our new Online Public Access search (http://www.archives.gov/research/search/)."

It is not clear from the above if the policy on free public access has changed with issuance of the RFI or not.

Background:
The Census Bureau conducts the Decennial Census every ten years. The Bureau summarizes its findings in reports that contain no information on individuals. The raw information collected, including names and addresses of those surveyed (sometimes called the "manuscript census" or the "census schedules"), is protected by law and is kept confidential for 72 years. After 72 years, that raw information is released by the National Archives and Records Administration. This information is invaluable to genealogists and other researchers. Typically, this raw information has been made available on microfilm at regional National Archives offices (Availability of Census Records About Individuals). This 72 year period for the 1940 Census expires on April 2, 2012.

• Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000
• Census Of Population And Housing: Reports, 1790-2010
• All of the information that the U.S. Census Bureau collects under 13 USC 9 is confidential.
• The "72-Year Rule"
• Census information and records can be invaluable tools in genealogical research

FGI volunteer ShinJoung Yeo reviews two books about global political struggles to govern the world's distributed communication infrastructure.

• Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace; Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, by ShinJoung Yeo, JASIST, Volume 62, Issue 8, pages 1647-1649, August 2011. Article first published online: 9 MAY 2011. [subscription required]

  A recent series of events--Google's dispute with China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom, the Egyptian government shutting off nearly all Internet services during the 2011 pro-democracy revolution, .xxx domain approval by ICANN after much political controversy--is indicative of the heightening global politics surrounding the Internet.

  Two books--Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, edited by Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, and Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, by Milton L. Mueller--have drawn attention and provide context to exactly these global political struggles to govern the world's distributed communication infrastructure, increase governments' efforts to control, and reassert sovereignty rights over cyberspace by nation states. Both books contribute to explicating the complex tensions between nation states and the extraterritorial nature of the Internet.

  ...If one has not yet been convinced that the Internet is far from value neutral, once again these books corroborate and stress the fact that cyberspace has grown ever more tightly intertwined with global political economy and has become a site of political, economic, and cultural struggle among nation states.

Earlier today I posted a couple of favorite quotes about the role of libraries as institutions that hold in our collective memory things that would otherwise be forgotten. A short article in Scientific American notes the importance of "the internet" as "external memory" or "transactive" memory:

• Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?, by Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American (July 14, 2011).

  ...[T]he Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory ... where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another ... for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage.

The researcher says that "Information is much more available than it was." An interesting article, but it misses, I think, the key point that if no one preserves "the internet" (or the parts of it that we want to preserve), this transactive memory won't be there for us to use. (The article even makes this amazingly naive statement: "And if our gadgets were to fail due to a planet-wide electromagnetic pulse tomorrow, we would still be all right.")

This is important because, if we think our "external" memory is safe and we rely on commercial interests to preserve that information, then we are leaving our very memory at the commercial mercy of those companies. An alternative is for communities of interest to rely on libraries to preserve important information.

A related article about the same research:

• Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds, By Patricia Cohen, New York Times (July 14, 2011).

In a recent court decision the National Security Agency acknowledged working "with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates" but it obtained from the court the right to keep secret documents that may, or may not, show a working relationship with Google.

• NSA spooks win fight to keep secret possible ties to Google, by Mike Doyle, Suits & Sentences legal affairs blog, McClatchy Newspapers (July 13, 2011).

  In a decision made public Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the curious souls at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC sought documents relating to NSA's possible relationship with Google following news of an alleged cyber attack by hackers in China and of a subsequent cooperation agreement between Google and NSA.

• EPIC v. NSA: Agency Can "Neither Confirm Nor Deny" Google Ties, EPIC (July 13, 2011).

From the Library of Congress:

• It Takes a Village…to Archive the Internet, guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress (posted by Mike Ashenfelder), The Signal, digital preservation blog, Library of Congress (July 14th, 2011).

  Despite the tremendous amount we’ve preserved, we know we can’t do it alone. We often collaborate to build web archives with other libraries, archives and organizations in the United States and around the globe. We do this when events unfold quickly on the Internet and the Library can’t react as quickly as we’d like for whatever reason, but also when the scope of a collection is so big that we must work with others to ensure that breadth of content is preserved.

  ...So while each institution has its own collection policies to follow, there is an obvious recognition by web archivists that the Internet is a global place, not neatly wrapped by physical boundaries. Personally, I value these collaborations and know that my colleagues do too. If we work together, we can ensure that more of the Web is preserved, and often we can act more quickly, particularly when the risk of loss of content is so great.

Corrected attribution above.

VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS

This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project welcomed Brenda Hemmelman as our latest volunteer documents specialist. Brenda has taken over the care and feeding of the South Dakota project page.

Brenda has not only fixed all of the broken links on the South Dakota page, but has also added a number of new databases including the Cemetery Record Search, which is considered to be a great resource for pre 1940s burials.

In other volunteer news, we are currently in discussions with a few people over the future of the California page and we hope to have it adopted out in the next week.

That leaves the following pages as orphans waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist:

Connecticut
District of Columbia
Illinois
Indiana
Mississippi
New Jersey
New Mexico
Tennessee
Texas
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states.

WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights:

Nebraska - Extensive link fixing.

DATABASES ADDED

Arkansas

State Vehicle Inventory Search - Searchable by agency, vehicle type, plate number, and most common reported use.

Delaware

Delaware Environmental Navigator (DEN) - "Will allow the public to view all facility information, violations, enforcement actions and monitoring results pertaining to Air Quality, Waste Water, Water Supply, Hazardous Waste, Hazardous Waste Annual Reports, Solid Waste, Contaminated Site Cleanup, Underground Tanks and Vapor Recovery, Above Ground Tanks, Septic Permits, Wetlands, Ambient Water Monitoring Data and Corrective Action Sites."

Nebraska

Nebraska Memories - Images of Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials.

On a quiet Sunday, here are two quotes that I find both memorable and inspiring when I think of the role and future of libraries. These days we see so much emphasis placed on fast access to current, popular, "must see" information. Although libraries have a role to play in that as well, few if any institutions have the long-term role that libraries have.

We mustn't model the digital library on the day-to-day operation of a single human brain, which quite properly uses-or-loses, keeps uppermost in mind what it needs most often, and does not refresh, and eventually forgets, what it very infrequently considers -- after all, the principal reason groups of rememberers invented writing and printing was to record accurately what they sensed was otherwise likely to be forgotten.

-- Nicholson Baker. Double Fold. NY: Random House, 2001. p245.

Libraries exist to preserve the thoughts and deeds that no one else has time for anymore, to collect items that might not be used for another ten, fifty, one hundred years -- if ever. It is this last uncertainty that makes libraries the most heroic of human creations.

-- Paul Collins. Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World. New York: Picador, 2001. p.285-286.

The National Archives asking volunteer transcribers at Wikisource to turn paper and ink historical manuscripts into simple, searchable Web text.

• National Archives' first Wikipedian in residence to bring more holdings to the public, by Joseph Marks, NextGov (07/11/2011).

An interesting part of this story is the issue of the quality of scans.

A major barrier, McDevitt-Parks said, is the quality of the Archives' digitized files, the most important of which were scanned in the 1990s using early technology that makes them difficult to read online.

...Unfortunately, it's hard to [make the case to] go back and scan things that are already scanned when there are millions and millions of things that aren't in any digitized form at all.

I think there is an important lesson here. As we develop policies for our individual libraries today and plans for the FDLP of the future, we should always remember that digitization technologies improve over time and the uses we make of digital documents evolve over time. We should avoid choices that are merely good-enough today.

We should aim for a future that will enable us to increase access and functionality in the future, not lock us into what we are technologically capable of today.

We've written here before about Google cancelling its newspaper digitization project. Here is a new story with some details about how Google took the most extensive searchable archive of Mexican historical newspapers in the world (The "Paper of Record" archive) and abandoned it.

• How Google Disrespected Mexican History, By Richard J. Salvucci, Miller-McCune (July 10, 2011).

  So you want Google (or perhaps any commercial enterprise) to digitize your books and papers and make them available to everyone for all eternity? Profits and losses come and go, but history is forever and not necessarily responsive to market incentives. Be careful what you wish for. Google may give it to you, or, then again, maybe not.

Census cuts could end some surveys, By Carol Morello, Washington Post (July 12, 2011).

...The agency, which is closing half its regional offices to save money, has warned that cuts [of 25 percent, as proposed under a bill being considered by the House Appropriations Committee] would likely mean an end to next year's Economic Survey, which is conducted every five years and is used to calculate the nation's Gross Domestic Product, among other things. There also could be deep cuts in the American Community Survey...

From C-SPAN:

The Library of Congress
A C-SPAN Original Documentary
Premieres Mon., July 18, 8 & 11 pm ET on C-SPAN

Join us this Monday evening on C-SPAN for the premiere of our latest original documentary, The Library of Congress. Founded in 1800 and sitting adjacent to the U.S. Capitol in the heart of America's capital city, the Library of Congress has collected nearly 150 million items, making it the world's largest library. This documentary explores the Library's 211-year history and the scope of its collection. Go behind the scenes and:

• Learn the history of the institution as you tour the Library's iconic Jefferson Building.
• See the treasures found in its collections of rare books, photos, and maps, as well as the thousands of pages of presidential and personal papers.
• Learn how the library uses technolgy to preserve its holdings and expand public access to them.

Premieres this Monday, July 18, 8 & 11 pm ET on C-SPAN.

For preview clips and more information about The Library of Congress, visit www.c-span.org/loc.

Two reports from a forum held today in DC. Plus, links to a list of 1759 domains managed by government. Also, a link to a video chat.

Full Text

From the GPO:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) is providing permanent public access to the Coastal Zone Information Collection (CZIC) through the agency’s Federal Digital System(FDsys).

"GPO is delighted to partner with NOAA Coastal Services Center to provide permanent public access to the valuable digital Coastal Zone Information Collection,” said GPO’s Superintendent of Documents Mary Alice Baish. “GPO encourages Federal agencies to take advantage of FDsys’ preservation repository capabilities as a
way to ensure longevity and provide the public with permanent access to their Federal documents.”

Read the Complete Announcement

Via INFOdocket:

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Historical Quadrangle Scanning Project (HQSP) is in the process of releasing all editions and all scales of more than 200,000 historic topographic maps of the United States dating from 1884-2006.

Historical maps are available to the public at no cost in GeoPDF format from the USGS Store. These maps are georeferenced and can be used in conjunction with the new USGS digital topographic map, the US Topo.

News Release and Links

Activity continues at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project. See a blow by blow list of changes from the previous seven days at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Some highlights from this week are:

DATABASES ADDED

Arkansas

Licensed Athletic Trainer Search - Searchable database of licensed athletic trainers, by first name and last name.

Connecticut

Arthropod (i.e. bugs) Management Database - Intended for commercial plant growers, this database "allows you to search for insects and mites that are pests on trees, shrubs and other plants in the landscape, the nursery or Christmas tree farm." Searchable by damage type, pest and plant. One of each, plus a "profession" must be selected to ensure a successful search.

Louisiana

Confederate Pension Applications Index Database - This database consists of alphabetically arranged pensions granted from 1898 for veterans and widows. The pensions may include service information, occupation, place of residence, and number of children. The collection also contains a few applications for individuals other than veterans or widows that were not granted.

This particular database was also added to our Official Records Databases page.

South Carolina

Orders - The database of Orders of the Public Service Commission is being expanded to cover orders and rate requests from 1990 to present. Searches can be by keyword, with filtering by industry.

Washington

Classics in Washington History - A searchable database of more than 160 scanned Washington history publications in 14 subject categories such as geography, territorial and state government, exploration and early travel, and women's stories.

DATABASES REMOVED

Arkansas

Parenting Program Directory - Basic information about existing parent education programs in Arkansas. Directory is searchable by county and keyword.

----
In addition to the changes above, the SADATFS Volunteer Guide was updated with some style guidelines and a clarification was made to the "What is a Database?" page.

We continue to need people to adopt the following orphan state pages:

California
Connecticut - Links fixed this week through govdoc-l crowdsourcing!
District of Columbia
Illinois
Indiana
Mississippi
New Jersey
New Mexico
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin