The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) has a report on the House bill that would cut NSF funding for political science and eliminate the American Community Survey:

• House Passes CJS Spending Bill: Amendments Eliminate NSF Political Science Program and American Community Survey, Washington Update Volume 31, Issue 9, COSSA (May 14, 2012).

There are at least two ways to look at this story from National Journal's technology newsletter.

• Data, Data Everywhere, By Adam Mazmanian, Tech Daily Dose (May 16, 2012).

  It's not clear why access to 600 gazillion terabytes (or thereabouts) of free, machine-readable data covering traffic accidents, copper smelting, phytoplankton cell counts and other fascinating, everyday topics have only inspired, at last count, 85 mobile apps.

One is that government hasn't found the right incentives to attract development of applications that make use of the wealth of government data in datasets that are more easily available than ever. This explanation is probably what drove the administration to host a "data pep rally... designed to stimulate interest in translating raw data into simple, navigable apps that consumers can use on mobile devices" today.

Another is that the whole idea of relying on the private sector to make information freely useable and useful (see, for example, The Federal Government Must Reimagine Its Role As An Information Provider) is not sufficient. This free-market approach to government information suggests limiting the role of governments to that of providing raw data to developers. This approach assumes that the market will turn that raw data into useful information products.

There is, I believe, reason to be concerned about the free-market approach to government information.

One reason is that, by reducing the role of government we will not gain better or more complete access to information; we will diminish and reduce our access to information. We can see that already with the Census Bureau's cancellation of the Statistical Abstract (see The demise of the Statistical Abstract and other critical Census titles.) With this model, the government stops producing useful information packages and the private sector does its best to fill the gap and charges a lot of money to do so. That has a lot of bad side effects, though. For one thing, it puts a cost barrier between the information and users. For another, to use the Statistical Abstract example, it is not even clear that the private sector can do more than imitate the product the government produced. (See all the tables in the StatAb that contain "unpublished" data from government agencies. For example, in section 2, "Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Divorces," I count 12 tables with unpublished data; in section 4, "Education," I count 32 tables with unpublished data. [counts from the 2012 Statistical Abstract].)

But there is another alternative. We could recognize that the government does have an important role in packaging raw data into meaningful packages of statistical tables, reports, views, and end-user-ready information. This makes sense for two reasons: First, it builds on the idea that information gathered and created by the government is public information and should be easily, freely, publicly usable by the public. That means that the government, which knows this information that it gathered and created best, should create the first package or product or view of that information. This is still, mostly, the default way governments behave for lots of government information. They use everything from press releases of current economic statistics, to amazingly useful reports like the Special Studies (P-23) series from the Census Bureau, to complex web sites like that at the The Bureau of Labor Statistics. Second, it makes sense because these government-produced information products will be better than any "pep rally" to attract others (private sector, public sector, and individual users) to dig into the raw data, to analyze the data, and to develop apps.

From Secrecy News: "The laws and policies governing same-sex marriages were exhaustively surveyed in a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service."

• Same-Sex Marriages: Legal Issues, by Alison M. Smith, Congressional Research Service RL31994, (May 9, 2012) [PDF at www.fas.org].

Dr. David S.H. Rosenthal, who is Chief Scientist at LOCKSS, and Kris Carpenter Negulescu of the Internet Archive recently organized a workshop on the problems of harvesting and preserving the Web as it evolves from a collection of linked HTML documents to a programming environment whose primary language is Javascript.

David and Kris, with help from staff at the Internet Archive, put together a list of 13 problem areas already causing problems for Web preservation:

Database driven features
Complex/variable URI formats
Dynamically generated URIs
Rich, streamed media
Incremental display mechanisms
Form-filling
Multi-sourced, embedded content
Dynamic login, user-sensitive embeds
User agent adaptation
Exclusions (robots.txt, user-agent, ...)
Exclusion by design
Server-side scripts, RPCs
HTML5

Read more about this on David's blog:

• Harvesting and Preserving the Future Web, by David Rosenthal, DSHR's Blog (May 7, 2012).

For the past five years, the Georgetown Law Library and the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group have been doing doing studies on "link rot." This year, they discovered that "link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years."

• "Link Rot" and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2012 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group.
• Georgetown Law Library Finds 38 Percent of Online Documents Disappear from Web Pages Within Five Years, press release, Georgetown University (April 25, 2012).

The Chesapeake group gathers information from the web and preserves it for their users and each year they study how many of the URLs from which they originally gathered information "no longer provide access to the content that was originally selected, captured, and archived by the Chesapeake Group."

This study is particularly relevant to government information specialists because more than 90% of their sample URLs were from state governments (state.[state code].us), organizations (.org), and government (.gov) the top-level domains.

For "dot-gov" domains (URLs ending in ".gov") the studies have shown cumulative link rot of:

10% in 2008
13% in 2009
25% in 2010
31% in 2011
36% in 2012

Cumulative link rot of state government URLs (.state.__.us) were almost as bad: 10.8% in 2008 15.8% in 2009 32.1% in 2010 30.4% in 2011, and 33.8% in 2012.

The total cumulative link rot for all URLs was 37.7% in 2012. Another way of looking at this is that, of the documents the Chesapeake Project has preserved, only only 62.3% were still available at their original URL as of the 2012 study.

This year's report includes two samples of URLs. The first sample includes 579 URLs that Chesapeake captured during 2007 and 2008. They use this sample to examine how link rot changes over time.

The second sample is a new and represents the full content of the Chesapeake archive at the time the study was conducted. Using this second, broader sample the study reports a link rot rate of 25.9%.

For libraries that rely on pointing to URLs rather than preserving information in their own digital libraries, the new report from the Chesapeake Project provides sobering, factual data on the reliability of that strategy.

The General Services Administration has launched two new sites: one for federal agencies to register their social media accounts and one for users to verify if a social media account is really an official federal account.

• GSA tool lets people verify genuine federal social media accounts, By Alice Lipowicz, FCW (Apr 27, 2012).

  Federal agencies need help tracking their social media accounts, and citizens need help verifying which government accounts are authentic. Now the General Services Administration has stepped in to address both of those concerns with a new online solution.

• Verify federal U.S. government social media accounts, USA.gov

  The government uses social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to connect with people and communicate official information, so it's important to know if a social media account is really managed by the government.

  We're currently working on a tool that will let you verify if a social media account is officially managed by the U.S. government. This tool will be available soon on this page.

• Check & Register: Federal Social Media Accounts, by Justin Herman, HowTo.gov (Apr. 26, 2012).

  GSA has built a federal social media registry -- a government-wide solution that gives the public a way to verify whether a social media account is official.

  It also provides a place for agencies to register their accounts centrally so they don't have to build a solution within each agency.

Gary Price points out a great new tool for getting alerts on Federal and State Government Info:

• Scout: A New Alerting Tool (Beta) for Fed/State Government Info From Sunlight Labs, by Gary Price, Infodocket (April 25, 2012).

 

• Scout.

  Scout is a free service that provides daily insight to how our laws and regulations are shaped in Washington, DC and our state capitols....

  Scout allows anyone to subscribe to customized email or text alerts on what Congress is doing around an issue or a specific bill, as well as bills in the state legislature and federal regulations.

Mike Wash, currently the chief information officer of the National Archives and Record Administration and previously the Government Printing Office's chief technical officer, is interviewed in this podcast. He speaks with the Library of Congress's Mike Ashenfelder about Wash's work at the GPO and NARA, including the creation of a new GPO digital publication system, Fedsys, and leading NARA closer to the national goal of creating permanent public access to government content.

• Mike Wash, National Archives and Record Administration, Series: Conversations about Digital Preservation, (April, 2012)
  57:57 minutes.
  download MP3.

A recent report and associated blog posts have a wealth of useful information on digital preservation of state government information:

• States of Sustainability: A Review of State Projects funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), by Christopher A. Lee, (March 2012).
• States of Sustainability: The NDIIPP Preserving State Government Information Initiative, by Butch Lazorchak, The Signal Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, (April 2nd, 2012).
• Preserving Digital Legislative Information: Wrapping Up the MTSA Project, by Butch Lazorchak, The Signal Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, (April 16th, 2012)

We've mentioned the Library of Congress's Viewshare, a free and open tool for creating interfaces for digital cultural heritage collections, here before. Here is an interview with Jennifer Brancato digital archivist at East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, about her use of Viewshare to create a fascinating view of a set of digitized funeral records.

• Better Know a Viewshare: Exploring Texas Funeral Records, by Trevor Owens, The Signal Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, (April 18th, 2012).

Jennifer says:

I love Viewshare! It is free and easy to use. No programming skills are required and there is no need to involve your IT staff. I think this tool is something any institution -- small, large, museum, library, archive -- could easily and quickly put into action. Viewshare made it possible to accomplish our goal of presenting our digital collections in a more dynamic and visual way.

Here's a short, informative interview with Vicky Reich, director of the LOCKSS programme at Stanford University Libraries, and Randy Kiefer, executive director of the CLOCKSS archive:

• Digital preservation matters, Research Information (April/May 2012).

Excerpts:

VR: If you don’t preserve digital content then it won’t exist. Most of society’s culture and commercial assets are now digital but, generally, the move from print to electronic is about access rather than preservation....

VR: The web as a publishing platform enables many things never envisaged in the print world. The web started with a document model, then evolved to include dynamic elements, such as advertisements and embedded videos. But first with AJAX and now with HTML5, the web is becoming a networked operating system inside the browser. It is no longer enough to parse content collected from the web to find the links and follow them; the content must be executed to discover the web resources from which it is composed. Some of these resources are web services, such as Google Maps. Preserving executable content and the services on which it depends is a major challenge that the LOCKSS programme is working to address.

One of my favorite publications is Lapham's Quarterly, "a magazine of history and ideas," created by Lewis H. Lapham, formerly editor of Harper's Magazine. The magazine's blog, Lapham's Quarterly: Roundtable has a fun article on back-of-book indexing.

• Back Matter, by Moira Donovan, Lapham's Quarterly: Roundtable (April 13, 2012).

Donovan quickly outlines the history of indexing books. Then she makes this parallel to search engines and the internet and how they affect how we view information:

The power of the index was twofold. Not only was it a microcosm of a more protracted body of knowledge, but it could also be intensely political. With the formalization of the profession in the eighteenth century, an author's choice of indexer required a discerning judge of human nature. One nineteenth century writer warned of books "whose indexes, compiled by unscrupulous enemies, have been their ruin." Although an index considered 'good' by the standards of the profession could never express any overtly political bent, a shadow of authorship is inevitably cast. In the same way that modern search engines filter content, the index shows that the organization of information, no matter how straightforward, is never neutral. Information retrieval may not change the content of the information sought, but it certainly affects how that information is viewed, shifting physical and psychological perceptions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced this week that when it creates software or contracts with others to create software, it will share the code with the public at no charge. "We use open-source software, and we do so because it helps us fulfill our mission."

• The CFPB’s source code policy: open and shared, By Matthew Burton, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau blog (Apr 6 2012).

  We're sharing our code for a few reasons:

  First, it is the right thing to do: the Bureau will use public dollars to create the source code, so the public should have access to that creation.

  Second, it gives the public a window into how a government agency conducts its business. Our job is to protect consumers and to regulate financial institutions, and every citizen deserves to know exactly how we perform those missions.

  Third, code sharing makes our products better. By letting the development community propose modifications , our software will become more stable, more secure, and more powerful with less time and expense from our team. Sharing our code positions us to maintain a technological pace that would otherwise be impossible for a government agency.

U.S. Navy’s History Program "At Risk", by William Burr, Unredacted: The National Security Archive blog (April 13, 2012).

According to the report, released through a FOIA request by the National Security Archive, historical records and artifacts are housed in a precarious environment, and invaluable archival material is in danger. The History and Heritage Command's leadership has not been using due diligence to ensure that naval commands and fleets are creating historical records of their ongoing activities. Moreover, according to the IG report, the Navy's professional historians, archivists, curators, and librarians who work for the history command feel "disenfranchised" because of "their marginalization in decision processes and lack of advancement opportunity."

Robert Groves, the Director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, resigned today.

• Looking Forward, Looking Back, Robert Groves, Director's Blog (April 10, 2012).

  I have had the honor of directing the Census Bureau since July of 2009. As was reported today, I was offered the provost position at Georgetown University and have accepted it, with a start date of late August, 2012.

• Census Bureau director resigns, By Andrew Lapin, Government Executive (April 10, 2012).

  The Census Bureau has not immediately announced a replacement.