Some of you may remember Dr. Joel Weintraub's census talk at the 2012 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, CA -- complete w a fire alarm and sobbing librarians. Because of that immensely interesting talk, My colleague Kris Kasianovitz and I decided to invite Dr Weintraub to speak about the history of the US census at Stanford University. He came last week (Monday 2/4/13) and gave an amazingly informative talk on the United States Decennial Census Manuscripts aka Enumerators' Notebooks, the history of the Census Questions, including controversial questions, undercounts, and truthfulness. For more on Dr Weintraub's census work see his 1940 census site and his collaborative work with Steve Morse.

The talk was co-sponsored by Stanford University Library, SUL Government Information Librarians and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS).

Enjoy!

The Government Printing Office has joined the social networking site Pinterest that "lets you organize and share all the beautiful things."

• pinterest.com/usgpo/.

The GPO press release says:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) expands its social media presence by joining Pinterest. Connecting people through 'things' they find interesting is the founding principle of Pinterest and a natural fit with GPO's core mission of Keeping America Informed on the three branches of the Federal Government. GPO will use Pinterest to share historic photos, videos, products, and Government publications with the public. Pinterest joins GPO's other social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Government Book Talk blog.

Link to GPO's Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/usgpo/

"GPO is constantly evolving and keeping up-to-date on public trends and the popular ways to access and share information," said Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks. "GPO's expansion of social media supports our mission of Keeping America Informed. Joining Pinterest is one more way GPO can engage the public and continue to serve as the official link between the Federal Government and public."

This was a mostly quiet week at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Quiet enough that I would not normally put out an activity report, but there are two notable things I wanted to share with you.

ORPHANS - THE FINAL FOUR?

The adoption of Florida is pending. That leaves us with just four states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

CALIFORNIA'S DATABASE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS

As most government information specialists are aware, local government documents are probably the most elusive of all. California has taken a step to try to make their local government documents easier to find and use. I (and any other user of the State Agency Databases wiki) was made aware of this by Joel Rane, the volunteer for California. Here is his annotation of California's new resource:

California Local Government Documents - An extensive database of local government documents across the state; if a document is not online, a scanned copy is hosted by the Berkeley IGS. Includes access to local municipal codes and charters, searchable by city; documents related to land use and development issues, searchable by jurisdiction, type of planning document and year (at both county and city level); and budgets and financial reports for Bay Area cities, county budgets and annual financial reports, and annual reports from county grand juries, all searchable by keyword. A tremendous resource.

Hats off to UC Berkeley for putting this together and thanks to Joel Rane for making the rest of us aware of this new resource for one state's local documents.

Some of you may remember that we nominated Aaron Swartz for the ALA Madison award a few weeks ago and asked folks to write in letters of support to the Washington Office. Last week, there was a memorial for Aaron in Washington DC -- Rick Perlstein covered it well for The Nation, "Aaron Swartz's DC Memorial: Radical Brings Bipartisanship to Washington". Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, the 2012 Madison award honoree(!) and one of a number of Congressional members who attended Aaron's memorial, caught wind of the campaign to nominate Aaron for the Madison Award and sent in her own letter in support. She kindly allowed us to post the letter here.

Gregorio Sablan (D), rep of the Northern Mariana Islands has introduced into the House H.R.429, Northern Mariana Islands Federal Depository Library Act of 2013 which would amend Section 1905 of title 44 to permit the Delegate from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to designate Federal depository libraries.

The National Academy Of Public Administration has released its report on the Government Printing Office.

• Rebooting The Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed in the Digital Age, A Report by a Panel of the National Academy Of Public Administration for the U.S. Congress, Congressional Research Service, and the Government Printing Office. National Academy Of Public Administration, Washington, DC (January 2013).

  Congress mandated that the National Academy of Public Administration (the Academy) conduct a broad operational review of GPO. The Academy formed a five-member Panel of Fellows to conduct a ten-month study of the agency’s current role, its operations, and its future direction.

The report contains 27 finding and 15 recommendations. Depository libraries will be particularly interested in three findings:

• III-3: Preservation of the Legacy (Tangible) Government Collection
• III-4: Preservation of the Digital Government Collection
• III-5: Government Information Dissemination and Access

The report repeats many of the tropes about the digital government information that have become familiar over the years. Some of these bear repeating and others are more questionable.

Perhaps the most troubling suggestion in the report is GPO should consider "cost recovery" for access to FDsys:

Now may be the time for GPO to revisit charging the public for access to FDsys content. The Academy convened a forum of experts on printing and publishing where this topic was discussed extensively. Participants noted that technologies for online payments have progressed to the point that they cost very little to administer. Also, the public is becoming accustomed to paying fees for government services that used to be free (such as admittance to National Parks). Rather than charge a publication price, GPO could explore charging a small user fee to recoup the cost of providing access to government information on FDsys, or allowing users to view documents for free, and charging for document downloads. Forum participants also discussed the possibility of GPO exploring opportunities for repackaging files and content in different ways and making them available for sale to the public.

This model (as the report notes) was tried before with GPO Access and failed. We would argue that it failed not because the "technologies of online payments" were inadequate at the time, but because attempting to charge fees for information that was also available without fees was a fundamentally flawed approach. (We have written about this issue many times. See for example: Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program and Privatization of GPO, Defunding of FDsys, and the Future of the FDLP.)

There is much more in the report and it deserves careful scrutiny.

Access to Court Opinions Expands. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (January 31, 2013).

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

The Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the Federal court system, approved national implementation of the project with the Government Printing Office, Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free access to publications from all three branches of federal government via the Internet. The pilot project pulls opinions nightly from courts’ Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems and sends them to the GPO, where they are processed and posted on the FDsys website. The functionality to transfer opinions to FDsys is included in the latest release of CM/ECF which is now available to all courts. Twenty-nine courts participated in the original pilot, and now, all courts may opt to participate in the program.

Access to judicial opinions through FDsys allows the Judiciary to make its work more easily available to the public. Collections are divided into appellate, district or bankruptcy court opinions and are text-searchable across opinions and across courts. FDsys also permits embedded animation and audio.

Presently, more than 600,000 opinions dating back to 2004 are available. Opinions from the pilot are already one of the most heavily used collections on FDsys, with millions of retrievals each month.

This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases:

NEW VOLUNTEERS AND A STATE HAND-OFF

This week we officially welcome three new volunteers to our project:

• Susan Paterson (University of British Columbia) - District of Columbia
• Siu Min Yu (Rice University) - Maryland
• Flora Shrode (Utah State University) - Utah

Flora is taking over the management of the Utah page from Susanne Caro who recently took over the Montana page.

Susanne had been one of two volunteers with two state pages. I (Daniel Cornwall) am the other. In addition to my home state of Alaska, I also do my best to maintain the Arizona page. If you live in Arizona and would like to take over the page, let me know.

ORPHANS: THE FINAL FIVE

With the successful adoption of Maryland and the District of Columbia, we now have five states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

OHIO (Audrey Hall)

Empowerment through Education county highlights] Summary of program activities for each county. Additional keyword searching available.

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

The following non-database resources were added to the South Dakota section of our "not databases" page:

• Adoption Resources in South Dakota
• South Dakota Resource Directory for the Elderly

A LOOK AT THE VOLUNTEERS BEHIND THE STATE AGENCY DATABASES PROJECT

We recently surveyed our project volunteers about who they were, where they worked and where they updated their pages from. About 70% of our volunteers responded to the survey. Here are the demographic findings:

What best describes your current job position?

Librarian - 77.8%
Paraprofessional - 8.3%
Library Student - 2.8%
Other (please specify) - 11.1%

Responses from the "other" category included:

Circulation Manager
Assistant Director with background in Government Documents
Library consultant
Archivist with a library degree working in a library

--

What best describes your current workplace?

Academic Library - 63.9%
Special Library - 2.8%
State Library - 33.3%

Other options were offered on the survey, but only the three categories above had non-zero responses.

--

Are you allowed work time to edit your page?

Yes - 88.9%
No - 11.1%

The project coordinator is one of the people whose currrent job description is too far outside the project work to justify using work time to maintain his pages or write these reports. In full disclosure, I have not asked to.

--

Where do you edit your page?

Work - 58.3%
Home - 11.1%
Home and Work - 30.6%

--

Do you live in the state of the page you edit? (If you have more than one state, choose "other" and note which state you live in.)

Yes - 77.1%
No - 17.1%
Other (please specify) - 5.7%

In addition to the demographic questions above, volunteers were asked several narrative questions. We'll be bringing those questions and selected responses to you over the next three weeks.

Steve Schultze, Princeton University, Associate Director at the Center for Information Technology Policy, gave this talk as part of a series of 3-minute lightning talks on transparency hosted on Capitol Hill by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, a project of the Sunlight Foundation.

• My Bill to #OpenPACER in memory of #aaronsw -- Open for Comment and Available on Github, by Steve Schultze. Freedom to Tinker (February 1, 2013). (video and transcript with links and downloadable slides).

  ...the courts offer electronic records through the PACER web site, which charges for search results, docket lists, and documents.

  ...PACER is making a killing, with $120 million dollars in revenue for 2012. Even with a highly inefficient system architecture, they only manage to spend about $20 million dollars on PACER expenses per year. Where does the rest of the money go? They spend it on other stuff.

  This is illegal. In 1992, Congress passed a law saying that the courts could charge only to recoup costs. Ten years later, Congress strengthened that law and said that it expected the courts to move to a free system. PACER fees have increased 42% since then.

  ...Open PACER is a bill that, once and for all, mandates that the courts provide free access to our public record. The bill is open for comment at openpacer.org. It is written in GPO-compliant Legislative XML, which anyone can edit and submit for incorporation via a tool called github.

The "workaround" is to clear your browser's cache, cookies, and history. The Census Bureau also suggests viewing the site in either Internet Explorer 9 or 8. The Bureau and its contractor should be really, really embarrassed about this and fix it quickly.

• Workaround Solution for Redesigned American Factfinder Browser Issues. FDLP Desktop (31 January 2013).

  The U.S. Census Bureau has brought to our attention that the newly redesigned American FactFinder does not render properly in some Web browsers. Users have reported issues with various versions of Mozilla Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer (IE).

  The Census Bureau is investigating the matter. In the meantime, their recommendation is to clear the browser's cache, cookies, and history as a temporary solution. In addition, they recommend viewing the site in either IE 9 or 8. If issues are encountered, the following instructions are specific to IE 8 and up.

  1. Click on the "Tools" icon.
  2. Select "Internet Options".
  3. Under the "General" tab, click on the "Delete" button under "Browsing history".
  4. Select the following:
     • Temporary Internet files
     • Cookies
     • History
  5. Deselect:
     • "Preserve Favorites website data"
  6. Click on the "Delete" button.

  To clear the browser cache, cookies, and history for other browsers, visit the American FactFinder FAQ or check the browser's Web site for browser-specific instructions.

  Be advised that clearing your browser's cache, cookies, and history may impact saved sessions for other Web services.