As part of their activities in the last ALA annual meeting, the GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force (SLDTF) approved the creation of a fifty-state registry of state government produced databases on the new GODORT wiki. SLDTF believes that there will be great value to librarians and end users alike in having the "invisible web" of state produced databases together in one place.

You can find the home page for this project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Right now, only Alaska has a developed page which you can find at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Alaska as an example for what SLDTF hopes the other state pages will look like.

Once this registry is complete, it will have a number of uses, not the least of which will be showing that documents librarians are tech savvy people who know where the information is buried even when Google can't find it.

BUT, they need your help to make this happen. There are four ways you can help with this project:

1) Go to the wiki and start adding any databases you are familar with. Just click on the "edit" tab. Registering with the GODORT wiki is recommended but not required.
2) Agree to be a "documents specialist" for a particular state and post your contact information so people who are not comfortable with editing wikis can e-mail updates to you.
3) Recruit state agency department webmasters, other state employees or other subject specialists to contribute to the database listing.
4) As you become aware of a new state (or local) government database, e-mail Daniel Cornwall, project coordinator (dan DOT cornwall AT Alaska DOT gov) or the documents specialist for that state if you are not comfortable with editing a wiki.

To me, this seems like a perfect collaboration project for the documents community. You WILL benefit from learning where your state's databases are and posting them to this annotated registry. The rest of us will benefit from having similar databases available from the fifty states and learning about your state's unique content.

So, help ALA GODORT and yourselves by contributing to this project!

If you adopt a state's page, would you leave a comment here so people can see how the registry is coming along?

Insanely Useful Websites from the Sunlight Foundation.

Web sites presenting different kinds of political, civic, and legislative information are distributed throughout the internet. While broad Web searches can be effective, they can also be time consuming and lead to sites of questionable reliability. With the debut of Sunlight's Insanely Useful Web sites page (on the second tab of the main Sunlight Foundation page) we're developing a collection of value-added government information databases on the Web.
political Web-resources, by Paul Blumenthal and John Wonderlich

How is the web and Web 2.0 changing politics and political discourse? Hear from lots of folks in this collection of interviews:

Interviews with Bloggers, , Politicos, and Netizens on Politics 2.0, Mother Jones June 20, 2007.

And a dissenting opinion:

Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype. And PressThink asks whether the printing press progressives at Mother Jones have any kind of grip.

Interviews at the Mother Jones site with:

Morra Aarons Contributing editor of BlogHer.com), David All (GOP Tech Consultant), Jerome Armstrong (MyDD.com), Floyd Brown Citizens United), John Byrne (Editor and founder of Rawstory.com), Michael Cornfield (Democracy Online Project), Howard Dean (DNC Chair), Colin Delany (Epolitics.com), Phil de Vellis (Creator of the "Hillary 1984" video, former strategist for Blue State Digital), Esther Dyson (Original Digerati), Bob Garfield (Advertising Age, On the Media), Julie Barko Germany (Institute For Politics, Democracy & The Internet), Jane Hamsher (Blogger, Firedoglake.com), Henry Jenkins (M.I.T. Professor), Nicholas Lemann (Columbia Journalism School Dean) , Lawrence Lessig (Culture-Sharing Guru), Peter Leyden (New Politics Institute Director), Nicco Mele (Echoditto President), Grover Norquist (Americans For Tax Reform President), Eli Pariser (Director of MoveOn), Chris Rabb (Afro-Netizen.com), Andrew Rasiej (Techpresident.com), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit.com), Kevin Rose (Digg founder), Micah Sifry (Personal Democracy Forum Cofounder), Ben Smith (Politico.com), Joe Trippi, Dean 2004 Campaign Manager, Michael Turk (Bush 2004 E-Campaign Director), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder), Bill Wasik (Creator of Flash Mobs), David Weinberger (Dean 2004 Internet Advise).

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) needs public support and is exploring ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to do so. "There are more than 500 groups on Facebook that are associated with NASA, but not officially...."

• Next NASA mission: Twitter and Facebook, by Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, Jun 27, 2007.

"Now NASA is trying to reach out to the technology industry to help market itself to a generation of kids growing up online and who seem less inclined to study science or math."

A big part of the agency's sales pitch to third-party partners is access to enormous sets of data from various sources, including the Hubble Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope, which resides a million miles from Earth. Google, for example, has teamed with NASA, which provides it data from Mars for the Google Earth mapping tool.

Mike Linksvayer, chief technology officer of the nonprofit Creative Commons, suggested that scientists and other planetary societies use its alternative license for copyrights to disseminate photos and other works so that more of the public has access to it. People can access NASA photos and videos that are posted to the Web because all government works are in the public domain.

"I encourage NASA to open up its data via APIs so that it can be used in mashups," Linksvayer said.

Examples

• AMES Research Center blog
• NASA Deputy Administrator's Blog (at spaceref.com)
• CosmosCode (CosmosCode will be like a SourceForge for space software... allowing third parties to contribute open-source code to NASA projects...)

The Open House Project (OHP) has started a new thread called CRS Tuesdays. It's not quite Mardi Gras, but throw in a little gumbo, and this thread is just as fun :-)

This week, OHP has posted PDFs of the following:

• Iraq: Post-Saddam Governance and Security (updated June 20, 2007)
• Post-War Iraq: Foreign Contributions to Training, Peacekeeping, and Reconstruction
• Foreign Science and Engineering Presence in U.S. Institutions and the Labor Force
• Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE): A Comparison of Selected Legislation in the 110th Congress
• And in honor of the 10 year anniversary of Internet free speech, there's Internet Search Engines: Copyright’s “Fair Use” in Reproduction and Public Display Rights

And as an aside, the OHP is really doing good work. Their site is worth a daily, or at least weekly, visit. We've added them to the FGI aggregator In Other News so make sure you visit. Just in the last week, they've posted about CRS reports, Politics is Architecture, George Miller taps Web2.0, and House Leg Branch Appropriations Review. Good stuff indeed!

During this past spring, I had the pleasure to teach a Government Information Sources course at San Jose State University.  The course was taught solely online via BlackBoard, which is a great tool for many basic class maintenance tasks, such as grading and posting assignments, however because it is proprietary, BlackBoard creates a silo of course data that doesn't readily support open and participatory modes of communication that are associated with Web2.0.  Subsequently, I decided to use BlackBoard for the basic functions (grading & assignments) and use Web 2.0 tools to support course interaction, communication, and content creation.  What follows is a review of the tools I used in the course and how the class used them. I've also included the links to the resources.

Social Bookmarking

Connotea is an excellent tagging tool because it does some things other social bookmarking tools don't. First, it supports SFX & openurls, which means it integrates with your library's link resolver.  It also has a group feature that allows collecting, browsing and viewing multiple users' library of tagged bookmarks at once.  Lastly, each user or group can create a wiki (called a 'community page') that is attached to the user or group's  bookmarks.   Other major social bookmarking tools don't have these features and, collectively, they are definitely a big sell for someone teaching a course.

In class, I used the Connotea wiki extensively as the class syllabus and weekly course notes.  I also tagged course materials with a unique week tag ( e.g. libr221-wk1) so students could filter on each week's materials easily. Additionally, as part of a class assignment, each student was required to bookmark and annotate a number of government information resources based on certain criteria.  Since Connotea provides a RSS feed for each account, a feed for each student could be set up in  my Google Reader account, so I could easily monitor (and grade) their tagging.

• Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/
• Course Group on Connotea (libr221): http://www.connotea.org/group/libr221
• Course wiki on Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/wiki/Group:libr221

Mapping

MapBuilder is a cool mapping too that uses both Google & Yahoo maps APIs. Users can create and share a map, add locations to the map, and annotate those locations with textual descriptions or images.  As part of the first assignment, students were asked to map their location along with their local FDLP libraries.  Google maps now offers a similar product called 'My maps', which offers many of the same features. 

• MapBuilder: http://www.mapbuilder.net/ 
• Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/ (Google MyMaps now offers most of the functionality of MapBuilder minus the collaborative piece.)

Video

I created a course introduction with a very inexpensive webcam and added it to my YouTube account. Additionally, I used Camtasia to create screen casts of government information resources or lectures and shared these with the class by uploading them to my web site.  I found this to be a very easy and effective means of one-way communication with the class.

For augmenting existing course material or for finding interesting 'retro' education resources, the Prelinger Archive, a public domain collection of over 60,000 ephemera videos (government & corporate PSA from the 50s, etc.), is a great teaching resource. I tried to select material that corresponded with the class topic, but sometimes chose material for just levity value. For a sampling of the
titles I used in the course, check out  The Powers of Congress, Japanese Relocation, and  Meet Your Federal Government.  When time permitted, I would actually download the videos from the Internet Archive and then upload them back into YouTube. The benefit of getting it in YouTube was to take advantage of their superior video compression and the provided code that nicely embeds the videos in a course web page.

• My YouTube account: http://www.youtube.com/user/jt14den
• Prelinger Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Google Apps

Google Groups, a mail list service, provides a nice web interface and archive to the basic listserv. I created a google group for the class primarily because the email and discussion features in BlackBoard have big usability issues. A nice added feature in Google Groups is that it allows you to add web pages to the group, which is great for adding course information or a syllabus.

Google Documents and Spreadsheets is a browser based productivity suite that also allows for document sharing and collaboration.  In the course, we used this site primarily for the final class paper.  I let students submit their papers in whatever format they wanted (all students chose Word). I then uploaded, graded and shared my comments with them in Google Docs.  This allowed me to provide in-line comments and feed back on their papers in a convenient way. 

• Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/
• Google Documents & Spreadsheets: http://docs.google.com
  

Feed Aggregator

I used Planet Venus  to aggregate multiple blogs or feeds into one interface. In our class instance of Planet Venus -- called GovInfo Planet -- we pulled in other govinfo blogs (FGI, DocuTicker, etc.) and related news along with our own course blog entries and Connotea lagging.  This is a nice approach if you want to aggregate a number of information sources for a course. It also supports filters.

• Planet Venus: http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ (requires server
  installation)
• GovInfo Planet: http://www.romanuslonginus.com/venus/govinfo/

IM

Meebo is a popular free web-based multi-protocol chat service. It also provides nice chat widgets that can be embedded into a web page.  for the course, I embedded a meebome chat widget into the SJSU faculty page and on the course syllabus page in BlackBoard.  This allows access for those students who don't have an IM account on one of the services.

• Meebo: http://wwwl.meebo.com/
• Info on meebome chat widget: http://www.meebome.com/learnmore.html

Easy Forms and Polls

Wufoo makes it very easy to produce and distribute webforms. I used it to poll the class a several times during the semester. It is very convenient since you can embed the form in a web page (or blog entry) and have the results pop into Wufoo.

• Wufoo: http://wufoo.com/

Social Software

Fantasy Congress takes the very popular Fantasy Football game and applies it to politics.  Users can select teams of members of congress and join a 'league'.  The application also allows users to trade members.  In my course, I required students to select a team and join the course league. The great aspect of this application is that it pulls in information on current legislation.  Users can rate bills and explore educational information about how Congress works.  However, this application didn't really take off with the class (or the teacher).  I think it is because there is a big difference between trying to assess and select the 'best athlete" from selecting politicians.  For one, I bet most people know their representatives and a few big names, but beyond that most members of congress are unknown.  Secondly, there is a bit of a cringe factor applying the sports analogy to politics.  Maybe it comes
too close to the truth about perceived cynical aspects of politics. 

• Fantasy Congress: http://www.fantasycongress.com/
  

-- Tim Dennis

The National Security Archives at George Washington University is making the CIA "family jewels" documents available as PDFs. "The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.
The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into five smaller files for easier download."

• The CIA's Family Jewels. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, Posted - June 21, 2007, Updated - June 26, 2007, 1 p.m.

The documents are also available at the CIA website, but I have not been able to find them available except in a one-page-at-a-time image viewer application. There is a link on the CIA FOIA homepage, or you can find the same link by searching "family jewels" or the document number "0001451843."

For an example of press coverage of the documents, see CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds "Assassination Plots, Domestic Spying Cited", By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus Washington Post, June 27, 2007; Page A01.

Taking on the challenges of academic publishing in the age of Web 3.0, Michael Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for the National Academies, describes what he calls "Authority 3.0".

• The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, [subscription required] by Michael Jensen, The Chronicle of Higher Education "The Chronicle Review" Volume 53, Issue 41, Page B6 (June 15, 2007). Also available for a few days without subscripion

What he describes is very relevant to government information. He says that the old models we've used in the past to regulate, authenticate, and authorize information don't work in a world of digital information abundance. Publishers (and I would include government agencies in this assessment) need to work with "repositories" and allow the public "to interact with material."

I also don't know whether many, or most, scholarly publishers will be able to adapt to the challenge. But I think that those who completely lock their material behind subscription walls risk marginalizing themselves over the long term. They simply won't be counted in the new authority measures. They need to cooperate with some of the new search sites and online repositories, share their data with outside computing systems. They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

As GPO pushes forward with it's Digital Future System and as the well connected (Internet-wise) Congress moves away from print and towards an exclusively online government information world, they might want to consider this new report published by the Communications Workers of America:

Speed Matters: A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States
http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/sm_report.pdf

According to this report:

The median download speed for the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 61 mbps, or 30 times faster than the U.S. The U.S. also trails South Korea at 45 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, Sweden at 18 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps. The median upload speed from the Speedmatters.org test was just 371 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or too transmit large files such as medical records.

Most people who went to Speedmatters.org to take the speed test used either a DSL connection or cable modem. Very few people with dial-up took the test because it took too long. According to surveys, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of Americans still connect to the Internet with a dial-up connection. So the median speeds in this report are actually higher than if dial-up Internet users had chosen to participate in the survey. In other words, even these dismal statistics paint a rosier picture than the reality.

The report was compiled by people visiting a speed test site and providing their zip codes, so it isn't truly a random sample. Still makes for interesting reading for broadband advocates.

And it should make interesting reading for policymakers who desire to eliminate print. And for people interested in constructing a geographically distributed system of electronic federal publications which could be more easily accessed over urban networks than all users dragging every publication from Washington.

As episode 3 of the FGI podcast starts to go into production, we've opened a new poll asking your opinion about the two podcasts we've completed so far. The first episode was very scripted and the second episode more free form. Did you like either, both, neither? Let us know.

And if you're in a commenting mood, please leave a comment here or on the poll page letting us know how we can improve the podcast.

If you haven't heard our podcast yet, please go to our podcast page and check them out.