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.