Josh Tauberer has announced changes to his wonderful GovTrack website and service.

• We’ve made a few "tweaks" to GovTrack, by Josh Tauberer, GovTrack blog, (March 19, 2012).

  ...there are some things missing from GovTrack 2.0 that were in the old site, and if you need them you can still find them for now at http://legacy.govtrack.us, which continues to run the old site. I apologize for discontinuing some features, such as information on amendments, but with the site’s tiny budget I’m just not able to keep everything running at once...

• GovTrack.

  GovTrack helps you find the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records for the Senate and House of Representatives, information on Members of Congress, and congressional district maps.

  Much of the information shown on GovTrack is assembled in an automated way from official government websites. primarily the website THOMAS which is the official website for the status of legislation run by the Library of Congress.

Hat Tip to InfoDocket!

Slightly off topic: the editor and editorial office of Webster's New World Dictionary "seems to have vanished."

• Death of a Dictionary? Or an Abduction?, By Allan Metcalf,
  Lingua Franca blog, The Chronicle of Higher Education, (March 21, 2012).

Even in the age of so-called e-government, there are few instances when government information is truly personalized and even fewer when the government takes the initiative to make sure that information reaches individuals. In most cases, one has to know information might exist and go hunting for it. One notable exception to this is the annual statements that the Social Security Administration mails to Americans saying how much their monthly Social Security check will be when they retire. But now, according to a statement on its website, SSA will be sending Social Security Statements only to workers age 60 and older.

As Michael Hiltzik points out, this will mean less information to Americans and that will, in turn, benefit "unscrupulous investment brokers, annuities hawkers and their friends in Congress as they tried to peddle retirement deals." They love to tell us that we can't count on Social Security and the annual mailings have, for more than a decade, served as "a powerful rebuttal" to that mantra for some 150 million Americans once a year.

• Information Regarding the Social Security Statement, Social Security Administration (03/13/2012).
• An antisocial move by the Social Security Administration, By Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times (March 20, 2012).

The National Security Archive has a roundup of stories from this year's Sunshine Week:

• Sunshine Week Round-Up, by Lauren Harper, Unredacted The National Security Archive blog (March 15, 2012).

  Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of the importance of open government and freedom of information, is in full swing. Every year, the news media, nonprofits, libraries, schools, and the government debate the public’s right to know.

On March 19, OMB Watch released a new report that evaluates state and federal websites designed to ensure the accountability of public officials. The report, Upholding the Public's Trust: Key Features for Effective State Accountability Websites, examines state efforts to release public officials' integrity information online. Such transparency is crucial to guard against self-dealing and patronage. While states and the federal government have made progress in this area, more work lies ahead.

This report considers four key areas of transparency in the U.S. state and federal governments: campaign finance, lobbying, procurement, and public officials’ assets. The report describes the key features needed for effective online disclosure in these areas and highlights leading practices in the states.

• annoucnement, OMB Watch (March 19, 2012).
• Upholding the Public's Trust: Key Features for Effective State Accountability Websites, by Sean Moulton, Gavin Baker, and Charles N. O’Neill, OMB Watch, (March 2012). [pdf]

The volunteers at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases are keeping busy with link checks and new databases.

NEW VOLUNTEERS

This week our project welcomes two new volunteers - Beth L. Rowe who has taken on Rhode Island and Richard Wojtowicz who has taken on Minnesota. We're grateful to them and all of our project volunteers.

NO ORPHAN TALK THIS WEEK

Although they are listed as orphans, Maryland and Maine have tentative volunteer documents specialists. If we can get them publicly engaged with their pages, all 50 states will be covered for the first time in the project's history. An announcement will be made when this happens.

WIKI ACTIVITY

Wiki activity has jumped with our quarterly link check.

For a full list of our last week's activity, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Below are highlights of the work we've done together:

DATABASES ADDED

Arizona (Daniel Cornwall)

School of Music MIDI database - Searchable database of public domain MIDI files from the following genres - Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, International Folk and Ethnic, Colonial American, and Pop Standards. Searchable by composer name, file title, nationality, genre, tempo (fast, moderate or slow) and by keywords. Some items also have public domain sheet music.

MISSISSIPPI (Carlos A. Diaz)

Mississippi MarketMaker - This database includes a great deal of market research information by age, household type, race, income, education, foreign born and food preferences. You can also search for farmers/ranchers, fisheries, and businesses near you.

NEVADA (Kathy Edwards)

Showgirls - Drawings and photographs of Las Vegas showgirls.

Kathy added a number of databases of historical significance to the Nevada page.

NEW YORK (Michael Tatonetti)

Historic Markers - Search for historic markers in New York State. Search by county.

NORTH CAROLINA (Jennifer Davison)

North Carolina Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Data Tool - Learn about North Carolina police reported bicycle and pedestrian crashes. Information for almost 40,000 bicycle and pedestrian crashes with motor vehicles in North Carolina has been compiled to create an interactive database. Look for standard data tables for certain years or geographic areas, or create custom searches.

DATABASES REMOVED

MISSOURI (Annie Moots)

Exceedance Monitoring System - Search for E. coli and fecal coliform exceedances in waters of the State of Missouri by keyword, category, or search tag.

In honor of Sunshine Week the Sunlight Foundation has created Back to the Source: REDACTED in which they take original investigative articles and manually black out all the information that would not be known without existing transparency measures. It is worth taking a look at just how little we would know with the Freedom of Information Act and other public disclosure laws.

• Back to the Source REDACTED: The Impact of Disclosure on Public News & Knowledge, by Melanie Buck, Sunlight Foundation (March 14, 2012).

  While journalistic skill and technique are essential for writing a good investigative article, we often take it for granted that journalists have access to the information they need to write complex news stories. Without publicly available data, much of our news would not be possible. We've been looking at investigative articles as part of an ongoing series called "Back to the Source" for the last several months. Now we've decided to amp it up a bit and make redacted visuals to explicitly demonstrate how little the public would know without laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available.

The Update on February 2012 Activities of the HathiTrust reports on research being done by the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) to quantify occurrences of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors in the HathiTrust corpus. OCR is the technology that converts a scanned image to text that can be searched and analyzed. Members of the HTRC examined 256,000 non-Google digitized volumes from HathiTrust using a clever algorithm that compared OCR text to a dictionary of known words. Using a supercomputer and a set of rules that were verified by a human expert, they found that 84.9 percent of the volumes examined (217,754 of the 256,416) had one or more OCR errors and 11% of the pages (7,745,034 of the 69,297,000) had one or more errors. The average number of errors per volume was 156.

As we at FGI have argued here before, we believe that it essential to take into account OCR accuracy and error rates when digitizing paper collections. This is particularly important when digitizing books that contain statistical tables since it is harder to use current OCR technologies to accurately convert image scans to numbers than it is to convert scans to text. It is also harder to evaluate the accuracy of such conversions; you can't use a dictionary of known statistics the way you can use a dictionary of known words. (The HTRC study did not, apparently, examine accuracy of statistical table conversions.) Because of the large volume of such information in government publications, this is a very important issue as we collectively try to digitize our paper collections, evaluate their accuracy and usability, and determine how many paper copies we need to keep after digitization (see Achieving a collaborative FDLP future).

Our friend Gary Price has started a new series over at searchengineland on "incredibly useful online information resources that are most effectively searched using their own site search tools, rather than relying on general-purpose engines to surface their valuable content." This looks to be a series worth following.

At least 3 of the 4 in his first entry should be of particular interest to government information specialists: the C-SPAN Video Library, Old Maps Online, and Archive-It. Gary's comments are always useful. Did you know that, "unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable"?

• Four Seriously Cool Information Resources, by Gary Price, Search Engine Land, (March 9, 2012).

Check it out!

The volunteers at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases are keeping busy.

A NEW ORPHAN - MAINE

Maine has become our newest orphan. Outgoing volunteer Tim Schneider was kind enough to check the links on this page before he withdrew. He also updated a number of our "subject specific databases" pages as you'll see below.

We thank Tim for his work and hope someone will step forward and claim Maine.

If working with Maine interests you, check out our Volunteer Guide. If you can meet the basic responsibilities, send me an e-mail at danielcornwall@gmail.com.

WIKI ACTIVITY

Wiki activity ought to pick up this week because we are gearing up to do our quarterly check for broken links and hunt for new databases.

For a full list of our last week's activity, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Below are highlights of the work we've done together:

DATABASES ADDED

STATES

TEXAS (Ann Ellis)

Texas Sex Offender Registration Program - The database provides public access to the Department of Public Safety's sex offender registration program as required by the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Six different search categories are included. Not all offenders are available in the the database.

SUBJECT SPECIFIC PAGES

BIOGRAPHICAL DATABASES

Maine Writers Database - Searchable database of writers with a relationship to the State of Maine. The connection may be birth, residency, employment or works that are set in Maine.

HEALTH CARE PRACTIONER DATABASES

Maine - Osteopathic Physician Search - License information for osteopathic physicians, searchable by name or license number.

HISTORICAL MEDIA DATABASES

Maine - Interactive Search - Searchable database of records available in the Maine State Archives in the following collections: Photographs, Maps, Movies, Newspapers.

OFFICIAL RECORDS DATABASES

Maine - Death History Search - Database of death records from 1960 to 1996. Searchable by Last Name, First Name, Middle Name, Town of Death and date range. Results include name, date and town of death, age at death and death certificate number. Actual certificates must be ordered from the Maine State Archives.

PRISONER LOCATER DATABASES

Maine Prisoner/Probationer Search - Search for adult prisoners or probationers in the Maine Department of Corrections system. Search by name, gender, race/ethnicity, age, race and a number of physical characteristics.

STATE BLUE BOOKS

Maine - Added Main Statistics and made note that there is no official State Blue Book.