Calling all independent government observers!
Submitted by jrjacobs on Tue, 2008-05-20 13:57.
Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org -- along with folks from several other great orgs -- is organizing a non-conference in Chicago this August. He's looking for 100 delegates to meet and work on issues of making government information more accessible to more people in a variety of formats. Find out more information here.
Are there any FGI readers out there interested in going? So far, there are 3 working groups (case law, municipal govts, and copyright) but I'd love to put together a library working group. Any takers? Leave a note in the comments to let us know you're interested in going. In your comments, it'd also be good if you left your ideas about what tasks a library working group could handle. Think of this as pre-un-conference agenda setting :-)
The Internet has created a new generation of individuals and institutes that practice the time-honored tradition of observing and reporting on the activities of government. These are reporters in the sense of court reporters, not journalists, auditors as in independent investigators rather than CPAs.
The classic independent observer is the court reporter, such as Henry Wheaton and Richard Peters, two businessmen in the early days of the Republic who took it upon themselves to collect, print, and sell the decisions of courts. Indeed, it was a business spat between those two that led to the classic pronouncement by the Supreme Court on works of government:
The Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right. Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834)
The new breed of government observers span all walks of life. In addition to a vibrant commercial sector, there are increasingly a number of nonprofit, academic, and individual citizen efforts."
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library working group ideas
I am really intrigued by this!
Thinking about what libraries might be able to do, I can't help but recycle old/new ideas:
- the lostdocs group that was originally formed had members who volunteered to 'watch' an agency and discover their new publications for cataloging/archiving purposes. Perhaps if this idea were re-invigorated, folks could upload these pubs to the Internet Archive?
It seems as though a lot of efforts are focusing on the legislative and judicial branches of governments - perhaps we could identify key areas of the executive branch that might be going under the radar? (I keep thinking about environmental impact statements - Northwestern has a great collection that's going to be digitized but isn't there yet, and I'm not sure if anyone is preserving the born-digital pubcs.)
A library group could also identify additional legacy publications that haven't yet been digitized or that have been digitized and aren't that visible.
lostdocs ho!
Hi Valerie. Thanks for your thoughts. I think it'd be a great idea to reinvigorate the lostdocs group. Anyone else interested? We could use delicious in a way that Daniel suggested so that folks could tag fugitives that we could then upload to the archive and blog about. That makes 2 of us. Anyone else in?!
On a side note, I'm leading a discussion at the Intl Documents Taskforce at ALA annual meeting next month (saturday, June 28, 4-5:30) about digital collections and collaborative collection development/management (I also noticed that State and Local documents taskforce is talking about preserving state digital information). I titled the discussion, "Farmington Plan redux: Collaborative collection development beyond printing and downloading digital documents." The Farmington Plan, which lasted from 1948 - 1972, was an innovative ARL program of collaborative collection development whereby subscribing libraries would have responsibility for collecting and cataloging research materials in certain subject and/or linguistic areas and would then distribute records (in the form of cards) to the National Union Catalog. So there's obviously been a long history of collaborative collection development. Everyone is invited to those meetings and I hope lots of folks will come to discuss the state of digital collections and what we can do together to do more that any one of us could do alone.
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