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Tag Clouds applied to GPO/FDLP

Building on James R’s post, I ran two major GPO/Council documents through Tag Crowd:

The difference in tag clouds is both striking and disturbing:

Knowledge will forever govern


Note that out of these 50 tags, four of the largest are: Government Information Public Library. Readers of FGI will know we like this outcome. It shows that Council was at least partly listening to the user community when they drafted the final version of the vision paper.

Contrast that tag cloud with the one for Strategic Vision for the 21st Century:

Note that out of the 50 tags shown her, five of the largest are: Government Digital Documents GPO Business. Library is barely detectable, but at least it is larger than the tag for “public”, at least in my view.

The Strategic Plan is the document that GPO brought to Congress as the vision of the GPO Management. TagCrowd’s admitted simple visualization analysis appears to show that the Strategic Plan is very far away from the vision of the documents community. This should worry us. Or at least lead to a discussion of visualization tools!

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