Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre
Submitted by shrillczar on Thu, 2007-02-08 13:50.
I am in a class about e-government this semester. In our second meeting, our professor showed us the excellent eGovernment Resource Centre. This website from the government of Victoria, Australia has compiled a large directory of e-government websites and news links. You can browse by topical groupings or just browse through an A to Z index. In addition, the site offers RSS feeds that provide such information as new resources for government web designers and site updates as they happen. I find the Daily Digest feed particularly useful, and I will occasionally link to stories I've found there, such as the one about ExpectMore.gov in my previous post.
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e-govt meme at ALA
Thanks for the post Chris. This is a meme that I heard several times during various GODORT meetings at ALA Midwinter a few weeks ago. And each time, it was mentioned with some amount of consternation. Evidently (and I haven't checked on this so this is purely an anecdote!), libraries are beginning to be seen as e-govt resources. Good you say, but the worry comes in when librarians are more and more expected to help their patrons fill out the govt forms that they've downloaded from library public computers. In other words, librarians are being seen as defacto public information officers. I'm not sure if this will be good for libraries -- perhaps a public that receives this kind of assistance will be more likely to support library bond measures? -- or bad for libraries -- will they receive funding for additional librarians in order to support this added function?
Another aspect of e-govt that would be good to keep in mind is the shift from instantiation to transaction in govt information. That is, what happens to our democratic tradition when govt information is no longer the evidence of the govt's actions but instead the receipts of its workings with citizens?
I just thought I'd mention these aspects of e-govt. Chris, if you get a chance to mention this to your class, I'd be really interested in how the discussion goes.
e-govt burden on librarians
We have had this discussion in class, actually. I think it is safe to say that more and more people are seeing libraries as their e-gov resources and that many librarians are struggling to cope with this new demand. From what my professor and many of my classmates have said, public librarians are finding that patrons expect them to be able to explain how to find and to fill out government forms. The government agencies are not offering librarians training, and libraries frequently don't have the budget to get the training for their staff.
Library Journal had an article on this topic in August. I'll link to it here and also put up a post on it on the front page.
Bertot, John Carlo, et al. "Drafted: I Want You to Deliver E-Government." Library Journal 131.14 (15 Aug. 2006): pp.34-39.
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