This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases:

NEW VOLUNTEERS AND A STATE HAND-OFF

This week we officially welcome three new volunteers to our project:

• Susan Paterson (University of British Columbia) - District of Columbia
• Siu Min Yu (Rice University) - Maryland
• Flora Shrode (Utah State University) - Utah

Flora is taking over the management of the Utah page from Susanne Caro who recently took over the Montana page.

Susanne had been one of two volunteers with two state pages. I (Daniel Cornwall) am the other. In addition to my home state of Alaska, I also do my best to maintain the Arizona page. If you live in Arizona and would like to take over the page, let me know.

ORPHANS: THE FINAL FIVE

With the successful adoption of Maryland and the District of Columbia, we now have five states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

OHIO (Audrey Hall)

Empowerment through Education county highlights] Summary of program activities for each county. Additional keyword searching available.

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

The following non-database resources were added to the South Dakota section of our "not databases" page:

• Adoption Resources in South Dakota
• South Dakota Resource Directory for the Elderly

A LOOK AT THE VOLUNTEERS BEHIND THE STATE AGENCY DATABASES PROJECT

We recently surveyed our project volunteers about who they were, where they worked and where they updated their pages from. About 70% of our volunteers responded to the survey. Here are the demographic findings:

What best describes your current job position?

Librarian - 77.8%
Paraprofessional - 8.3%
Library Student - 2.8%
Other (please specify) - 11.1%

Responses from the "other" category included:

Circulation Manager
Assistant Director with background in Government Documents
Library consultant
Archivist with a library degree working in a library

--

What best describes your current workplace?

Academic Library - 63.9%
Special Library - 2.8%
State Library - 33.3%

Other options were offered on the survey, but only the three categories above had non-zero responses.

--

Are you allowed work time to edit your page?

Yes - 88.9%
No - 11.1%

The project coordinator is one of the people whose currrent job description is too far outside the project work to justify using work time to maintain his pages or write these reports. In full disclosure, I have not asked to.

--

Where do you edit your page?

Work - 58.3%
Home - 11.1%
Home and Work - 30.6%

--

Do you live in the state of the page you edit? (If you have more than one state, choose "other" and note which state you live in.)

Yes - 77.1%
No - 17.1%
Other (please specify) - 5.7%

In addition to the demographic questions above, volunteers were asked several narrative questions. We'll be bringing those questions and selected responses to you over the next three weeks.

Steve Schultze, Princeton University, Associate Director at the Center for Information Technology Policy, gave this talk as part of a series of 3-minute lightning talks on transparency hosted on Capitol Hill by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, a project of the Sunlight Foundation.

• My Bill to #OpenPACER in memory of #aaronsw -- Open for Comment and Available on Github, by Steve Schultze. Freedom to Tinker (February 1, 2013). (video and transcript with links and downloadable slides).

  ...the courts offer electronic records through the PACER web site, which charges for search results, docket lists, and documents.

  ...PACER is making a killing, with $120 million dollars in revenue for 2012. Even with a highly inefficient system architecture, they only manage to spend about $20 million dollars on PACER expenses per year. Where does the rest of the money go? They spend it on other stuff.

  This is illegal. In 1992, Congress passed a law saying that the courts could charge only to recoup costs. Ten years later, Congress strengthened that law and said that it expected the courts to move to a free system. PACER fees have increased 42% since then.

  ...Open PACER is a bill that, once and for all, mandates that the courts provide free access to our public record. The bill is open for comment at openpacer.org. It is written in GPO-compliant Legislative XML, which anyone can edit and submit for incorporation via a tool called github.

The "workaround" is to clear your browser's cache, cookies, and history. The Census Bureau also suggests viewing the site in either Internet Explorer 9 or 8. The Bureau and its contractor should be really, really embarrassed about this and fix it quickly.

• Workaround Solution for Redesigned American Factfinder Browser Issues. FDLP Desktop (31 January 2013).

  The U.S. Census Bureau has brought to our attention that the newly redesigned American FactFinder does not render properly in some Web browsers. Users have reported issues with various versions of Mozilla Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer (IE).

  The Census Bureau is investigating the matter. In the meantime, their recommendation is to clear the browser's cache, cookies, and history as a temporary solution. In addition, they recommend viewing the site in either IE 9 or 8. If issues are encountered, the following instructions are specific to IE 8 and up.

  1. Click on the "Tools" icon.
  2. Select "Internet Options".
  3. Under the "General" tab, click on the "Delete" button under "Browsing history".
  4. Select the following:
     • Temporary Internet files
     • Cookies
     • History
  5. Deselect:
     • "Preserve Favorites website data"
  6. Click on the "Delete" button.

  To clear the browser cache, cookies, and history for other browsers, visit the American FactFinder FAQ or check the browser's Web site for browser-specific instructions.

  Be advised that clearing your browser's cache, cookies, and history may impact saved sessions for other Web services.

   

I just noticed this post over at Wired Magazine's Threat Level blog, Activists Flood Government Agencies With FOIA Requests in Tribute to Aaron Swartz. Last week, Muckrock, the site that helps journalists, lawyers, and the public submit FOIA requests for a small fee ($20 for 5 requests), waived their fees in tribute to the transparency fights of computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz who committed suicide a few weeks ago. I hope Muckrock will post all of the documents received via these requests. According to Muckrock:

MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26.

Swartz, among MuckRock's first users and supporters, used public records laws to attempt to find out more about why the federal government was pursuing Internet piracy charges against him. He also filed requests related to alleged WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning and the U.S. Mint, among many other topics.

In a Jan. 18 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking about Swartz’s prosecution, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) asked, “was the prosecution of Mr. Swartz in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act?”

As a way to honor Swartz’s legacy and to further his transparency work, MuckRock encouraged users to file requests in his honor free of charge. The requests cover all corners of government, ranging from the Department of Homeland Security’s documents relating to the high profile Tar Sands Blockade to the city payroll for Everett, Mass.

Updates on the requests will be available at the File for Aaron profile page. Swartz’s own requests can be found here.

I'm really glad Muckrock is doing this, and also happy to see that they post all requests and FOIA'd documents on their site. I've added Muckrock to our Archive-it FOIA collection.

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but in trying to retrieve a report from the Education Resources Information Clearinghouse (ERIC), I received this "error" message:

Dear ERIC Community,

We have currently disabled access to many ERIC full-text PDFs due to the discovery of personally identifiable information in some documents. A team is in place to check each PDF to see if it contains personally identifiable information. Due to the quality of many of the documents, a large portion of the search has to be done by hand. This will take several weeks, but our primary concern is to protect the privacy of individuals.

To minimize the burden on our users, we will prioritize searching the PDFs that users request. If you would like to request a PDF to be returned online, please fill out this form, which requires only the document’s ERIC record number and your email address. Full-text PDFs will be returned on a rolling basis. We will be posting the list of newly released documents here.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and want to thank you for bearing with us through this unexpected delay.

The ERIC Team

It seems like a responsible enough message and they are trying to assist researchers who need documents. It would have been nice if the message had a date stamp so we could see how long it will take ERIC to rectify this situation.

I'm also wondering about the status of ERIC fiche collections. Wonder if we'll see withdrawal requests from ERIC and whether that would wind up highlighting the personal information they're trying to withdraw.

This week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases:

ORPHANS: AND THEN THERE WERE SIX

With the pending adoption of the District of Columbia, we now have six states up for adoption:

• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

ARKANSAS (April Sheppard)

Child Care Provider Search - Search for licensed child care providers and ABC and Headstart facilities by name, facility number, location, child age, hours and voucher acceptance.

UTAH (Susanne Caro)

American Indian Collection - Part of a database of Utah publications, this section includes information on the Ute (Uintah and Ouray), Dine' (Navajo), Paiute, Confederated Tribes of Goshute, Northwestern Band of Shoshone, Skull Valley Goshutes, Ute Mountain Ute (White Mesa).

NEW RESOURCES ON THE "NOT DATABASES" PAGE

As mentioned in some previous activity reports, our project volunteers occasionally find useful materials out of scope for our main project pages. Usually this is either a state produced resource that is not a searchable database or it is a searchable database not produced by a state agency.

These resources live on our Not Databases page. This week Janice Wilson, our Connecticut added Veterans.ct.gov, which contains information about CT and federal services and benefits available to veterans.

I had the distinct honor to be invited to speak at the University of Washington Libraries on thursday, January 24, 2013. I want to thank Cass Hartnett, the Northwest Government Information Network, the UW Information School, the UW Association of Library and Information Science Students (ALISS), and the University of Washington Libraries for allowing me the opportunity to talk publicly about the future of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). the audio for my talk can be downloaded from the UW Library digital archive or streamed below from the Internet Archive.

that is all.

We’re at the very beginning of the digital era where tools, policies, best practices, etc are all in flux. In many ways, we’re at the age of new metaphors needed to describe what it is that we as librarians do on a daily basis.

I'd like to talk about the underlying historical ideals of the FDLP, discuss how those ideals have been under fire from both within and without the library community and argue that those ideals applied to today's new information metaphors give us the best chance at access to and long-term preservation and assurance of govt information.

Then I’ll talk about some of the digital collection strategies that I’ve found to be successful and then conclude with a bit about collaboration and to-dos.

Twitter announced last Friday that all 100 members of the Senate as well as 90% (398 members) of the House of Representatives are on Twitter. In the 112th Congress only 44% of Senators were on Twitter. House use of Twitter has also increased from 35% to 90% (398 representatives). Twitter also announced that Michelle Obama will be tweeting from @FLOTUS about her life as First Lady.

• An entire Senate on Twitter. Really. By Joseph Marks, NextGov (January 23, 2013).

  Raw numbers can be misleading where Twitter is concerned. The federal tech sphere alone is littered with rarely used Twitter accounts. The Senate’s story seems different, though.

  A quick review of about 30 senators’ handles revealed no slackers. All of the senators -- or usually their staffs, of course -- are tweeting at least several times a week but, more importantly, a solid proportion of those tweets include content that would actually be valuable to people following the senators’ activities, such as links to legislation the lawmaker introduced, notes on committee work and alerts about media appearances.

• 100 Senators and the 57th Inauguration, Twitter Blog (January 18, 2013).
• US Senate: A public list by Twitter Government: "Principal Accounts of Members of the U.S. Senate (a mix of campaign and government accounts)."
• US House: A public list by Twitter Government: "Principal Accounts of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives (mix of campaign/govt accounts)".

The Center for Effective Government, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, was formed as OMB Watch in 1983 to lift the veil of secrecy shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In January 2013, OMB Watch became the Center for Effective Government.

• Center for Effective Government (website).
• Government Matters (newsletter)
• The Fine Print (blog)
• RSS feeds
• twitter.com/foreffectivegov
• facebook.com/foreffectivegov

New volunteers and ongoing work marked this week at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

NEW PROJECT VOLUNTEERS

Our project welcomed four new volunteers this week:

April Sheppard - Arkansas
Stephanie Martin - Indiana
Mary Sauers - Nebraska (A hand off from departing volunteer Beth Goble.)
Ed Sperr - South Carolina

In other volunteer news, Susanne Caro adopted the Montana page. She also maintains the Utah page.

SEVEN REMAINING ORPHANS

With our additional volunteers, our list of orphan pages now stands at seven:

District of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Kansas
Maryland
Minnesota
Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a full listing of activity over the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

ARKANSAS (April Sheppard)

National Register of Historic Places (AR) - Searchable by county, city, name and description.

SOUTH CAROLINA (Ed Sperr)

Most Wanted - is a listing with photographs of the most wanted, absconded criminals.

TEXAS (Ann Ellis)

Texas Higher Education Data - This site contains information organized for policymakers, parents and students, media, institutions and researchers, and educators. It includes forms, maps, charts, graphs and reports. Texas legislative issues related to higher education are included.

WYOMING (Karen Kitchens)

License Types and Fees - Search for current Wyoming fishing and hunting license fees by type (species) and resident or nonresident. Wyoming Game and Fish Department.