grants.gov, "a central storehouse for information on over 1,000 grant programs and provides access to approximately $500 billion in annual awards," started a blog back in August. It is available at at the commercial, (not dot-gov) site: http://grants-gov.blogspot.com/

I found both the grants.gov site and the blog a bit confusing. It was not clear to me who the audience was. Maybe I should have spent more time evaluating it. But this site has had its problems being user friendly. See Should Grants.gov Be Abolished? and Grants.gov is Windows-only.

Smithsonian: Blogs is a good place to find all the blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds from the Smithsonian Institution.

Did you know that The Smithsonian Institution Libraries is participating in Library Thing? I didn't until I read it on the Smithsonian Libraries blog. (SIL Joins LibraryThing, Oct 1, 2008.) It is one of a dozen SI blogs.

And the podcasts look great! The Folkways Collection, Global Sound Live Vodcast Series, and more!

And, there are almost two dozen RSS feeds in addition to the feeds from the blogs and podcasts!

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics now has a page of "Latest Numbers" RSS feeds. There are feeds available for: BLS Principal Federal Economic Indicators, Business Employment Dynamics, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), Consumer Price Index, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Employment Cost Trends, Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Productivity and Costs, Mass Layoff Statistics, Import/Export Price Indexes, Producer Price Indexes, and regional statistics.

Two new blogs appeared on the USA.gov Blogs from the U.S. Government page recently:

• Arctic Chronicles, by Jessica Robertson, Public Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey. She will be documenting her journey to the Arctic as she accompanies scientists on an expedition to map the seafloor.
• The Energy Savers Blog, which aims to provide "a place for consumers to learn about and discuss energy efficiency and renewable technologies at home, on the road, and in the workplace."

While the Energy Savers Blog is apparently provided by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), it is hosted on a .com website. That creates a variety of problems for long-term access and preservation. (See more examples of government information on .com sites here.)

Both blogs have RSS feeds.

One of my favorite web sites is The Memory Hole, which exists "to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known." It has been offline for a while, but is back with a new URL. This is a project of one person, the dedicated Russ Kick, winner of the Project on Government Oversight’s “Beyond the Headlines” Award 2005. Check out his first new post.

We have updated the FGI blogroll with the new addresses and items from the Memory Hole feed appear again in the FGI aggregator of feeds and in the category of Blogs from organizations of interest to FGI.

MultiMedia RSS Feeds - State of California State of California.

From the Air Resources Board to the Legislative Analysts Office, to New Opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit, lots of RSS feeds!

I had not seen this before, but it looks like a model for open government. The District of Columbia provides free access to "city operational data" (e.g., Demographics, Health Care, Environment, Human Services, Education, Economic Development, Public Safety) in a variety of formats including RSS (Atom) feeds, XML, CSV, and ESRI Shapefiles. The feeds are drawn from more than 150 data sets, ranging from the all- important crime reports to pothole complaints.

DC Data Catalog and Data Feeds

Wow, today is a convergence day of holidays! Not only do we have May Day, International Workers' Day, and Loyalty Day, but now there's also RSS Day! RSS (aka "rich site summary") is the little XML file that could; that is, RSS can help librarians and readers in general collect and read the stuff in which they're interested. See the video below for a really good, straighforward description of RSS. And don't forget to register for the GODORT preconference at ALA Annual '08 entitled, Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community. FGI will be there with Jim Jacobs presenting about RSS and James Jacobs moderating and presenting about del.icio.us.

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves.

One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement.

If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource "with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page".

OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-)

I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too!

The Law Library of Congress has announced that they now offer RSS feeds and e-mail delivery of LLOC information.  Library feeds consist of a headline, brief summary, and a link that leads back to the Library's website for more information.  Available feeds cover Law Library News and Events, Law Library Webcasts, Legal Research Reports, and the Global Legal Monitor.  go to this page on their website to add the RSS feeds or to sign up for email notification.

A map a day keeps the doctor away right? Well now you can browse through history with National Geographic's daily maps site of historical news events and milestones. And they've even got an RSS feed.

Your feed reader getting too full? Thunderbird slowing down because of too many feeds? Then do what I do: tag it to your del.icio.us account with a tag like "daily." Because each tag has an RSS feed, you can simply add the feed to your Firefox toolbar as a live bookmark. Just click on the orange icon ( in your location bar (upper right). That's how I read GOVDOC-L too!

Will Johnson notes in a post to the OpenHouse Project mailing list that RSS feeds from Members of Congress are almost impossible to find and,  "I'm pretty sure that some of the offices aren't aware that their CMS [Content Management System] is generating a feed."  To help out he has set up an interesting remix/mashup called PolFeeds, which grabs those feeds as well as those from candidates.  He describes it this way:

PolFeeds. n. A website that brings you virtually all of the RSS feeds offered by Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and the White House together in one place.

In his post he describes a bit about how flexible this is:

If you want info from a particular politician, you can just go to "name.polfeeds.com".  For example, barackobama.polfeeds.com will give you the content for all of Obama's feeds, Twitters, YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos, everything.  Of course, you can limit your view to particular types of items. If you want to see only blog posts by House members, you can go to polfeeds.com/house/blog.

Appending "/rss" onto the end of any url will give you the rss feed for the items on that page.  You can also subscribe to the feeds individually or create a custom feed.  For example, you could put together videos from Pelosi with blog posts from McCain and press releases from Boehner.

Very cool!

Some stuff for us map junkies:

The World Freedom Atlas uses Flash to mashup data from the Quality of Government Institute with maps. 

GeoRSS is a new standard for encoding location information into RSS feeds.   

You can get prebuilt GeoRSS feeds or build them yourself in ShapeWiki.

The Census Bureau offers over 40 RSS feeds on general topics (e.g., "Latest Releases," "Tip Sheets") and specific topics ("Aging Population," "Poverty") as well as pocasts (check out "Statistical Abstract 2006")!

• RSS Feeds, U.S. Bureau of the Census.

RSS feeds allow you to easily keep track of content that may be updated frequently.

The feeds provide headlines, link back to the source document, and provide brief description information.

Today our friends at the Sunlight Foundation made the following announcement:

Sunlight would like to invite you to test out our new search engine of federal documents called LOUIS -- the Library Of Unified Information Sources -- at http://www.louisdb.org. There's a screencast available on its homepage to help familiarize you with the site.

LOUIS makes it easy to search from a collection of over 300,000 documents from seven sets of federal documents dating back to 2001:

• the Congressional Record,
• congressional bills and resolutions,
• congressional reports,
• congressional hearings,
• GAO reports,
• presidential documents
• Federal Register.

LOUIS, which updates its document depository daily, even allows you to set up a "standing query" as an RSS feed, to get alerts every time Congress or the executive branch takes action that references the subject of the initial query.

In addition, LOUIS delivers these federal documents in an electronic, printable, text format for easier use. LOUIS also lets you access all the pages of a debate in the Congressional Record printer-friendly Web page.

We've also made available the LOUIS API -- Web access
methods that any computer programmer can use to build their own application using the database and the computer code that powers LOUIS.

Test it out - we encourage your feedback.
Thanks,
Gabriela

--
Gabriela Schneider
Communications Director
The Sunlight Foundation
1818 N Street NW, Suite 410
Washington, DC 20036
P: 202/742-1520 ext 236
F: 202/742-1524
gschneider@sunlightfoundation.com
www.sunlightfoundation.com

After briefly exploring this tool, I think it will be highly useful. And it's a great example of the type of creative uses of government information that is endangered if the government decides to go to a tiered model of information access where fully usable data is only available to those who can pay and agree not to release non-drm'd version of info to the public and free access is restricted to some sort of page at a time display.

Since the Future Digital System was designed to be "policy neutral, the reuse friendly policies of today could be converted into the crippled drm'd policy of tomorrow with a few buttons.

Don't let that happen. Work for the locally built, Internet accessible depository system of the future. Study our digital library technologies page, check out LOCKSS or just start tagging documents of value.