Back in January we asked people to use del.icio.us to tag a sample of 32 documents taken from the 100 EPA documents posted by the Government Printing Office (GPO) to http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.
We asked people to tag documents from 1/18/2008 through /18/2008. A spreadsheet of the results is available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pybymZBlZ80PVat2ggty2GA.
This brief article informally discusses some of our results, offers some lessons learned, and offers suggestions for future projects. Finally, a short list of articles on other research relating to tagging is presented.

1) Findings

• Number of tagged documents - 31
• Average number of people tagging a given document - 2.5
• Highest number of taggers for a document - 8, for the document "Environmental Results Under EPA Assistance Agreements"
• Average number of deduplicated tags per document - 11.25
• Number of documents with descriptions - 31, with a majority of documents having more than one human generated description.

2) Some Promising Results

While we would have liked to have seen more participation (see below under "study limitations"), these initial results are somewhat positive. There is some interest in tagging. Tagged documents tended to receive meaningful descriptions beyond what a brief bibliographic record would provide. For example, for the document "Air Sealing: Building Envelope Improvements", we have the following descriptions from five users:

* Mount Desert Spring Water was able to win a bid to provide bottled water and water coolers to the University of Maine. Mount Desert Spring Water was successful because the water coolers it provided were energy efficient and the lowest cost to the Universi - samchap

* Describes the benefits of proper air sealing for homes. EPA awards the EnergyStar when legal minimum standards are exceeded. - mkvs

* Conserving energy in your house by having it sealed correctly - bookswoman

* "Air sealing the building envelope is one of the most critical features of an energy efficient home." "25-40% of energy" "ENERGY STAR qualified homes, constructed to exceed [building] codes with air sealing, can offer a better quality product." - keyvowel

* This Energy Star news release describes ways homeowners can reduce home heating and cooling costs by implementing air sealing techniques. - tadamich

Without question, the first description is problematic, but the other four descriptions are in agreement about what this document is about AND provide more relevant information than a brief bibliographic record.

For the most part, the tags we got were also meaningful and descriptive. Staying with the document "Air Sealing", we have the following tags:

Air, air-sealing, airsealing, building-insulation, efficient, energy,
energy-efficiency, Energy-Star-Branding, energyconservation, energystar, epa, EPA-advertising, globalwarming, greenhousegases, home-building, home-building-techniques, home-construction, home-improvement, homes, hvac, indoor, leakage, money-saving, quality, sealing, ventilation

Contrast that with a brief bibliographic record that simply has title, agency, and URL. How would people know that this document is part of the EnergyStar initiative, or that it was related to home building or energy efficiency? Clearly, in this instance and in a number of other project documents, there was a clear value added.

3) Limitations of current study

Our promising results were limited by three factors, the most important was the lack of participation. We estimate that about ten people participated in our tagging project. The available research on tagging is pretty firm on stating that good social tagging requires many users. Some say 100 or so is good, others suggest higher numbers. Our numbers are clearly too low. There are also too many instances (12) when a document was tagged by a single user. This could greatly bias how a document gets tagged. Consider if the only description of "Air Sealing" had been the mistaken one about water coolers. That would have been worse than useless. But even in this instance, a user pulling up this document while searching for water coolers could have provided a more accurate description.

The low number of taggers also made it difficult to see how much tag agreement existed among the various taggers.

Another problem was self-inflicted. We forgot to instruct people on tag construction. These were our original instructions:

1) Visit http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=epapilotproject and go to a document on the list. Open the pdf file in a separate browser window.
2) In del.icio.us, tag the page for the Internet Archive record (i.e. not the PDF file) after examining the PDF file.
3) In the del.icio.us "notes" field, write a one or two sentence description of what the document is about.
4) In the tags field, please use epapilotproject, for:freegovinfo and then any tags that you feel describe this document.

del.icio.us uses a space separated tag system. In other words, a space begins a new tag. So tagging something as "air quality" results in the two tags of "air" and "quality" and not the more helpful tag of "air quality" This resulted in some of the tagging becoming meaningless. If we had asked people to put dots or dashes in multiple word tags, we would have gotten more meaningful tags. We still got some useful tags because some of our taggers were used to the del.icio.us system, but we shouldn't have assumed that everyone tagging would know how to construct multiword tags in del.icio.us. On the other hand, this problem might have been less noticeable if we had more taggers per document.

Our final problem is one we think could be avoided in future projects. That is people tagging different files with the same document title. We asked people to bookmark the Internet Archive page for a given document, which has a link to the PDF file. We specifically asked people NOT to tag the PDF file because del.icio.us doesn't populate the title field of bookmarked PDFs. But one person in our project consistently bookmarked a document's PDF file instead of the Internet Archive page and this separated that person's tagging from everyone else's and made it more difficult to compile tagging info for every document.

4) What next? Some suggestions

Our findings indicate that tagging does have potential to add value to web harvested documents that do not receive full cataloging, but for this benefit to be fully realized, there must be more taggers. When we realized we didn't have the number of taggers we wanted, we headed for the literature and found some articles
listed below under "References Consulted." They offer some interesting guidance for other document tagging efforts.

While all of the papers below talked about user motivation, I think Tim Spalding said it best in a post titled "When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing":

"Something is going on here—something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton."

The EPA documents are sort of like fluffing pillows at the local Sheraton, to me at least. My primary interest isn't environmental documents and EPA documents are not a major component of my library's depository collection. In addition our particular sample was unintentionally heavy on flyers, applications, and brochures. It could be that another agency's documents, say NASA or DoD might get more attention.

There's another angle too. In my anecdotal experience, librarians don't see web stuff as theirs, so they don't spend much processing time on it. Of if they are concerned about web documents, perhaps their administration does not. So how could we make them owners and think of web harvested materials as "their stuff" so they'll make their "documents beds"? A few suggestions follow:

1) For the EPA documents, GPO could partner with libraries that do have a strong environmental collection. Perhaps candidate libraries could be determined through item selection analysis.

2) GPO might wish to consider doing a depository survey to see what agency depositories would most like to see web-harvested. The survey could include a question asking libraries if they would tag if the desired content was harvested.

There wouldn't have to be a commitment to tag every document, but to tag some of the documents.

While GPO should continue with web harvesting no matter what, we wouldn't blame them for not moving forward with a documents tagging initiative if the depository community failed to register interest in such a project.

3) If GPO re-harvests EPA or moves on to another agency, it should consider setting up RSS feeds for newly harvested documents. Subject specialists from inside and outside the library community could take part in tagging. Again, GPO would need to start with some broadly popular agencies to have a chance of recruiting a significant number of taggers.

4) If GPO or another organization does a large scale tagging project, significant thought should go into tagging conventions. Not the vocabulary itself -- research seems to show that once an item reaches 100 tags or so, the proportion of tags stays constant. That is to say that agreed upon terms appear to predominate over idiosyncratic or spam tags (See Golder and Huberman below for details). What needs to be spelled out is how multi-word tags should be constructed -- is it air-quality, air.quality, or air_quality? They all mean the same thing, but del.icio.us and other tagging services interpret them differently. A consistent new word marker or a choice of tagging site that supported spaces inside tags will make any tagging project go smoother.

These are our thoughts. What are yours? Look at our spreadsheet. Check out the item pages on del.icio.us and read the articles below. Then let us know what you think about the future of social tagging for government documents.

References Consulted

- "HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead" by Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd, Marc Davis http://www.danah.org/papers/Hypertext2006.pdf

- The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/tags/
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/tags/tags.pdf

- "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" by Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina
http://heymann.stanford.edu/improvewebsearch.html
http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=2008-2&format=pdf&compression=&name=2008-2.pdf

- "When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing"
Thingology Blog, posted by Tim Spalding Tuesday, February 20, 2007
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-...

Bill Sleeman, chair of the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT), recently posted the minutes to the GPO / GODORT Steering Conference Call of March 12, 2008. These conference calls take place from time to time and often have news of value. The minutes can be found (may have to scroll) at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/GODORT_Chair and covered the following topics, among others:

• Request for Information for Mass Digitization Opportunities
• Status of EPA Web Harvesting
• Status of the Federal Digital System (FDSys)
• Addition of pre-1976 cataloging to the Catalog of Government Publications - in progress.
• Continued distance ed through OPAL
• Current stats on the newish Government Information Online reference service.

If I were you, I'd look over the entire set of minutes as it was all interesting. I'd like to highlight two issues, both of which cry out for the documents community to do more to support GPO in some of its efforts:

EPA Web Harvest Project

Here are the notes on this subject (full names available from minutes page):

LH & RHM: Status of EPA harvesting project: GPO worked through 300 of the documents to gather information on what it will take for GPO to provide access to harvested materials (process, workflow and staffing implications). So far: the back end automation of meta-data extraction is not ready; parameters for metadata that accompanies the files needs improvement to automate de-duping; and the rules, methods and mechanisms for harvesting need to be refined (approximately 28% of material was not in scope). Basically, it is still taking more staff time to make these available than GPO can afford. BS asked about the FGI taxonomy experiment and if GPO would be investigating the results of that effort. GPO may incorporate that information into the project as the project moves forward.

GPO's results of automated harvesting finding a lot of out of scope material and difficult automated extraction of metadata are about what I expected based on my own experience and from my reading of the literature. Whether or not GPO builds on our modest taxonomy experiment (Thanks Bill!), I think that a GPO - community/citizen collaboration will be needed to begin getting a handle on web-based agency documents. They could start simply by publishing their spidering logs and see what happens. Or perhaps they can obtain some of the $2 Billion/week currently being spent elsewhere. If GPO choose to take the mass collaboration route, I hope the documents community is in the forefront of helping them.

If you're interested in taking part in our tagging experiment, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We will be running the project through April 18, 2008. To see what has been tagged so far, please visit http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject.

OPAL Training

Here are the notes on this subject:

LC: OPAL, GPO continues to use OPAL for online training and demos. At present, technical capabilities limit presentations to slide shows, such as PowerPoint presentations. Interactive web functions will be added in the future. January call for participation in creation of tutorials netted one submission; hoping to generate interest at DLC.

The FDLP has over 1200 libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? A majority of FDLP libraries are teaching oriented academic libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION?

Hello! I know I'm not the only one who has insisted that GPO provide training between conferences for those of us who don't get out much. The documents community has a great reservoir of government information expertise. We should be actively aiding GPO in their efforts to spread that expertise.

I admit that GPO's one submission wasn't from my library. I have a pretty new docs staff that's still getting up to speed. But that can't be the case everywhere. If only 10% of FDLP libraries could step up with a program, that would still be 120 programs -- twice a week for a whole year.

Just so I can at least pretend to put my money (or staff time) where my mouth is, I will spend some time next month looking at our library's gov info information strengths, our customer needs and patron interests. And then sometime during the summer I or someone else from our library will submit a program. If you run a depository, will you commit to doing the same? Not only does GPO need our help, so do our colleagues.

FGI thanks the GODORT and GPO personnel who participated, Jill Vassilakos-Long for taking the minutes and Bill for posting them to the ALA GODORT Wiki.

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

This project got its inspiration from Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), an astronomy project which has a database of 1 million galaxies that researchers asked regular folks to classify as ellipical, clockwise spiral, or anticlockwise spiral. They aimed for and got at least 20 classifications per galaxy. If a particular galaxy was classified a certain way by 80% of users who assigned a classification to that galaxy, that classification was accepted. This "person on the street" data was compared with a small subset (50,000) of galaxies that professional astronomers had managed to classify on their own. The researchers found that there was pretty much total agreement between the professional and amateur assessments. Documents are more complex than galaxies. :-) , but if 9 out of 10 people tag an epa document as air quality, then it's probably about air quality.

So please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging and get started. And tell your friends, coworkers and especially any environmental professionals that you know to get involved. Also, if you have a network in del.icio.us, we'd appreciate you putting on a "for:[friend name]" tag for every member of your del.icio.us network.

UPDATE 1/25/2008 Forgive my overzealousness with the above suggestion to tag every person in your del.icio.us network. I should never advocate spam. BUT, if there are people in your network interested in the environment or government documents, please consider sharing our project page with them.

The more people involved with this project, the better the descriptions and the more robust the subject access provided by the tagging will be. At least that's our hope.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.
B) How many documents were tagged.
C) How many documents were described.
D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given document. We will make our compilations publicly available along with any analysis we have.

Hope to see you on del.icio.us soon making environmental documents easier to find and easier to digest!

Note: The project period was January 18, 2008 through April 18, 2008.
The participation period for this project has closed

Please see below for unique tags assigned to documents. To view the tagging directly on del.icio.us, please see http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject

Update 4/23/2008 - Data has been compiled into a spreadsheet available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pybymZBlZ80PVat2ggty2GA
Interpretation to follow.

Update 5/7/2008 - The results report is finished and may be read and commented on at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

Below is the original project announcement:
============================

Free Government Information needs your help to investigate whether social tagging of government documents is a viable idea.

We have stashed 32 documents from the Government Printing Office's EPA Web Harvesting Pilot Project in the Internet Archive. We would like as many people as possible to bookmark, tag and provide brief descriptions of all 32 of these test documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service.

If you would like to join this effort and have a del.icio.us account, please follow this proceedure:

1) Visit http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=epapilotproject and go to a document on the list. Open the pdf file in a separate browser window.
2) In del.icio.us, tag the page for the Internet Archive record (i.e. not the PDF file) after examining the PDF file.
3) In the del.icio.us "notes" field, write a one or two sentence description of what the document is about.
4) In the tags field, please use epapilotproject, for:freegovinfo and then any tags that you feel describe this document.

Please do steps 2-4 for as many documents as you can, ideally all 32.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.

B) How many documents were tagged.

C) How many documents were described.

D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given document.

We have a belief, based on projects like NASA Clickworkers, GalaxyZoo and the Library of Congress' Flickr project, that the community of government documents users can improve the findability of government information and provide a valuable adjunct to traditional cataloging. We also believe that a successful tagging environment will provide better access than GPO's newly declared brief bibliographic records process. Time will tell. Help us find out!

=====================================================

List of harvested EPA test titles for this project:

Aerosol Test Facility at Research Triangle Park - Aerosol-propellants, Environmental-health-Research, Research-Triangle-North-Carolina, Terrorism-Prevention
Air Quality Data Analysis Technical Support Document for the Proposed Interstate Air Quality Rule - air, pollution, quality, data, ambient, monitoring
Air Sealing: Building Envelope Improvements - Air, air-sealing, airsealing, building-insulation, efficient, energy, energy-efficiency, Energy-Star-Branding, energyconservation, energystar, epa, EPA-advertising, globalwarming, greenhousegases, home-building, home-building-techniques, home-construction, home-improvement, homes, hvac, indoor, leakage, money-saving, quality, sealing, ventilation
Analysis of Atmospheric Deposition of Mercury to the Savannah River Watershed - water-quality, mercury-levels, water-pollutants, Clean-Water-Act, water-testing-results
Approval of Urban Bus Retrofit/ Rebuild Equipment - Air, Air-quality, Air-toxins, buses, emissions, engine, engines, engines-retrofit-and-rebuild-equipment, matter, particulate, pollution, retrofit, transit-buses-emissions, Urban-transportation
Approval of Urban Bus Retrofit/ Rebuild Equipment (Oct 1997) - Air, buses, Clean-Air-Act, emissions, engine, engine-retrofit-rebuild-kits, engines, matter, Particulate, particulate-matter, pollution, retrofit, transportation, Urban-transit
Are You One of the Top 20? - 2005, benefits, Best-Workplaces-For-Commuters, business, commuters, commuting, companies, emission, employers, epa, flexible-scheduling, fortune500, govdocs, incentives, misspellings, private-transportation, public-transportation, reduction, telecommuting
Are You Ready to Take Advantage of the New Commercial Tax Incentives - Energy-Star, Energy-saving-tax-decuction, Commercial-buildings, Commercial-building-improvements
Arsenic Rule Benefits Analysis: an SAB Review - Arsenic, Arsenic-levels, Cancer-causing-agents, costbenefitanalysis, drinking, environment, Environmental-health-Research, exposure, exposurelevels, Freegovinfo, health, public, standards, water, Water-quality, Water-treatment-costs
Best Workplaces for Commuters Application Form - Applicationforms, applications, audience:hr, benefits, bestworkplaces, carpool, carpools, communting, commuter, commuter.benefits, commuters, commutersepa, commuting, employerincentives, employers, environment, environmental, environmentalimpactofcommuting, epa, etc., forms, impact, incentives, program, publictransportation, telecommuting, telework, transportation, vanpool, vanpools
Best Workplaces for Commuters Graphic Standards and Usage Guide - EPA-branding, Best-Workplaces-For-Commuters, Government-agencies-public-relations
Boxed In? - 2004, airpollution, cleanair, emissions, environmentally-friendly-shipping, epa, fleet, gases, global, globalwarming, govdocs, greenhouse, greenhousegases, management, money-saving, posters, shipping, smartway, transportation, vehicle, warming
Business Case for Information Services: EPA's Regional Libraries and Centers - Environmental-libraries-United-States, Environmental-libraries-United-States-Costs-and-benefits
Calculation and Use of First-Order Rate Constants for Monitored Natural Attenuation Studies - attenuation, attenuation-rates, biodegration-rates, contaminants, contamination, epa, govdocs, ground, groundwater, mna, monitored, natural, plume-concentrations, remediation, research, water
Carpool Incentive Programs: Implementing Commuter Benefits as One of the Nation's Best Workplaces - air, carpools, commuters, commuting, employers, Employers-and-employees, EPA-advertising, EPA-branding, incentives, pollution, transportation, Workplace-conditions
Chloroneb - Chloroneb, pesticides, pesticides-safety, Cotton-crop-management-and-control, ornamental-plants-and-grasses-pesticide-treatment
Community Involvement Plan for the Copper Basin Mining District Site, Polk County, Tennessee - Freegovinfo, Copper, Basin, mining, community, involvement, cleanup, environmental-cleanup, community-involvement-in-environmental-programs-details
Conformity SIP guidance - transportation-regulations-states, Conformity-state-improvement-plans-SIPs, transportation-federal-regulation, transportation, conformity, SIP, air, quality, standards
Development of a Performance-based Industrial Energy Efficiency Indicator for Automobile Assembly Plants - vehicle-assembly-plants-energy-use, assembly-plants-energy-efficiency, automobile-assembly-energy-use-studies, manufacturing-process-energy-used
Diclofop-Methyl - 2000, bioaccumulation, cancer, carcinogens, Commercial-use-of-pesticides, golf-courses, diclofop-methyl, epa, Freegovinfo, golf, govdocs, herbicides, pesticides, reregistration, toxicity, toxicology,
wild-oats-control
Diesel Retrofits: Quantifying and Using Their Benefits in SIPs and Conformity - emissions, Diesel-engines, engines, engine-rebuild-retrofit-kits, environmental-state-implementation-plans-SIPs, environmental-regulation-states environmental-regulation-federal
Difenzoquat - Difenzoquat, pesticides, wild-oats-control, barley-crop-yields, wheat-crop-yields, agriculture-crops-and-yields, difenzoquat, herbicides, pesticides
Energy Star Wins the Bid - 2006, bottled_water, efficiency, electricity, energy, energy_star, energy-efficiency, energy-efficient-water-coolers, energy.conservation, energy.efficiency, energy.star, energyconservation, energystar, environmental-benefits, epa, EPA-branding, Energy-Star, freegovinfo, govdocs, money-saving, pressreleases, purchasing, umaine, water

ENERGYSTAR Building Upgrade Manual - Energy-Star, Buildings-energy-saving-improvements, Energy-savings-plans, Energy-costs
Environmental Economics Research Strategy - Environmental-economics-influences, Behavioral-science-economic-impacts, Behavioral-science-effect-on-policy-development, Business-and-human-behavior
Environmental Results Under EPA Assistance Agreements - Tagged with (gmp), 2005, assistance.agreements, assistance, agreements, compliance, environment, environmental, environmental.protection, epa, epa.policy, epa.strategic.plan, evidence-based, funding, goals, objectives, governmentagreements, grant, grantee, grants, management, outcome-based, plan, policies, programs, regulations, research, results, results-oriented, strategic
EPA's Diesel Retrofit SIP and Conformity Guidance - emissions, Diesel-engines, engines, engine-rebuild-retrofit-kits, environmental-state-implementation-plans-SIPs, environmental-regulation-states, environmental-regulation-federal
Final Emission Standards for 2004 and Later Model Year Highway Heavy-Duty Vehicles and Engines
Guidance for Quality Assurance Project Plans - Quality, assurance, environmental, data, EPA-quality-assurance-project-plans, EPA-QA-project-plans, Organizational-quality product-quality
Guide to Technology Commercialization Assistance for EPA Small Business Innovation Research - Small-Business-Innovation-Research, Small-business-finances, small, business, innovation, technology, commercialization
Heavy-Duty Engine Emission Standards for Highway Trucks and Buses - trucks, transportation, Air-quality-history, trucking-industry, emissions, NOx-standard, Nitrogen-oxides, Global-warming greenhouse-effect
Preliminary Risk-Based Screening Approach for Air Toxics Monitoring Data Sets - Air, Air-quality, air-toxics, Air-toxins, assessments, Clean-Air-Act, data, Data-analysis, data-screening, dqo, freegovinfo, methodology, monitoring, pollution, r4-slt, risk-based, Screening, sets, toxics, Biomarkers

Recently, GPO released a sample of EPA documents that had been harvested from the EPA's website by software agents. These documents were gathered as a result of GPO's web harvesting project and a sample can now be found at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.

According to the EPA Web Harvesting page, documents are being made available in two ways:

The first method involves the creating of brief bibliographic records for the monographs and the CONSER standard record format for the serials. The majority of publications included in this sample will be made accessible through this method. Users may conduct a keyword search in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) for the phrase “EPA pilot project” to review these cataloging records. The second method of access being tested involves posting a portion of the publications from the sample to GPO Access using a browse table. At the request of the Depository Library Council, LSCM is also trying to determine if there is a mechanism that enables public access to Web harvested content while these publications are in the queue for brief bibliographic records. LSCM has posted a small portion of the sample to GPO Access using a browse table.

If you want to see the full methodology and the documents available through the browse table, then please visit http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.

Regular readers of FGI know that we have problems with brief bibliographic records with no subject access, but we definitely appreciate GPO's efforts at item description and posting the browse table.

We are also very thankful to the Depository Library Council for requesting that the public be able to access harvested content while the publications are waiting for their brief records. We hope that GPO can find a way to accomodate their request as it will open up many possibilities for getting EPA publications in a timely yet searchable manner.

So thanks for sharing!

Valerie Glenn, University of Alabama Libraries nee University of North Texas, has an article out in the current First Monday entitled, "Preserving Government and Political Information: The Web–at–Risk Project" that talks about ... wait for it ... Web harvesting!

It's based on her talk at 2007 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World. In fact the whole issue of First Monday 12(7) is dedicated to selected papers from the WebWise. Valerie's article the what and why of Web harvesting, gives some sample collections, tools, and services and talks a little about some of the overarching issues involved in Web harvesting. There's more information on the Web-at-risk wiki.

Besides Valerie's article, there are podcasts of all of the sessions from WebWise07 where you'll hear the likes of Liz Bishoff, Günter Waibel, Steve Puglia, Deanna B. Marcum etc.

And if you haven't heard of First Monday you owe it to yourself to get over to that link and check out all their past issues. Or look at Best Mondays, their most read -- or at least most accessed -- articles.