It's 2010; time to gear up for another year of advocating for digital govt information. It's my pleasure to introduce Tom Moritz to the guest blogger podium for January, 2010 (Tom's bio here). Tom's a jedi library advocate with too much experience to list here. Take it away Tom!

And our many thanks to Sonnet Brown, our December 2009 guest blogger! As always, let us know if you'd like to take a turn as guest blogger. It's fun and easy :-)

Tom Moritz has been a librarian and advocate for knowledge equity since 1975. He has broad experience from the local to the international level in public and private sector libraries of all types. He has performed extensive contract work for US EPA, NOAA, The National Academies and the University of Washington, has won grants from the Mellon Foundation, the US National Science Foundation and The Sloan Foundation (in conjunction with the Internet Archive). He has been successful in winning substantial support from private donors. In 2005, he served as Visiting Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He is a regular participant in professional peer review activities including advisory boards and grant reviewing and is editor and author of many publications and presentations.

Ok gentle readers, we've got a new guest blogger for December. Welcome to the podium Sonnet Brown, head of the Federal Documents Department at the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans. She's a 2010 ALA Emerging Leader so watch out! Check out her bio for more. Take it away Sonnet!

Sonnet Brown is head of the Federal Documents Department at the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans. She was selected to be a 2010 American Library Association Emerging Leader.

Sonnet received her M.L.I.S. (2008) from Texas Woman’s University and her B.A. in Classical Studies (2004) from Loyola University New Orleans. When she isn’t working with documents, she enjoys writing and exploring Second Life. She is currently a columnist with Legal Information Alert and will also be writing the Tech Watch column with Rebecca Blakeley. She is also working with UNO’s Digital Initiatives Librarian Keith Pickett to digitize U.S. Hearings from the 1960s-1980s. She promotes the project and the rest of her collection through the department’s Facebook, Twitter, and Blog.

As a member of Gen Y, Sonnet looks forward to a long career ahead of her. After all, she believes that “librarians are like vampires…they live forever!”

Thanks for having me as FGI September Blogger of the Month! I am signing off now and returning to my regular gig at the SLA Govt Info Blog but will remain a faithful reader. I will also keep spreading the news about the great work that FDLP librarians do. A fine example just came up on GOVDOC-L: the newly updated Federal Websites for Tribal Libraries and Tribal College Libraries, created by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. Wonderful!

Happy October,
Peggy

Hi all. We've got a treat for you as Peggy Garvin takes another turn at the podium. Peggy, the blogger in chief at the SLA Government Information Division blog, was BOTM in August, 2006 and liked it so much she decided to do it again (hear that other guest bloggers?!). So without further ado, take it away Peggy.

Happy August, fine readers. Please welcome Aimee and James Quinn to the podium for the month of August. Aimee and James are librarians and activists who hale from the fine state of New Mexico (full bio here). Take it away James and Aimee.

Also, many thanks to Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, our BOTM for July, 2009. Check out Jeanne's posts here:

Cheers to Jeanne and now take it away James and Aimee!

James and Aimée Quinn are both librarians who share a love of cats, books, movies, coffee, dogs, exploring new places (especially libraries) and technology although James is much more tech savvy than Aimée. Both work with the Humane Societies to fight for animal rights. Aimée is a librarian at the University of New Mexico, Parish Memorial Library. She served on a variety of ALA committees, task forces, discussion groups, etc. related to government information, permanent public access to government information, rare & valuable government publications (yes they really do exist) and government literacy. Aimée is an assistant editor of the international journal, Government Information Quarterly.

After working in academic law libraries for over 25 years, James, along with Matthew Wright, co-founded the Library Underground. He now works with Chris Zammarelli (another of our guest bloggers!) to maintain the site. James is an anti-nuke/environmental activist who also serves as the list owner for an international anti-nuclear discussion group. These activities coupled with associating with librarians makes him a dangerous peacenik.

Happy July everyone! This month we've got Jeanne Kramer-Smyth with us. Among other things, Jeanne is a blogger at Spellbound Blog, a really interesting blog about the intersection of archives, digital humanities, cultural heritage institutions and technology -- here's her full biography. Take it away Jeanne!

We also want to thank Molly and Lori from the Internet Archive for being our guests for the month of June. They turned us on to a bunch of cool Archive-it digital collections hosted at the archive. We really hope they'll continue to keep us posted on the Archive's happenings. Thanks again Molly and Lori!!

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is the author of Spellbound Blog. A recent graduate of the University of Maryland's iSchool Archives, Records and Information Management program, Jeanne comes to the field of Archival Science with over 18 years of experience designing relational databases, creating custom database software and participating in web based software development. She has brought her great interest in information visualization, structured data and helping individuals find what they are looking for to her studies, personal research and writing. She is interested in the ways that access to government information can be improved -- especially ways that free structured government data can be reused, analyzed and visualized.

Jeanne currently holds a position as a Metadata Analyst and SEO Coordinator within the Interactive Technology division of Discovery Corporation. She divides her time between doing search engine optimization (SEO) for Discovery's network websites and working on taxonomies and controlled vocabularies.

I was away for the weekend and so didn't get a chance to post this. Be that as it may, it is with great pleasure that I bring up to the guest podium Molly Bragg, Lori Donovan and the Internet Archive's Archive-It team (full bio). They'll be highlighting some of their collections as well as anything else that piques their interest for the month of June. Take it away Molly, Lori et al!

Molly Bragg and Lori Donovan work at the Internet Archive's Archive-It web archiving service. Archive-it is used by over 100 libraries and organizations around the globe to harvest, preserve and access born digital content. The service began in 2005 as a way for memory institutions who lacked technical infrastructure to archive born digital information. Partners include U.S. State Archives, State Libraries, University Libraries, National libraries, federal institutions, museums, public libraries, non-profit organizations and individual researchers. The Archive-It website provides access to over 850 collections, over 900 million URLs and 81 tb of data all full text searchable and available to the public. For more information contact the Archive-It team at archive-it at archive.org.

Please welcome to the podium Justin Grimes, our guest blogger (or BOTM in FGI parlance) for May, 2009. Justin comes to us from the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and the Center for Information Policy and E-Government (Justin's full bio is here). Justin blogs over at justinmgrimes.com and you can also follow him on twitter (@justgrimes).

We're really looking forward to plumbing the depths of Justin's expertise and interests in e-govt and information policy. Take it away Justin!

Justin Grimes is a PhD student in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and a Research Associate at the Center for Information Policy and E-Government. He holds a MLS degree from the University of Maryland as well as a BS in Integrated Science and Technology from Marshall University. His research interests include e-government, information policy, and information design.

A laurel and hardy handshake goes out to Brian Williams, our guest blogger for March, 2009. See the list of conversations that Brian started below.

We don't have a guest blogger this month, but we'll return next month for sure. If you're interested in being a guest blogger, please contact us at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. That is all.