No doubt folks have seen at least 1 of the growing video remixes of Hitler in the bunker. Well here's a new one from Critical Commons that highlights digital scholarship, open courseware, and fair use. Nicely done.

Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

The official YouTube channel of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO): youtube.com/user/usgao.

Twitter feed for: reports and testimony.

Twitter feed for: Legal Decisions and Opinions.

more:

GAO Joins YouTube, Twitter, Congress Daily, "Tech Daily Dose," July 7, 2009.

www.youtube.com/USNationalArchives

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Kate.

Last week, we posted a note about the government Youtube channel, youtube.com/usgovernment. Today, the American Historical Association describes the playlist section of the site. (Ask not what YouTube can do for you..., By Elisabeth Grant, AHA Today, May 26, 2009).

These channels bring together videos on a particular topic from different agencies. For example, the Health and Nutrition channel has videos from the CDC, the Senate, the State Department, and the FDA.

This is a very nice and appropriate service and we like that the government is using popular sites like Youtube to reach Americans with its information.

But we also know that a short-term service is not the same as long-term preservation. Preservation of multimedia is still a big issue. When videos are hosted only on .com sites, it is not always clear that the material can be easily identified and downloaded. (The YouTube Terms of Service says, in part, "You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission.")

The proprietary formats of streaming videos can make it more complex to preserve them in an open format that will guarantee their long-term usability.

Some videos may have been created under contracts that allow the content to be copyrighted or may contain "poison pill" copyright content that makes it difficult or impossible to legally preserve or reuse the whole video.

The government has yet to develop a comprehensive policy for depositing digital government information into libraries and archives. Many Federal Depository libraries have been reluctant to accept digital content and the Government Printing Office has been actively arrogating to itself the job of being the sole repository of government information. This is dangerous because every digital depository is vulnerable to technological, social, budgetary, and economic problems and the best solution is to have multiple repositories.

A digital Federal Depository Library program could help solve many of these issues.

See also:
Citizens in the Dark? Government Information in the Digital Age. SAA 2008 and our library of articles.

Steve Grove at CitizenTube, has a posting about the federal government's use of YouTube:

• The U.S. Government Comes to YouTube (May 21, 2009)

Now, there are dozens of official federal YouTube channels where you can access footage from NASA, the State Department, the FBI, the CDC, and more.

...The U.S. Government channel is located at http://youtube.com/usgovernment, a nifty hub that links off to dozens of federal government channels on YouTube, from the Social Security Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency, with others to be added in the coming months.

I wonder how much government information we would lose if YouTube failed. Are agencies that rely on YouTube as a channel of communication keeping copies of the videos they post there? Would they make them available through another channel? What if FDLP libraries had copies?

• YouTube Is Doomed, by Benjamin Wayne, Business Insider: Silicon Alley Insider, Apr. 9, 2009.

Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world’s greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google’s massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.

Air Force Blocking the Military's Own Video Site By Noah Shachtman, Wired, March 27, 2009.

trooptube.tv is the "online video site designed to help military families connect and keep in touch while miles apart" maintained by "Military OneSource" which is an authorized Department of Defense program for Active Duty, Guard, Reserve and their families. As Wired describes it, trooptube is the "military's taxpayer-funded, security-scrubbed, low-bandwidth-optimized video sharing site."

But now, Wired says that military bases, especially Air Force bases, are blocking TroopTube as part of a larger, Air Force-wide decision to cut off access to it.

This isn't the first time the military has sent mixed signals. See Pentagon promotes itself on YouTube, but prohibits troops from using it.

Library Of Congress On YouTube, iTunes, National Journal, TechDailyDose, March 30, 2009.

New channels on video-sharing Web site YouTube and the Apple iTunes service will allow the Library of Congress to begin sharing content from its vast video and audio collections. The channels ... will be rolled out in the coming weeks....

Congress Comes to YouTube, by Steve Grove, YouTube blog, January 12, 2009.

YouTube Teams With Congress to Show Lawmakers at Work By Miguel Helft, New York Times, January 12, 2009.

On Monday, YouTube, in collaboration with Congress, will unveil two new Web pages, one for the House and one for the Senate, where every lawmaker will be able to create a video channel on the site.

Already several members of Congress have channels on YouTube. But by creating a central hub for all senators and representatives, YouTube is hoping to encourage more members to create their own channels, not only as a place to promote their agendas but also as a forum for interacting with citizens.

The Senate Hub: youtube.com/senatehub

The House Hub youtube.com/househub

Not Your Father's Censorship, Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms, by HARRY LEWIS, The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Chronicle Review", Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B9. [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time]

Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales....

Should we feel comfortable relying almost exclusively on private companies to help us find the truth, when we cannot know what version of the truth they are showing us?...

Storing information and making it available are now service businesses, and therein lies another censorship opportunity....

U.S. copyright law is such a heavy club that it can abet censorship by parties that simply object to what people are saying about them....

Harry Lewis is a professor of computer science at Harvard University and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008).

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) now has its own channel on Youtube: youtube.com/fema and its own twitter feed: twitter.com/femainfocus. And, of course, it has a number of RSS feeds, fema.gov/help/rss.shtm.

More here:
FEMA In Focus: Where FEMA Was, Is Now, and Where FEMA Is Going, FEMA Press Release HQ-09-004, January 7, 2009.

FEMA starts channel on YouTube, By Alice Lipowicz, FCW.com, Jan 08, 2009.

The current Middle East crisis has received wide publicity via web 2.0. It is certainly a new way of reaching out to the international audience. Recently, there was an article in CNN about Israel’s attempt to influence the global public opinion through YouTube and Twitter. The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit has uploaded several videos of the crisis on YouTube. Likewise, the Israel Consulate in New York held a “Citizen’s Press Conference” on Twitter on Dec. 30, 2008. While Israel is busy in engaging the international community’s attention, Al Jazeera also has been using Twitter to spread information about the Gaza conflict. For more details, take a look at boingboing.

Check out the search demonstrations of GPO's FDsys (nee Future Digital System). GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) will "manage federal govt documents, allow them to be uploaded, accessed via the internet, included in the depository library program (italics added!), and preserved for the future." The video images are a bit fuzzy, but you can see that the basic utility of FDsys from an end-user's perspective is getting close to full functionality. I'm most interested in APIs and other tools and services for exporting large chunks of data and associated metadata for reuse, digital deposit into library repositories/LOCKSS caches etc and generally being able to expand on access, preservation and long-term sustainability. Hopefully, future video demonstrations will elaborate on those possibilities.

• part 1: simple search
• part 2: advanced search
• part 3: citation search
• part 4: boolean search
• part 5 is mentioned in part 4, but there's no video available as of 11/28/08 from GPO's youtube page.

Questions and comments should be emailed to pmo AT gpo DOT gov. Also feel free to leave comments here as well.

In September, I had the good fortune to attend a most interesting panel discussion held at UC Berkeley's Free Movement Speech Cafe (which just so happens to be in the UCB's Moffitt Library!) called Archives of Dissent. The panel was part of a week-long series of Bay Area events called The Great Rehearsal commemorating the 40th anniversary of the uprisings and worldwide upheavals of 1968, their impacts and legacies. Archives of Dissent brought together librarians, curators, oral historians, conservators, publishers, academics, and others working to prevent the loss and erasure of radical voices, events and movements of both the past and the present.

The panel included:

• Lincoln Cushing (19:35), independent librarian and Docs Populi archivist. The first 10 minutes of the presentation are images from Lincoln's collection of radical posters.
• Julie Herrada (28:20), Labadie Collection Librarian, University of Michigan, curator of a “1968? special exhibit, and good radical reference buddy. The Labadie Collection is an internationally renowned archive of social protest materials.
• Kalim Smith (41:25), UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology and folklore, researching the preservation of Native American languages threatened with extinction.
• Megan Shaw Prelinger & Rick Prelinger (50:08), Co-founders of the appropriation-friendly Prelinger Library in San Francisco

What does this have to do with government information you say? in many aspects, govt documents collections fall within the context of cultural archives, govt documents librarians by and large have the same radical political passion about govt information as professional and lay archivists, and the myriad issues and opportunities of digitization and the transformation of physical collections discussed in terms of archives parallel (and in many respects are predated by) those same opportunities and issues of govt information collections.

What were the main themes of the panel? (I'm in full Rumsfeld mode :-) ). All of the speakers had great things to say about needing willpower to build collections -- especially those of social movements that aren't necessarily well-funded -- building archives that are situated within and expound on cultural contexts, the importance of preservation, the politicization of access, DIY archivism, information ecologies, archives as battlegrounds, etc.

The most challenging for me (and therefore the most interesting) was Kalim Smith's talk. Kalim is an Anthropology PhD student at UCB. He talked passionately about extinction, loss and erasure of native languages. He surmised that the efforts to revitalize/preserve native languages might have the effect of re-colonizing them; that writing down, or archiving those languages, takes them out of the very context in which they grew and thrived. To think about this in terms of archives and libraries, the very act of preservation outside of context in which the materials were created, is potentially damaging. That's certainly a thought bomb that has reverberated in my mind.

Please take some time to watch this panel of most engaging folks. You'll be glad you did!

The U.S. Department of State has a channel on YouTube (youtube.com/statevideo and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has announced a new service they are calling "Briefing 2.0" in which you can post a video to YouTube asking the State Department a question. McCormack says:

The idea is that you would be able to ask questions of me directly by posting video on YouTube.... This should be a lot of fun. I know it's going to be fun for me. I get to hear from the press corps every single day and give them answers. This is an opportunity for me to hear directly from you and for you to hear directly from me with answers to your questions, whatever happens to be on your mind. So give it a try.

The Washington Post covers the story and the first few questions here: What's the Opposite of 'Mainstream'?, By Al Kamen, Washington Post, October 31, 2008; A17.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Kevin Taglang!