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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Curating Web-Based Information

Our friend Gary Price, who produces the excellent InfoDocket and Full Text Reports, has a new presentation online about selecting and curating and preserving information on the open web.

  • Maximizing Use Of The Open Web by Gary Price, MIT Brown Bag: “Issues in Curating the Open Web at Scale” (September 20, 2016).

    Much of the web remains invisible: resources are undescribed, unindexed or simply buried — as many people rarely look past the first page of Google searches or are unavailable from traditional library resources. At the same time many traditional library databases pay little attention to quality content from credible sources accessible on the open web. How do we build collections of quality open-web resources (i.e. documents, specialty databases, and multimedia) and make them accessible to individuals and user groups when and where they need it? This talk reflects on the emerging tools for systematic programmatic curation; the legal challenges to open-web curation; long term access issues, and the historical challenges to building sustainable communities of curation.

Gary highlights some key government information resources that could benefit from library attention. These include Disaster Lit: the Resource Guide for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, and Data-Rich Reports and Documents, and historical Federal Reserve documents, and international documents.

He provides some specific tools to help librarians select and curate (see slide 11).

Micah Altman provides a nice summary of some of the points Gary made:

Micah notes that Gary makes the point that “much of the web remains invisible: Many databases and structure information sources are not indexed by Google. And although increasing amounts of structured information is indexed — most is behaviorally invisible — since the vast majority of people do not look beyond the first page of Google results.”

FDLP libraries (including, but not limited to so-called “all digital depositories”) that wish to really add value to online government information and provide real value for their communities should carefully consider Gary’s recommendations!

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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