Home » post » GODORT update

Our mission

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.

GODORT update

Now I’m at the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) update. On the agenda are Cheryl Nyberg, University of Washington law library talking about the Washington State Digital Archive, Matt Brosius from OECD, and Judy Russell, soon-to-be-retiring GPO superintendent of documents.

Cheryl mentioned that the information in the state archive is “open source” in that all content is not tied to individual software and so can be preserved and shifted into new and/or future systems. Much is available including purchase of “certified” copies of records in cases where records/documents are needed for legal proceedings. Nice touch! Unfortunately, they’re using a plugin called Djvu. The plugin is necessary to view the documents. It’s basically a PDF viewer from a private company. I recently ran into this plugin for while using the Spectator Project, a 19th century digital newspaper project, and was dismayed (as was the user I was helping) because the plugin could not be installed on the public computer that she was using. I would HIGHLY recommend that future archives projects — not to mention current ones like the WA state archive — should give users multiple ways to access documents. Access is the key right!!

Washington State library is actively harvesting WA state documents, storing them locally and linking them to the WA State library catalog. Shouldn’t EVERY state library be doing that?!?!

Also in the works are a plan to connect the digital archive and state publications. This will happen by the 4th quarter of 2007 hopefully.

Next up is Matt Brosius:

Matt will talk about what it took to get Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) into the digital realm with their e-books.

OECD publishes @ 150 book titles/year plus 20 serials and 40 statistical databases. They’re mandated to recover their costs of publishing. The process of shifting to online started in 1998, launched December, 1999. They decided on an e-journal infrastructure that could recoup costs. All books are in PDF format. Metadata for almost all chapters of almost all books (abstracts by authors) make access very good. Matt noted that the OECD search engine is not very good. They’re moving into XML in order to be more flexible in the future. Online access has risen every year. Bibliographic information is listed on every page so that users will know where they are. They also have several thousand excel spreadsheets of data, and will soon have citation management integrated into the SourceOECD system, videos and podcasting. Matt mentioned GAPMINDER, but I haven’t had a chance to look into that further. If anyone does, please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Next up is Judy Russell:

Bruce James retired on 1/3/07. there’s no news on a replacement for Public Printer. GPO is in waiting mode in terms of appropriations. The shift to a democratic majority means that things are in a holding pattern. It will probably take a month or more for the Senate appropriations com to get together. GPO has been talking with the administrative office of the US courts to provide access to US courts’ PACER system (public access to court electronic records). It is expected that this will happen through the FDLP (I didn’t get the whole gist here because the mic was not very close to Judy. Sorry!). Expectation is that this will go through by 3rd quarter (sept?) 2007. Also a project going on with NTIS to give access to their bibliographic records. Depositories will be able to download at no charge their documents connected to these records. There will be a beta phase of this project. Send an email to epruszko@gpo.gov if you’re interested in being in the beta rollout.

Legacy digitization project is continuing as well. Web discovery project is going forward. GPO has 2 vendors crawling, identifying and targeting documents on the EPA Web site. 3 crawls were done. A huge amount of content was harvested and now GPO will be looking through to deal with it. A large amount of individual assessment, cataloging and purl creation will need to be done before these documents will be available.

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


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives