The Civic Literacy and Public Engagement Buzz
I haven't blogged for FGI in three years. They've made the blogger interface so much sexier (so why don't you volunteer next month?) since 2006, but otherwise all is familiar. And that's the feeling I get when going through the recent stream of reports about civic literacy and public engagement. Not the sexy part, but the fact that some of it is new (or newly documented), but most of it is familiar territory. Three reports discussing civic literacy and citizen engagement recently came out, all within five days of each other. Here's a quick look. Pew Internet released The Internet and Civic Engagement [PDF] on September 1. The report compares the demographics of those traditionally involved in their community affairs and politics offline with the demographics of those actively participating online. It turns out those two groups look pretty much the same until social media use is measured. That's where we find the new netizens. (The report compares groups that have internet access; the focus is on a civic divide rather than a digital divide.) The Association of Research Libraries published Public Engagement, SPEC Kit 312 on August 31. Government or political engagement is not the focus but is one of various types of academic library community outreach discussed. You have to buy the publication, but the table of contents and executive summary [PDF] are online for free and, from what I see, the Government Information Online virtual reference service is mentioned. Finally, the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services released Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills on August 28. The IMLS report [PDF] covers civic engagement as part of its broader mission "to engage libraries and museums, community stakeholders and policy makers at the national, state and local level in a concerted effort to meet the educational, economic, civic, and cultural needs of communities." The Skills Definitions section of the report identifies the scope of civic literacy as the ability to "participate effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes; exercise the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national, and global levels; and understand the local and global implications of civic decisions." Do any of these reports provide you with ideas for action, fodder for justification, or inspiration to ask new questions? Continue reading
USAsearch.gov Minutiae
Two recent changes for the US government's government search engine, USAsearch.gov:
- In the Advanced Search option, the option to limit a search to federal websites has been removed. USAsearch.gov searches both federal and state websites. An option previously available under the Advanced Search option of "Search In" allowed a researcher to specify that they were only interested in results from federal websites. The option never worked cleanly. I had dubbed it a "leaky limit" because some state website results always seeped in. Now there is no federal-only option. Fortunately, once you have your USAsearch.gov results, the agency-sort option makes it easy to view just those results coming from federal agencies.
- On the plus side of the equation, USAsearch.gov now indexes the USDA Forest Service websites that use the .fed.us domain. Any search engine can limit results to those that have a .gov or .mil domain suffix. But some federal websites are exceptions to that rule, as was the case with www.fs.fed.us. Now your searches will find that Forest Service information. I had often run a search in training classes for information about "remote sensing." It was a good way to show how many agencies were involved with this technology, and to show off the agency sort option. Now I have one more agency showing up in my results! Continue reading
Smithsonian Image Claims Challenged
Carl Malamud has challenged Smithsonian Institution restrictions on use of the images at the Smithsonian Images website. The Associated Press reported today on the action by Malamud's Public.Resource.Org site. Continue reading
C-SPAN Announces New Copyright Policy
C-SPAN issued a press release today, announcing:
...a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency-- about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks--which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.(The emphases are C-SPAN's own.) You will find a bit of background about this development on National Journal's Beltway Blogroll posting. The C-SPAN announcement is causing a stir in the blogosphere, where bloggers are wondering about the definition of "non-commercial" and whether it includes them. Any FGI insight? Continue reading
Congress Remix: OpenCongress.org Launched
The website OpenCongress.org was launched today by the Participatory Politics Foundation with help from the Sunlight Foundation. As stated on the website: "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill" and also "OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement." The site incorporates:
- Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
- News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
- Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
- Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
- Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.
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