Mr. James underestimates Congress’ willingness to spend
During his speech for the Plenary session of the Spring 2005 DLC Meeting, Mr. James acknowledged that GPO needed more funding to carry out its responsibilities, but expressed his belief that Congress was uninterested in expanding appropriations. As a new Cato Institute report explains, the reality is that the President and Congress are expanding appropriations like there is no tomorrow. According to the report, "Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years." Surely the President and Congress could be persuaded to provide a penny a month for all Americans in order for us to have full access to the information we've already paid for with our tax dollars. If you look at the Citizen's Against Government Waste's Pig book for 2005, you'll find these projects that exceed $36 Million that meet one or more of these criteria: Continue reading
Who should disseminate gov’t PR?
It bears reminding that government information comes to us in many forms. In addition to journals, reports, studies, etc; many government agencies have "public information officers" and/or contract for education campaigns. Recently the Forest Service announced a plan to outsource about a 100 FS jobs to private PR firms. The PR, tech-oriented podcast For Immediate Release has a discussion of this initiative on FIR #30 - fast forward to 36min 43sec for the Forest Service discussion. Continue reading
Is Government Information worth $0.12 to you? Write Congress
In preparing my letter for National Library Legislative Day, I came across this factoid: At a $36 Million level of funding for the Federal Depository Library Program, the program would have a per capita cost of TWELVE CENTS for each of the United States' 296,034,744 inhabitants. According to such experts as former Congressional staffer Bernadine Abbott-Hoduski, $36 Million would allow GPO to continue the current level of tangible distribution while putting their National Collection and Future Digital System in place. Isn't that worth TWELVE CENTS per person? If you agree, take some time today to write your Congressional Delegation. Information and talking points are available at the link above. Continue reading
Lessons from Canada – Good and Bad
Like the United States, Canada also has a federal depository system. We at the Alaska State Library are fortunate to be a selective Canadian documents depository. As such, we are on the Infodep (sort of a cross between FDLP-L and govdoc-l) mailing list that has a public, but dated archive. Two recent announcements from Canadian Depository Services Staff show that our Northern (or Eastern if you're in AK) neighbors do things better and worse than us. On the one hand, I think they have a better understanding of the challenges involved with preserving digital documents as shown by this quote by Gay Lepkey, Head of Documentation of Publishing and Depository Services in an April 12th posting (full e-mail available on request to dnlcornwall@alaska.net) to the public infodep list (emphasis mine):
"As for the stability of electronic publications housed on DSP servers, we can say that the DSP electronic collection has been very stable since its Continue reading
DLC Disaster Recovery / Only 4 sessions left!
Thanks to Herrick Heitman of the Washington State Library, we now have a summary of what sounds like an excellent session on Disaster Recovery for Depositories. With Herrick's contribution, there are only four sessions for which we have NO Summaries. Be the first attendee on your block to provide summaries for the following sessions: Sunday - Depository Library 101 Monday - Regionals Meeting Tuesday - FDLP Myths & Monsters Wednesday - New Depository Manual We actually only have three "contentless" session because we are pleased to offer access to Janet Scheitle's slides for Wednesday's New Depository Manual session. Finally, a hello to our new Bloglines subscribers, who now number twenty. Thanks for reading! Continue reading
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