Help GovGab with Web 2.0 Comments
Our friends over at GovGab have started a conversation about web 2.0 tools at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/govgab/entry/government_in_the_web_2 we think you should join. After some introduction that I encourage you to read on their site, they say:
So, America, I pose a question to you… What do you think of government agencies using social media tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, widgets, and microblogs to reach out and give you information? Is it good? Bad? Are there ways you’d like the government to provide information that we haven’t thought of or addressed yet? After all, we’re public servants and we’re here to serve, so let us know what you want and need.So far they've got nine comments, all of them interesting. Some are from government employees explaining why their agencies aren't terribly social. Sometimes there good reasons. Read Ray's comment dated 4/11/2008, 2:05pm to see an example. The thread has also shown that the GovGab folks are really listening. A poster called lentigogirl noted that GovGab's Flickr pictures were tagged "All Rights Reserved" when photographs produced by the government should be public domain. Within a few hours, GovGab blogger Sommer came back with this response:
lentigogirl, Thanks for the heads up on the Flickr photos. I hadn't noticed the photos were labeled "all rights reserved" before. Whenever I view our photos I'm logged into the account and that piece of information isn't displayed to you on your own account. I've done some research on Flickr and they don't offer an option to set your photos for the public domain. The closest I can come for now is designating them "Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons" (for more info http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/). Also see the Flickr Help Forum for more information on this topic: http://www.flickr.com/search/forum/?q=photos%20in%20public %20domain Based on comments in the Help Forum I think the best solution might be to just tag all our photos with a "public domain" tag. Thanks for teaching me more about Flickr -- it really is all about communicating with each other! Have a great weekend! SommerNow THAT is responsiveness. As regular FGI readers know, I've really enjoyed GovGab from day one. I think they do a terrific job. So now that they're asking for input on Web 2.0 stuff, I hope you'll take a moment to help them out by sharing your opinion. Then I hope that more agencies will use GovGab and the USA.gov as service benchmarks for responsiveness. Continue reading
Phishy, yet Phunny and Quite Useful
Thanks to Sabrina Pacifici over at beSpacific, FGI learned about a great new FTC video series at YouTube. The most recent videos are warnings against phishing, where bad actors try to trick you into revealing personal information: Phishy Home Phishy Office While YouTube is great from a publicity standpoint, it would be good from a preservation and reuse/remix standpoint if they'd also put these great videos into the Internet Archive. But we at FGI salute this effort to bring gov't education on phishing into web 2.0 forums. Continue reading
Spring 2008 DLC Materials Now Available
I wanted to write about this a few days ago, but have only found the time to do so now. The Government Printing Office (GPO) started releasing materials from the Spring 2008 Depository Library Conference even before the DLC meeting closed on April 2, 2008. You can find their materials at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html GPO deserves credit for being prompt for the initial release of DLC materials. It is a refreshing change from a few years ago when people who couldn't make meetings had to wait many weeks for materials to be made available. So thanks GPO! I hope to go through most of this material in the near future in more detail, but here are some items that seem like they are of special interest:
- Improved Access to EPA Information:Before and After with Web 2.0 by Brand Niemann (in 3 parts)
- Web 2.0 Power Point Presentation by Cindy Etkin of the U.S. Government Printing Office
- Back to the drawing board in Virtual and Real Worlds
- Web Harvesting Update for the Depository Library Council
- Web Scraping Government Information
Spring 2008 DLC Conference March 31 – April 2 Resources Page
Official materials including handouts and some prepared speeches can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html. Please feel free to send us your notes or recordings of conference sessions. Continue reading
GPO/GODORT Conf Call Minutes Posted
Bill Sleeman, chair of the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT), recently posted the minutes to the GPO / GODORT Steering Conference Call of March 12, 2008. These conference calls take place from time to time and often have news of value. The minutes can be found (may have to scroll) at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/GODORT_Chair and covered the following topics, among others:
- Request for Information for Mass Digitization Opportunities
- Status of EPA Web Harvesting
- Status of the Federal Digital System (FDSys)
- Addition of pre-1976 cataloging to the Catalog of Government Publications - in progress.
- Continued distance ed through OPAL
- Current stats on the newish Government Information Online reference service.
LH & RHM: Status of EPA harvesting project: GPO worked through 300 of the documents to gather information on what it will take for GPO to provide access to harvested materials (process, workflow and staffing implications). So far: the back end automation of meta-data extraction is not ready; parameters for metadata that accompanies the files needs improvement to automate de-duping; and the rules, methods and mechanisms for harvesting need to be refined (approximately 28% of material was not in scope). Basically, it is still taking more staff time to make these available than GPO can afford. BS asked about the FGI taxonomy experiment and if GPO would be investigating the results of that effort. GPO may incorporate that information into the project as the project moves forward.GPO's results of automated harvesting finding a lot of out of scope material and difficult automated extraction of metadata are about what I expected based on my own experience and from my reading of the literature. Whether or not GPO builds on our modest taxonomy experiment (Thanks Bill!), I think that a GPO - community/citizen collaboration will be needed to begin getting a handle on web-based agency documents. They could start simply by publishing their spidering logs and see what happens. Or perhaps they can obtain some of the $2 Billion/week currently being spent elsewhere. If GPO choose to take the mass collaboration route, I hope the documents community is in the forefront of helping them. If you're interested in taking part in our tagging experiment, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We will be running the project through April 18, 2008. To see what has been tagged so far, please visit http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject. OPAL Training Here are the notes on this subject:
LC: OPAL, GPO continues to use OPAL for online training and demos. At present, technical capabilities limit presentations to slide shows, such as PowerPoint presentations. Interactive web functions will be added in the future. January call for participation in creation of tutorials netted one submission; hoping to generate interest at DLC.The FDLP has over 1200 libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? A majority of FDLP libraries are teaching oriented academic libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? Hello! I know I'm not the only one who has insisted that GPO provide training between conferences for those of us who don't get out much. The documents community has a great reservoir of government information expertise. We should be actively aiding GPO in their efforts to spread that expertise. I admit that GPO's one submission wasn't from my library. I have a pretty new docs staff that's still getting up to speed. But that can't be the case everywhere. If only 10% of FDLP libraries could step up with a program, that would still be 120 programs -- twice a week for a whole year. Just so I can at least pretend to put my money (or staff time) where my mouth is, I will spend some time next month looking at our library's gov info information strengths, our customer needs and patron interests. And then sometime during the summer I or someone else from our library will submit a program. If you run a depository, will you commit to doing the same? Not only does GPO need our help, so do our colleagues. FGI thanks the GODORT and GPO personnel who participated, Jill Vassilakos-Long for taking the minutes and Bill for posting them to the ALA GODORT Wiki. Continue reading
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