Reminder That Transparency Advocacy Trumps Parties
Two items from Peter Suber's Open Access News give an important reminder that friends of greater access to government information can come from anywhere:
The first item notes Senator Lieberman's call for action on S Res 401, which would post all unclassified Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports in a public database. Although this would simply do for CRS what is already done for the General Accountability Office (GAO), S Res 401 has seen no action since Senator Lieberman introduced it on December 11, 2007. The second item notes the gratitude of the American Association of Law Libraries for Justice Roberts action in permitting free trial access to the PACER database at selected Federal Depository Libraries. Free public access to PACER, which provides electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records has been a longstanding goal of the depository and law library communities. As I understand it, before Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court was unwilling to consider free access on any level. While it is tempting in these troubled times to assume that one party stands firmly for restricted access in all cases and the other party stands for full transparency, that's not true. In all cases we information advocates should be seeking out and working with whomever is in favor of greater transparency on a case by case basis. Continue readingNational Agriculture Library Digital Repository
Thanks to FGI BOTM alum Carlos Diaz for notifying the govdoc-l list about a new resource from the National Agricultural Library (quote edited for URL formatting):
Looks like the NAL has begun to digitize in .tiff format their historical collection of publications including the Agriculture handbooks and yearbooks, etc.
You can find the Digital Repository at http://naldr.nal.usda.gov/A very precious resource indeed.
We agree. The digital repository has publications going back many decades for the following series:
Agricultural Economic Report
Agriculture Handbook
Agriculture Information Bulletin
Bean Improvement Cooperative Annual Report
Bean Improvement Cooperative Natl Dry Bean Res Assoc Conference
Division Pomology Bulletin
Economic Research Service Staff Report
Fruit Vegetable Market News Report
Pomological Watercolors
Report Commissioner Agriculture
Report Secretary Agriculture
Rural Development Perspectives
Rural Development Research Report
Technical Bulletin United States Department Agriculture
World Poultry Congress
Yearbook United States Department Agriculture
Some monograph publications and other non-series publications are also available. The documents are a touch awkward to use though. You need to page through them one page at a time. But if you use their "print pdf" button, you can get a PDF file for your use. Another nice feature of this site is an RSS feed and list of recent additions.
Finally the repository can be searched. Results include not only matching publications, but also specific page numbers. Results can be sorted by the column headings, very nice!
Naturally I used "Alaska" for my search. It brought up hundreds of results, including this tidbit from the 1958 Agriculture Yearbook:
Creator Johnson, Hugh A.
Title Seward's folly can be a great land.
Source Yearbook United States Department Agriculture
Year 1958
Volume_Info 1958
Pages p. 424-439.
Go and check out this resource. And then remember that it was a LIBRARIAN who brought it to you! Thanks again, Carlos!
Continue readingA First Look at FDSys
The Government Printing Office released two videos demonstrating the "Proof of Concept" release of the Federal Digital System (FDSys):
Search - 3:22
Submission - 9:21
The videos require Windows Media Player to view and one of our volunteers was unable to view the videos using his Mac version of WMV. But I did get a look.
Everything below is subject to GPO's own caveat that this "proof of concept" version will change a lot between now and the first public release in late 2008.
I was impressed with the search functionality. The search box is simple with few options, but navigation boxes on the right hand side of the screen allow one to quickly zero in on likely documents. Search results may also be sorted by title, relevance, type of resource and date issued. Individual records have links to the content, preservation metadata and more.
The only problem I had with the search was the fact the search defaults to "OR". GPO itself now understands that is a problem based on beta user input and the video narrator promised this would be fixed in the public release. I have to admit that I don't understand how anyone in the age of Google would have made a default "OR" to begin with. But what's important is that the problem is being fixed.
The Submission section of FDSys will not be available to the public, but is interesting to watch the demo to see what is involved with document creation. Currently the ability to add metadata does not include keywords, which is something I hope will be included in the official release. Given GPO's move towards brief records under some circumstances, it would be very helpful to have agency generated keywords in FDSys.
There is some information in the agency submission side of FDSys that I hope carries over to either the public side or at least for FDLP librarians. FDSys requires an agency contact for every document. It would be helpful to librarians to a contact for documents in case something goes out of print or if a user had in-depth questions about the content of a given document.
Overall, this looks like a promising start. No mention of the alert features and push delivery slated for future releases, but hopefully those will be demoed soon.
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Call for Submissions: Information and Communications Technology Law
This notice is being posted on behalf of Debbie L Rabina of the Pratt Institute. Questions about the item below should go to her:
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Journal of Information and Communications Technology Law
Submissions for a Special Issue: Government-held Information, Privacy and Civic Access
Governments are most frequently the largest collectors of data
within their jurisdictions, and often that data collection and storage
is financially supported with public taxes. How governments manage and make available that information when requests are made by non-government parties varies in each country. As the data-sharing world finds new and multi-platform ways to network, the variations of legal access to government-held information create both opportunities and difficulties. This special issue will collect the state of access to government-held information with special attention to concerns for civilian privacy and civic activists’ oversight of government operations. Submissions should conform to normal journal specifications noted http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/cictauth.asp
Please send submission no later than August 1, 2008
Prof. D.L. Rabina Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science, 144 West 14th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10011-7301 or by email drabina@pratt.edu
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Hopefully some FGI reader out there will come up with a good article as a result of this opportunity.
Continue readingSenator Obama addresses Net Neutrality in Podcast from 2006
My Google Alert for podcasts works in strange ways. Today, for example, it sent me a podcast episode by Sen. Barack Obama done in 2006. Why it's flagging it now, I don't know.
But it's an interesting episode that addresses a major FGI interest, net neutrality. You can find the episode at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/. I think he sums up the issues well:
"It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.
But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.
Everyone who cannot pony up the cash will be relegated to the slow lanes."
If you're aware of other candidate statements on Net Neutrality, feel free to post links to them in comments. Interestingly, Sen. Obama's last podcast seems to have been on April 12, 2007. See all of his topics at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/. If you're aware of him podcasting somewhere else, let us know by leaving a comment.
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