Putting the State Agency Database Registry to Work
Now that the 50-State agency database registry has annotated content from most of the fifty states, it is becoming possible to put it to some interesting uses. For example, one can start to explore common state interests by using the search feature of the ALA GODORT wiki. If you do a search for "film" in the wiki, you'll find that New Mexico and Tennessee have film promotion offices that produce databases. Tennessee will help you find locals in almost any category you can think of for your film production. New Mexico has a similar resource, plus they have a location finder database as well. In a similar way, a search using the word "buildings" shows you that Ohio, South Dakota and Washington all have resources to help business choose commercial or industrial real estate properties. What can you discover through browsing or searching the database registry? Let us know in comments. Continue reading
GODORT Database Registry Reaches 46 states & DC
I'm pleased to report to you that the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force efforts to create a 50-State Registry of state agency produced databases is nearing the end of its initial setup phase. With the help of 30 named volunteers, we have created content for 46 states and the District of Columbia. The remaining four states have prospective volunteers who should be filling in content soon or letting me know they cannot take on page volunteer duty at this time. Please see our nearly completed product at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. In these pages you will find databases on finding doctors, shipwrecks, commercial properties, Confederate Veterans pensions, dangerous dogs and much more. To get a small taste of what is becoming available through the Registry, check out the unofficial project blog "State Databases of the Day" at http://statedatabase.blogspot.com/. You don't have to be a named volunteer to help with the project. If you go to a state's page and don't see your favorite state agency produced database, go ahead and add it if you are comfortable with editing wikis. If not send your link to the page volunteer, if available, or to me at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net as project coordinator. Please try to have a look at the Registry this week. Check out and improve your own state's page. Or check out what's available. A lot of stuff from the California page just amazed me. Think about how you might build subject listings (Wildlife, business, etc) using the Creative Commons' licensed material from this project. Together we're building a good resource. Let's keep at it. Continue reading
FDSys Receives 1.4TB worth of Statutes at Large
According to the Future Digital System blog, FDSys is ingesting a full run of Statutes at Large from the Library of Congress. The scanned files take up 1.4TB worth of storage space and "The next step is for GPO to assess the content and determine whether the content complies with GPO specifications and create access derivatives (including OCR text) of the content." People who are considering LOCKSS boxes to store federal content shouldn't blanch at the 1.4TB figure for Statutes at Large. Generally speaking, scanned files (which are images) are much larger than born digital content. For example, GPO deposited a year's worth of 10 Federal born-digital e-journals during their LOCKSS pilot. These 10 "journal-years"" worth of content took up 900MB or roughly 0.9 GB. At that rate, we could have harvested these 10 journals for over 250 years before filling up our 250GB hard drive. Of course, we'd need to upgrade our hard drives well before that. Having said that, it will be interesting to see what sort of uses that GPO can put this material to. Continue reading
We know what you did last night: Deep Packet Inspection
A new article from Ars Technica: Deep packet inspection meets 'Net neutrality, CALEA By Nate Anderson | Published: July 25, 2007 - 11:10PM CT Details the promise and peril of a new technology called "Deep Packet Inspection." On the plus side large-scale deployment of this technology might well be able to make large scale denial of service attacks a thing of the past and provide robust virus protection to all. As this article indicates, this comes with a downside:
Looking this closely into packets can raise privacy concerns: can DPI equipment peek inside all of these packets and assemble them into a legible record of your e-mails, web browsing, VoIP calls, and passwords? Well, yes, it can. In fact, that's exactly what companies like Narus use the technology to do, and they make a living out of selling such gear to the Saudi Arabian government, among many others.According to the article, this technology can also allow ISPs to determine who can access what, as shown by this example from Great Britain:
What that means in this is that you pay by the gigabyte and by the service. Plans start at £9.99 (around $20) a month for just 1GB of data, though use after 10 PM appears not to count for this quota. The lowest price tier also does not support gaming and places severe speed controls on FTP and P2P use (allowing only 50Kbps at peak periods). Plus.net says that the lowest tier will not work adequately with online games or corporate VPNs. Paying £29.99 (around $60) a month provides 40GB of data transfer and fast P2P and FTP speeds, along with 240 VoIP minutes from the company. All of these tiers feature downloads speeds of up to 8Mbps.As Congress and the Government Printing Office insist on moving from a custody model (libraries have publications housed locally) to an access model (we link to the Future Digital System), librarians have an obligation to consider what will happen to users if we move from our current net neutrality to a model facilitated by the software described above. Do we think its ok for the government to have a complete record of who is accessing what publications? Are we prepared to turn users away when our ISP informs us that our monthly download limit has been reached? What happens when GPO reaches its Internet quotas in a future world where the government purchases Internet access from private providers? It doesn't have to be this way. Support Net Neutrality. Educate yourself about digital library technologies and help build the geographically distributed federal depository library system of the future. Thanks to the folks at Current Cites for pointing out this article. Continue reading
Hearing On Sensitive But Not Classified Information (1987)
Proving that everything old is new again in terms of information restriction, I came across this title from my federal depository's shelves: Hearing on sensitive but not classified information : Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Thursday, May 28, 1987 by United States. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. I thought this part of the introduction was interesting reading:
The difference of opinion was over the means to protect this information. In general, the library and information science communities felt that sensitive material should be classified in order to relieve these communities of the burden of limiting access to information and determining which information should not be made available to foreign nationals or governments. In general, the government and the defense establishment would prefer that the library and information communities exercise a degree of judgement in releasing sensitive data to foreign nationals in order to slow up the flow of valuable technological and other information to the East Bloc. Classifying much of this information would take time and expense for all concerned, as well as limiting the flow of sensitive information to all Americans.In my view the information flowing to the Eastern Bloc couldn't have been that useful since the Warsaw Pact imploded barely two years after this hearing. In this hearing, Sandra K. Peterson of Yale University represented the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT). Her testimony begins on page 41 of the hearing proceedings. Time constraints keep me from giving you most of Ms. Peterson's testimony, but a key point was that the government's proposed definition of "Sensitive but unclassified" was so broad that GODORT believed "Much of the information that the federal government collects compiles, produces, publishes and disseminates falls within these definitions." Towards the end of her prepared testimony, Ms. Peterson emphasized GODORT's basic position which I believe they hold today. I know we do at FGI:
In summary, GODORT believes that unclassified government information of all formats should be accessible by the American public.Hear, Hear! Now if we could just make the SBU concept go away. Seems like there is more work to do. Continue reading
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