New Crime Podcast by DC Agency
Let's have a warm welcome to the newest podcast in our government podcasts directory: District of Columbia Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency - Brief video programs for the public on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system. Some episodes in Spanish. Continue reading
BPE 2007 – Building docs collection with Archive-IT
At the recently closed Best Practices Exchange 2007, Kelly Eubank of the North Carolina State Archives presented how NC has made archived agency web pages available throught their use of the Archive-It tool. The NC collection can be found at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/archives/webarchives/index.html. Looking at all the collections available from the Archive-IT web sites, it seems like a number of state governments are using this tool:
- Alabama - several collections
- Arizona - several collections
- Indiana State and Local Documents by Indiana University
- Virginia - several collections by Library of Virginia
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nebraska - County gov't sites saved by Nebraska Historical Society.
- North Carolina - several collections
- North Dakota - several collections
- Tennesee - several collections
- Utah - several collections
Secrecy News defends public domain from Army
According to Secrecy News, Army Documents Posted "Illegally," Army Says - "A U.S. Army official told the Federation of American Scientists that Army documents on the FAS web site had been published by FAS "illegally" and must be removed." Thankfully, Steven Aftergood has stood his ground and pointed out that public Army documents, like other government documents are in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted. Thus, the Army cannot dictate where they can and cannot be hosted. Government officials and others can review our background on copyright page, itself copied from a government document in the public domain. Hopefully this was just a misguided low-level official and not the start of yet another high-level effort to assert centralized control of government information. Thanks to Secrecy News for standing tall. Maybe we should all start posting PUBLIC military documents on our servers and notify the army publications directorate. Continue reading
Nebraska joins the State Library party on SL
The Nebraska Library Commission has announced a grand opening of their Second Life presence. To the best of my personal knowledge, Nebraska is the third State Library Agency to set up shop in Second Life, following Kansas and South Carolina. I did not see any reference to government information in Nebraska's announcement, but the Library is planning a rotating photo exhibit. Photo exhibits seemed to work well for Kansas and I wish this new effort well. The big party is May 11, 3-5pm Central Time. I won't make it then because I can't install the Second Life client at work, but I will try to visit the NLC building and get back to you. Continue reading
BPE 2007 – Shoestring Repositories
There were so many good presentations at Best Practices Exchange 2007, that is doesn't seem fair to single out any one of them as "really cool", but I can't think of another phrase for Robert Hulshof-Schmidt's Creating an Online Documents Repository on a Shoestring presentation. Robert is on the staff of the Oregon State Library and he described how his library used a new depository law, the mixed blessing of a statewide Content Management System and some nifty programming to create a system that automatically harvests agency publications, deposits them to a library web server and creates a URL for document catalogers. It's not entirely automated. Nothing can be in the current state of affairs, but it sounds like it minimizes the need for human review of a lot of files. Another nice feature of the Oregon system is that it automatically converts ingested documents into either HTML (if text based) or PDF (if binary based, like Word/Excel). So it looks like OSL is able to do some important potential preservation work at the point of ingestion. Oregon's document repository can be found at http://egov.oregon.gov/OSL/GRES/REPOS/. Continue reading
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