BPE 2007 Introduction
From May 2-4, 2007, it was my privilege to attend and present at Best Practices Exchange 2007. The purpose of this conference was to share information on how states and other organizations are discovering, describing, preserving and providing access to digital, (mostly government) information. There were six broad tracks - Metadata & Discovery, Access, Preservation, Technology, Project Management & Outreach, and Emerging Issues. A more detailed explanation of the tracks is available on the web site. This conference drew 103 registered attendees representing 32 States and Provinces from 61 organizations. A list of presenters and presentations is available at http://bpexchange.org/presentations_chron.htm and should have all the presentation slides, including mine in the next few weeks. But in case you can't wait, I've attached my LOCKSS presentation slides to this blog post. Those who know me well know that I find it hard to resist cliches. So I have to say this isn't your parents' conference. The organizers of this conference followed last year's model of very short presentations (10-20 minutes) with small audiences (20-35) to allow for maximum discussion and sharing between states and organizations. I didn't attend last year, but I found the format very helpful and invigorating. There were also long breaks and lunches to facilitate networking. During one "break", someone from InterPARES took the time to do a one-to-one JHove tutorial for me. JHove extracts technical metadata from a large variety of files and I really wish I had a working knowledge of it when I prepared our latest "gubernatorial snapshot" DVD for the Alaska State Publications Program. I'm so impressed, I might offer a file analysis as an optional download. This conference has something for everyone regardless of their experience with technology. There are a variety of sessions and all speakers were patience and supportive of all questions. As a result, I even think I now have a partial handle on OAIster and OAI-PMH, which I didn't despite having tried to read many articles on the subject. Assuming this conference is offered next year, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you register. As soon as I hear that BPE 2008 is being planned, I'm going to start promoting it to the entire Alaska State/Federal depository community. Over the next few days, I plan to write more about what I learned from the Exchange. It will be more about lessons learned than a blow-by-blow description of sessions. I might make an exception for the keynotes, which were done by Brewster Kahle and former Arizona legislator Jeff Hatch-Miller. If you are reading this and were a fellow BPE2007 attendee, would you include a tag of BPE2007 in anything you blog about? Thanks! Continue reading
Montana State Publications via RSS
At the Best Practices Exchange 2007, I learned that the Montana State Library is providing RSS feeds for their new state publications. See http://msl.mt.gov/PubRSS/RSSNewPubs.asp for details. I (and I think my FGI colleagues) would really like to see GPO implement something like this for new titles in their current catalog and definitely in FDSys. Meanwhile, Montana uses the same ILS system my library does, so next week I hope to get details from MT, pass them onto my systems administrator, and who knows? Perhaps AK will join the growing ranks of state depository RSS feeds! Continue reading
State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources
While there is an abundance of state legal resources (laws, regulations, court opinions, etc), in most cases they can't be used in courts of law or for other legal purposes because its the print version that is considered "legally official." The American Association of Law Libraries has just released this new 50 state report outlining the status of online legal materials: State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources This report was released in conjunction with the National Summit on Authentication of Digital Information, which AALL held April 20-21 in Chicago. According to AALL, The 50 delegates who participated in this event were a distinguished group of individuals: judges, state government officials, attorneys, and leaders of AALL and of other organizations, such as the American Bar Association. They were invited because of their interest and expertise in some aspect of legal/government information. Proceedings from the summit will shortly be posted to the AALL web site. Continue reading
AALL & SLA Support GPO Funding, Will you?
On May 1, 2007, Mary Alice Baish of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) testified in support of full funding for the Government Printing Office (GPO) before the House Committee on Appropriations for AALL and the Special Libraries Association (SLA). While readers know that FGI has its differences with GPO, it plays a vital role in informing American citizens through its publishing, the Federal Depository Library Program, and of course, GPO Access. In addition, GPO's proposed Future Digital System (FDSys) could be a vital PART of any government information ecosystem of the future. Like every other federal agency, GPO has been operating under a continuing resolution which held it to FY 2006 funding even though we are nearly at FY 2008. As Mary Alice points out, fully funding GPO’s request of $45.61 million for the Salaries and Expenses (S&E) account that funds the FDLP; $109.54 million for Congressional Printing and Binding; and $26.82 million for the revolving fund is vital for several reason including:
- The S&E request includes necessary funds for the cataloging, indexing, and distribution of Federal publications in print and electronic formats to depository libraries and other recipients designated by law.
- Providing money for digitizing pre-1976 cataloging records; cataloging documents harvested from agency Web sites and improving the GPO Access system.
- To provide GPO with GPO with the ability publish all the important congressional documents of the 110th Congress. In addition, $5 million of the CP&B request is needed to ensure that the 2006 U.S. Code, compiled by the Law Revision Counsel, is published and distributed to members of Congress and depository libraries in a timely fashion.
- Provide the last third of funding to bring FDSys online.
- Helping GPO to fulfill its partnership agreements with libraries around the country.
New Remix: Federal Register Searches by RSS
Thanks a bundle to Steven M. Cohen who Twittered about this new item we've added to our remixes page: Justia Regulation Tracker - This free service takes Federal Register data and provides the ability to create RSS feeds of search results. The search gives you more options than the GPO Advanced Federal Register Search because the Justia search gives you agency dropdown choices and the regulations abstracts appear on the results pages. Justia is led by former CEO and FindLaw co-founder Tim Stanley. They make their money from advanced web services to lawyers, but provide free basic legal info to the public. More information on Justia and this new service can be found at http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2007/04/feeding_the_rea.html. This is a perfect example of a service that couldn't be started if GPO implemented a two-tiered model of information access - Free but restricted access at Depository Libraries and fee access for vendors wishing to reuse government information. But how will GPO be able to sell government information if people who obtain this public domain information republish for free with better searching and alert tools than GPO? We don't think they can without restricting the no-fee information model in some way. So we at FGI think they shouldn't try. Finally, if this serendipity by Twitter intrigued you, drop by and friend me at http://www.twitter.com/dcornwall Continue reading
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