Home » Articles posted by James A Jacobs (Page 126)
Author Archives: James A Jacobs
Senate Progress on Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports
Bill Mandates Publishing Agency Reports to Congress, By Joseph Marks, NextGov TechInsider (07/27/11). "The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday introduced companion legislation to the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. The measure would require the Government Printing Office to publish agency reports to Congress online within 30 days of their submission." See also: Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (ACMRA) Heads to House Floor Continue reading
House Bill Questions Future of GPO
House Questions Future of Government Printing Office, OMB Watch (July 27, 2011)
The House Legislative Branch appropriations bill for FY 2012, H.R. 2551, passed on July 22. The bill cuts $27.3 million from the FY 2011 funding level for the agency -- a 20.2 percent annual decrease, $40.4 million less than the agency's request. These cuts, which are considerably deeper than other legislative branch agencies face, would constrain GPO's ability to publish, digitize, and disseminate important public records. For example, GPO requested $5 million specifically to continue the development of FDsys, but the entire line item was cut from the bill. ...Certain provisions of H.R. 2551 suggest that some members of Congress seriously question whether GPO is needed at all.Continue reading
NTIA website redesigned
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is redesigning its web site. You might want to check for broken links in your catalog.
- the legacy NTIA website. (Note: When visiting legacy website pages where content is already migrated, you may be redirected to the new website.)
- the new NTIA website NTIA is the Executive Branch agency that is principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues. NTIA's programs and policymaking focus largely on expanding broadband Internet access and adoption in America, expanding the use of spectrum by all users, and ensuring that the Internet remains an engine for continued innovation and economic growth.
- New Website Notice We are in the process of launching a new website to better serve you. While most content has been migrated, some content is not yet on the new website and will not yet appear through the search feature.
From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary
Here is an interesting story about preserving British government information.
- From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA), by Bernard M. Scaife, Ariadne, Issue 67 (4 July-2011)
It occurred to us that this software could enable us to eradicate our link rot problem, whilst building in a core level of digital preservation and increasing the discoverability of these documents. We were convinced that a citation which linked to a record in a Web archive was far more likely to survive than one which did not.They knew that government budget cuts were increasing the risk of losing content from government departments. The article describes their experiences and summarizes what they learned:
- Placing files in a repository gives digital preservation to key documents in the subject field and eradicates the link rot problem.
- Adding high-quality metadata enhances the resource and allows it to hold its head high and become an integral part of a library's collection.
- A specialist library can play an important role in preserving domain-specific government content as part of its long-term strategy and ensure high-quality resources remain available.
- Provided you are prepared to get to grips with its complexity, the EPrints software is well suited to the task and provides good interoperability with other legacy systems for importing metadata
- The added value of being able to search the full text provides a potentially very rich resource for data mining whether by current or future researchers of educational history. Continue reading
Sunlight evaluations of Congressional Web Sites
The Sunlight Foundation has posted the first in a series of blog posts about congressional committee websites:
- Congress Online: Evaluating Congressional Committee Websites, By policy interns Eric Dunn and Jacob Hutt, Sunlight Foundation (July 25, 2011). Recently, we went through all forty-five House, Senate, and Joint Committee websites and evaluated them based on a transparency checklist made by Sunlight in 2010. In this first of a series of blog posts, we reveal general trends from our evaluation and highlight the websites that stood out, the ones that need some work, and a few that were just awful.
-
The websites for the Joint Committee on Printing and the Joint Committee on the Library are by far the worst of them all - they have not been updated in years. Half of the committee members pictured on these websites are no longer in office.
Latest Comments