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Author Archives: James A Jacobs
National Park Service employees react to censorship
After this week’s shutdown by the Trump administration of publications and “outward facing” documents at executive agencies, government employees are taking action. Scientific American reports that anonymous employees of the National Park Service have created the AltUSNatlParkService Twitter account announcing their intent: “Mr. Trump, you may have taken us down officially. But with the scientific […]
Review of 2016 in anticipation of 2017
It is January and time once again to review what last year brought to libraries and the FDLP and where we should put our energies in the coming year. 2016 In 2016 GPO issued a series of policies that express its intentions to enhance both access to and preservation of government information. While we applaud […]
Using Government Data
Back when I helped teach new data librarians about data, one of the themes my colleagues and I liked to repeat was that “data should tell a story.” By that we meant that raw facts are literally without meaning until we analyze them and understand the stories they tell. “Understanding” is more than facts. As […]
The Fake News Attack on the U.S. Census
A lot has been written about “fake news” in the last few months. Too much of that writing has (IMHO) muddled the differences between just-plain-lies and everything else that divides the country at the moment. But the basic issue of politicians who distort the truth because they are more interested in the zero-sum game of […]
The Shame of Bad Digitizations
In a recent thread on the Govdoc-l mailing list about a Congressional Publications Hub (or “pub hub” — more of the thread here), one commenter said that The American Memory project’s digital surrogates of the pre-Congressional Record publications "probably aren’t salvageable" because the TIFFs were captured at 300 ppi resolution and then converted to 2-bit […]
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