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Gen Y are the leading users of libraries
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that "members of Gen Y are the leading users of libraries for help solving problems and in more general patronage.... Furthermore, it is young adults who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library."
- Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help (December 30, 2007) Leigh Estabrook, Evans Witt, and Lee Rainie. (full report. PDF)
- Information Searches That Solve Problems (Press Release)
- Young Adults Heavy Library Users by Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press December 30, 2007.
GovernmentDocs.org provides enhanced access to FOIA documents
Back in November, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, along with Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation launched a new website, GovernmentDocs.org, which will house governmetn documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. From the press release:
The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind.
Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:
- Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.
- A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.
- Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
- Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.
- The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations' documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.
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How many government websites are there?
Still No Directory of Federal Websites, E-Gov Act Ignored. By Coby Logen, .gov Watch. November 05. 2007
How many government websites are there? How many HHS or DOJ sites are there? You and I have no way to know. American taxpayers cannot even know how many public websites their government is funding. By law, we should—but the system is broken.
The E-Government Act of 2002 set a deadline of two years to develop a "public domain directory of public Federal Government websites" (Section 207(f)(3)). But this directory still does not exist 5 years later.
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Most fed data is un-Googleable
As we've noted here before (Is your search engine finding the government information you need?), the problem of relying on commercial search engines to find government information is that a lot of government information on the web goes un-indexed by those search engines.
- Most fed data is un-Googleable By Jason Miller FCW (December 17, 2007). "After five years, a major E-Gov Act provision goes unmet because of search problems."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says "There are more than 2,000 federal government Web sites not included in commercial search engine results. Is it accidental, or is there a policy, or it is just laziness? I would like to know why" and "Agencies do not let commercial search engines index their sites."
I wonder if that is true? I wonder if there is any document librarian who can answer that question or point to which sites are not indexed?
It is probably closer to the truth to say, along with John Needham, Google's manager for public-sector content partnerships, that government "databases" are being missed by web crawlers and that "Agencies are concerned more about how information is presented than if users are finding it." In other words, agencies would probably like to have their information indexed, but haven't figured out how to do so, or don't have the budgets to do what is necessary. It probably isn't "laziness" but lack of funds and other resources; it probably is sometimes "accidental" in that some may not know what to do. It is probably sometimes even "policy" -- but probably less often.
But, one big problem is that we don't really know the scope of the problem or the cause. FDLP librarians should be pushing GPO, researchers, and library schools to research these issues so we have answers.
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Boston Public Library Digitization Project
Carl Malamud says his motivation is to make the workings of the government more accessible at no cost and that "This is society's operating system."
- Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web. By John Markoff, New York Times (December 27, 2007).
Continue readingA digital library partnership, including two nonprofit organizations and the Boston Public Library, is preparing to begin making digital copies of the library's paper-based government documents collection, which will then be made available on the Internet.
The project, which will take two years and require the hand scanning of millions of pages of government hearings and related publications, will cost an estimated $6 million, according to the project's sponsors.
Boston Public Library librarians said they planned to begin by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which is regularly sought after by its patrons.
The project is being undertaken by Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library.
The project is the brainchild of founders of the two organizations, Carl Malamud and Brewster Kahle...
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