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Another remix of speeches
Although this is not, strictly speaking, government information, it is about the presidential race and is an interesting complement to US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (more on that here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud). This is another good demonstration of how interesting things can be done with information that is easily re-usable.
- Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate, Pollster.com, April 27, 2007
Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important
Don Wood at Library 2.0 has a good, short post on Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important. He notes that "For libraries to flourish as centers for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users' right to privacy and freedom of inquiry." If libraries do not have copies of digital government information, users will be faced with retrieving that information from government-controlled web servers where there is no guarantee of privacy (Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?). If libraries want to flourish as centers of uninhibited access to information, they need to have copies of digital government information. [Editor's note 2/18/09: The link to Don Wood's blog appears to be dead. However, I found a copy in the Internet Archive. The link above has been changed to go to the archived copy of the page.] Continue reading
Google data goes missing
Google glitch loses user data, By Dan Goodin, The Register 26th April 2007. Google users found that "settings and data they've amassed over months have suddenly gone missing from their personalized homepage." Although this story doesn't directly pertain to government information it has a lesson for us. While the loss of individual preferences is hard on the individual, it is not the same as losing public information that we want accessible forever. We hope that Google will be able to restore these user preferences, but the lesson here should not escape us:
Over the years, the many free services offered by Google and its competitors have become indispensable to many of us, but they also bring to mind the old adage that we get what we pay for. And Google's personalized homepage isn't the only such service to show signs of untrustworthiness....As libraries (and government agencies) increasingly rely on Google to provide essential access to government information (e.g., Google to index government deep web? and Google begins to offer full-text scanned government documents and Agencies are working with Google to boost rankings and increase traffic and Cabbage Statistics, a microcosm of our selection decisions?), we should all be asking ourselves if this is an adequate infrastructure for permanent access. Every time we think "I don't have to [index, catalog, fill-in-the-blank-service] because Google will..." we should ask ourselves what we'll do if Google doesn't, or fails, or changes it's services. If we do more (e.g., Cabbage statistics and google bombs), we will at least be able to use our own systems and Google and its competitors and its successors. An even more important question is, do we know what google does and how it does it? What do they index and how do they rank? What gets ranked high and what gets ranked low? How deeply do they index a given web site? Are these the same decisions that we would make? Have they changed what they do since last week? Are they the right decisions for our users? Does there need to be an alternative that we control and can explain to our users and thus better help them? Continue reading
Technical Requirement for Digital Deposit
A recent thread on the govdoc-l mailing list is about digital deposit. See Digital Deposit by Janet Fischer, 26 Apr 2007 and digital deposit by James [R.] Jacobs, 27 Apr 2007. Thanks to Janet for bringing this up and to James for the helpful links to technical information on digital deposit. I'd just like to add two thoughts: 1. I believe that it is best to think about digital deposit in much the same way we think about paper deposit: every library will be different. We shouldn't be looking for a one size fits all solution in the digital world anymore than we expect any two depositories to be identical. The technical requirements that any given library comes up with will depend on the level of service and collection profile that the library chooses. We should be thinking of services and collections first and technology second. We should not be trying to shoehorn our service and collection decisions into an abstract technological solution. Nor should we assume that every digital depository will have to meet the same requirements that an OCLC, CDL, NARA, or FDSys will meet. I can, for example, easily imagine a small depository with a slow or intermittent Internet connection and little or no online services selecting a few essential titles and putting them on a stand-alone public PC so that users can easily use those titles when in the library even if the network is down or slow or the originating site unreachable. And, at another extreme, I can see a large library, which already has some digital collections online and accessible over the web, adding government information to its collection and integrating government and non-government sources together so that its users do not have to go to two different interfaces or sites to find the information they need. You can probably easily expand these simple examples too your own situation and see where digital deposit will fit into your existing collections and services -- or collections and services you are planning. 2. I think it is equally important to emphasize to library management and to your technical support people that there are different technologies for implementing any given collection and service plan. Again, I believe that we should not be looking for a one-size-fits-all technological solution -- even for similar collection and service plans. For example, one library might choose to use LOCKSS to implement online collections, another might use its institutional repository software (e.g., DSpace, EPrints, Greenstone, etc.), another might use content management software, and another might integrated documents into its existing webspace by uploading them to the same server that hosts its existing html documents. The point is that there are different technical ways to implement the same collection and service plans. I hope this helps and others will contribute to this thread. If you have specific suggestion or solutions that you anticipate using, please share your stories! Continue reading
Anonymous Senator Blocks Campaign E-Disclosure Again
Another Day, Another Hold On Finance Bill, By Matthew Mosk, Washington Post, Friday, April 27, 2007; A21.
The infamous unnamed senator (or senators) has for more than a week blocked passage of legislation that would require Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically. Electronic filings would make the names of campaign donors readily available -- it's how members of the House and presidential candidates have been doing it for years.Continue reading
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