Author Archives: James A Jacobs

Government's Global News Is Pulled From USA.gov, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily [subscription required] February 22, 2007 PM edition

The Internet home for government information has been stripped of Voice of America content and other international news after federal lawyers determined that the material should not be on a domestic news site.... "In light of the administration's other ventures into domestic propaganda," said Patrice McDermott, executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, "it was a matter of real concern that such information was on USA.gov, which is linked to by the states and by educational institutions around the country." ...Removing VOA stories from USA.gov will not prevent the American public from accessing VOA on the Internet, VOA spokesman Joe O'Connell said. "VOA has had a Web site for many years, now," he said Wednesday. "In fact, all 45 of our broadcast languages have Web sites. The nature of the Web is that it doesn't respect boundaries."

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Here is bad news about public access to government information. In an article (Agencies Take Steps To Make Web Data Searchable by Daniel Pulliam, National Journal's Technology Daily, February 21, 2007 PM Edition. [subscription required]) about efforts by Google, MSN. and Yahoo to index government web pages using the Sitemaps tool, J.L. Needham, a strategic partner development manager at Google, criticizes government information access.

Despite months of meeting with nearly every government agency, Needham said there is a lack of understanding about search engines. He said most agency officials do not realize that about 80 percent of visitors to their sites come through search engines. Most sites under the e-government initiative of the President's Management Agenda remain unsearchable, Needham said. "Literacy about search engines is lower in the federal government than in the private sector," he said. Because about half of all government Web pages are not searchable, a substantial percentage of people conducting searches are missing information they would otherwise find, Needham said. Managers cite other priorities and a potential increase in bandwidth use, which could drive up costs, as their primary concerns about optimizing their sites for searches, he said.

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Information, Please. Watchdog Groups, Some Lawmakers Say Congressional Reports Should Be Made Public, By Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post, February 19, 2007; A17. [Another copy here]

For years, open-government groups have fought to make the [Congressional Research Service] reports public, and for years, many lawmakers have kept them under wraps. Or so they thought. By insisting on secrecy, Congress instead created a bootleg market for the research. Every day, a small Texas company compiles the reports and sells them to lobbyists, lawyers and others who pay thousands of dollars for a peek at the reports and what they say about the congressional agenda. And it's all legal. "How I get them is my trade secret . . . but I get them all," said Walt Seager, who digs up the reports for Gallery Watch, a legislative tracking service.... Subscribers to Gallery Watch pay about $4,000 a year to get all the CRS reports, online and searchable, delivered weekly.

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GPO is providing audio and video files from the Fall DLC meeting and Library of the Year award presentation here. They note that "Audio files are available in .mp3 format, while video files are available in .mov format. All files have been compressed in zip format for easier download. Transcripts are available in PDF format.... In the future, we hope to provide these podcasts in streaming format. For now, however, they are only available as downloadable content." Continue reading →

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FY2008 Budget Documents: Internet Access and GPO Availability, by Jennifer Teefy, Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007

This 5 page document provides brief descriptions of the budget volumes and related documents, together with Internet addresses, Government Printing Office (GPO) stock numbers, and prices to obtain these publications. You might be able to use this as a handout if you have lots of budget users.

Thanks to OpenCRS!

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