Author Archives: James A Jacobs

FirstGov moves to cluster technology to expand search engine capabilities, By Rob Thormeyer, GCN (10/10/05) Vol. 24 No. 30.

Under a recently announced new contract, FirstGov will be adding numerous resources and the ability to search across all levels of government—including state, local and tribal authorities by next spring. According to this story, FirstGov already indexes 8 million federal government web pages and the new contract will expand that more than threefold.

The article quotes Chris Sherman (president of Searchwise, a search engine analysis company) as saying that most FirstGov users probably won’t notice a difference or significant change in the quality of search results. Sherman also said that the overarching factor in awarding them the contract was price. The current search engine is working quite well, Sherman said, so the decision came down to money.

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With the Macintosh offering full text searching of everything on your hard disk and Microsoft promising the same in "Vista" (its next version of Windows) and Google and other search engines making it practical to find a lot of needles in the Web haystack, the government is finally asking, Could search technology replace some information management standards? (by Aliya Sternstein, FCW.com, Oct. 17, 2005). A Request for Information (RFI) dated Sept. 15 from the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget asks, "Does current search technology perform to a sufficiently high level to make an added investment in metadata tagging unnecessary in terms of cost and benefit?" Of course, it shouldn't be an either/or question, but that's the way it is often asked in IT departments, commercial outfits, and even libraries. Continue reading →

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The National Journal reports today that The Copyright Office will not, as earlier announced, force people and companies that want to "pre-register" their works online to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

• Copyright Office Backs Away From Browser Mandate, by Sarah Lai Stirland, National Journal's Technology Daily [subscription required] October 17, 2005 p.m. edition.

The article says that off-the-shelf software from Siebel Systems caused the anticipated glitch related to Internet Explorer. (see What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information) Complaints about the earlier announcement from the Copyright Office that it intended to require IE was criticized by software programmers, musicians and filmmakers who use computer-operating systems, such as Apple Computer's Macintosh, that do not support current versions of Internet Explorer. The Homeland Security Department has warned Web surfers not to exclusively use Internet Explorer because IE is considered a security risk. The World Wide Web Consortium, noted that making pre-registrants use a specific browser may violate federal e-government rules. Continue reading →

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New national center to assist governments with open source applications, by Stephen Feller, NewsForge, October 14, 2005.

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research (NCOSPR) was launched today at the first Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, a meeting of more than 200 representatives of government entities and software developers hosted by at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL). The mission of the NCOSPR will be to guide government agencies through the array of open source software available, as well as to develop specific solutions for individual agencies with its resource center. The center is also behind Government Forge, a portal to host and maintain open source software relevant to government agencies and other public entities.

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Update 10/25/2005 - GPO has posted their definitions of "push" and "pull" at the FDSys Blog. Results from a GPO survey of depository libraries show a majority of those responding expressed a high interest in digital deposit. Hundreds of depository libraries said that they were interested in delivery of digital information to depositories.

question	interest: very high/high (number)	interest: very high/high (percent)
Ability to "pull" content from GPO	299	85%
Automatic "push" of content from GPO	228	65%

From the GPO Future Digital System (FDsys) Library Survey Results web page:

In August 2005, GPO submitted a survey to all Federal Depository Libraries to obtain valuable input from our library partners regarding proposed features and functions of GPO's Future Digital System (FDsys). More than 400 of the approximately 1,250 depository libraries responded to GPO's request for feedback.

Partial results from the survey are contained in this one page pdf file: Library VOC Responses Sorted on Library Interest, High Interest (Top 2 Boxes). A copy of the survey is available here: Library Voice of User Survey. Those who filled out the form were asked to rate their "level of interest" on a 7 point scale (1=Very high 2=High 3=Neutral 4=Low 5=Very low 6= Don't Know 7= Not Applicable). Two questions in the lengthy list of "GPO services" dealt with digital deposit. Continue reading →

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