Author Archives: James A Jacobs

A series of articles about access to public records in Pennsylvania:

Obtaining public records can be a challenge By FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS Bucks County Courier Times, phillyBurbs.com May 22, 2005

Government offices wrongly giving public less access than press By MARK SCOLFORO, phillyBurbs.com, May 22, 2005.

Survey finds barriers to public records _ and ways to overcome By MARK SCOLFORO, phillyBurbs.com, May 22, 2005.

"Many government offices in Bucks County and across Pennsylvania treat requests for basic public records and documents with suspicion, hindering or even denying prompt access, a survey of almost 700 government offices found."

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PROGRAM SOLICITATION for a Cooperative Agreement to STUDY USER SATISFACTION WITH ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT INFORMATION AND SERVICES AT PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND PUBLIC ACCESS COMPUTING CENTERS Issued by Institute of Museum and Library Services Office of Library Services

"The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) invites proposals for a project to conduct a research study on how the part of the population with limited access to Internet resources (individuals who do not have broadband access from home, work, or school; who choose to access government services and information from locations other than home, work, or school; or who do so through traditional means of access) accesses federal, state and local government services and information, and whether such users are satisfied with the information and services they are able to access. Additionally, the study shall examine the ways that public libraries and public access computing centers provide assistance (e.g., reference services, tutorials, classes, training) to users seeking federal, state, and local government information and services."

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Report from Australia: Vanishing Government Information History will vanish into the ether, by Toss Gascoigne, Australian IT, MAY 11, 2005. This is an edited version of an address to the seminar, "Digital Amnesia: The Challenges of Government Online" organized by the Australian Library and Information Association at the National Library of Australia on April 21. Toss Gascoigne, executive director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, notes that "Tracking down government reports is a growing problem for researchers in Australia. Originally published on the web, many reports have become unavailable or difficult to find." Gascoigne reports many examples of documents gone missing and examines the reasons. Of interest to us here in the U.S. is the finding of relatively trivial circumstances that cause documents to go missing. Many of the documents were still available, but such simple things as redesigning or streamlining a website caused the documents, though still available somewhere, to become "almost impossible" to find. Changes in staff and management and making "way for new versions or new publications" was a reason for publications being permanently removed from web sites. Staff would remove publications when a particular publication seemed to "no longer attract much traffic." One person reported that he presumed that "a desire to take a different policy direction" would naturally result in removing a report from an earlier time. Continue reading →

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Last month, there were stories in the press about a Canadian company, Remote Approach, that is developing tools to help "identify, manage and measure" the use of PDF documents "in real-time." Now Peter Suber writes about this and related technologies in the context of eprints of open access scholarly literature.

Trojan horse eprints, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #85, May 2, 2005.

Suber reports that "Remote Approach is working on executable scripts embedded in PDF files that will report back to their creators whenever the files are opened, even after they have been copied and redistributed." He notes that there is an obvious issue of reader privacy but there is also a deeper problem:

'The deeper problem is that once we allow scripts in text files for benign purposes, it will be very hard to block, let alone detect, scripts for malign purposes. Malign scripts could subvert fair-use rights and open access.'

He also notes press reports of "a feature that would let a company block a document from being read if there's no Internet connection." He sees dangers in such technolgies:

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We've added the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count to the Remix page. Continue reading →

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