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Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics: another defunded publication
Add the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics to the growing list of defunded federal publications. The Sourcebook, published since 1973, is a project of the University at Albany, School of Criminal Justice's Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center and funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Sourcebook offers a wide variety of statistics regarding the characteristics of criminal justice systems, public attitudes toward crime, nature and distribution of offenses, Characteristics and distribution of persons arrested, Judicial processing of defendants, and Persons under correctional supervision. Due to budget cuts, the Department of Justice is terminating funding for the Sourcebook as of 8/1/12. Please take a few moments to answer the survey they're conducting as part of their effort to secure alternative funding sources.
As a result of the substantial budget cut that has affected the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online will cease being funded by that agency as of August 1st, 2012. For over 40 years, Sourcebook has served as a standard reference tool in the field of criminal justice. We are proud to have offered reliable data on a variety of crime and justice issues to a wide scope of users. We are actively seeking ways to maintain the services offered by Sourcebook and any development in that direction will be posted here. We thank you for your support throughout the years and encourage you to respond to our brief survey. Your feedback will be kept anonymous and will be helpful in our efforts to procure other funding sources.Continue reading
Sunlight releases Scout to help track legislative/regulatory process
Today, our pals at the Sunlight Foundation released Scout, a new tool that allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions -- at both the state and federal level! They'll also soon release their Open States tool to target the legislative process of all 50 states. Thanks Sunlight!
Start by entering a keyword or phrase you would like to get updates about, such as the vaguely defined "cyber threat" included in CISPA or any references to the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Scout then saves your subscriptions and sends notifications via email or text message whenever the subscribed issue or bill is talked about on the floor of Congress, mentioned in new regulations, appears in state and federal legislation or when Congress is moving forward for a vote. Through your profile you can create as many alerts as you'd like and group them by tags with the additional option to make them public for others to follow your issues. You can also complement a Scout subscription by adding optional external RSS feeds, such as press releases from a member of Congress or an issue-based blog.
Hearing Tuesday 6/19/12 “Economic Impact of Ending or Reducing Funding for the ACS and other Government statistics”
Finally! I hope all of our DC friends will show up for this Congressional hearing next week entitled, “The Economic Impact of Ending or Reducing Funding for the American Community Survey and other Government Statistics” being held by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC). As we've argued over and over, these types of data/statistics are critical to a well-functioning democracy. Here's a great chance for the American public to shut down the misguided and unsupported perspectives of Representative Daniel Webster and other politicians of his ilk. Support the ACS and the Census!
The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC), will hold a hearing entitled, “The Economic Impact of Ending or Reducing Funding for the American Community Survey and other Government Statistics,” at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19, 2012, in room 210 of the Cannon House Office Building. WHAT: Hearing on “The Economic Impact of Ending or Reducing Funding for the American Community Survey and other Government Statistics” WHO: Mr. Kenneth Simonson, Chief Economist The Associated General Contractors of America and Vice President, National Association for Business Economics Washington, DC The Honorable Vincent P. Barabba, Former Director of the Census Bureau (1973-1976; 1979-1981) and Current Chairman Market Insight Corporation Capitola, CA The Honorable Keith Hall, Senior Research Fellow Mercatus Center at George Mason University and former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Arlington, Virginia The Honorable Grant D. Aldonas, Principal Managing Director Split Rock International Washington, DC WHEN: 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, June 19, 2012 WHERE: 210 Cannon House Office BuildingContinue reading
Thoughts on White House Digital Government Strategy
Building off of last week's post on the Obama Administration's new digital government strategy, I came across this analysis over at TechPresident: "White House Rolls Out New Plan for Digital Government".
Among the changes called for in the plan:Open government activists, including Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich and Clay Johnson, writer and former director of Sunlight Labs, expressed "meh" for the new plan. While we're excited that the White House is continuing to espouse the importance of open government principles, our concern is that the plan (PDF) does not address digital preservation or authenticity, two critical issues for librarians in guaranteeing long-term FREE access to government information -- and issues we addressed in a 2010 letter to then deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck. It's all well and good to talk about IT reform, shared IT infrastructure and services, APIs etc, but who's going to manage all of this cool digital stuff for the long-term? And where will the funding (or RE-funding) come from to keep Data.gov afloat in order to manage all of the APIs? In an era where GPO's FY2012 request for $6million to fund continuing development of their Federal Digital System (FDsys) is met with $0 funding by the House and only slightly less catastrophic $500,000 by the Senate, talk is all well and good. Digital infrastructure and services, and more importantly the staff to manage them, costs $$ -- arguably much more $$ than distribution and preservation of paper collections in the FDLP. We need a government and politicians who won't short-change open government and transparency. We need them and the public to realize that "online" does NOT equal "free beer" but "free kittens!" Continue reading
- Within six months, the Office of Management and Budget will release new government-wide standards for open data, content, and web application programming interfaces. Agencies will have another six months to make sure they are following those policies. They are also going to be asked to take two customer-facing online services and expose the information it delivers through APIs to "appropriate audiences," meaning some set of developers will be able to build applications around them without necessarily working in close concert with the agency providing the data.
- Agencies will be asked to publish ever more data through APIs and as structured data, which are the building blocks of modern web design and mobile-ready websites. The White House line on this is that it will also encourage outside developers to build new businesses on top of government data.
- The General Services Administration will establish a Digital Services Innovation Center to work with agencies to modernize how they interact with citizens on the web.
- The White House will begin releasing its own source code on GitHub and launch a "presidential innovation fellowship" program to bring developers from the private sector into government for six-to-12-month projects.
- The federal government will work to develop "MyGov," a prototype central hub for citizens to access all the services and information they're looking for from government online.
- Through programs like one intended to encourage small businesses to compete for government business, the White House will work to change IT procurement practices and cut down on the number of high-dollar, low-output contracts. Other procurement-related initiatives include a government-wide vehicle for mobile device and wireless service contracting and government-wide guidance on bring-your-own-device policies.
- Data.gov, the federal repository for government data available online, will transition away from being a hub for data files and towards a central clearing house of government APIs that developers can incorporate into web applications.
Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
June 18, 2012 / 1 Comment on Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
Here are 2 recent items analyzing Hathitrust and Google books for their efficacy in giving access to Federal government documents. The first is an article by Laura Sare (Texas A&M) and compares Hathitrust with Google Books. The second is a presentation by Brian Vetruba (Washington U in St Louis) at "Leveraging Your Strengths: Regional Government Documents Conference" at the Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis on May 4, 2012. A Comparison of HathiTrust and Google Books Using Federal Publications. Laura Sare. Practical Academic Librarianship: The International Journal of the SLA Academic Division. 2(1) 2012 p. 1-25. (attached below. Fair use claim)
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