Home » Articles posted by James R. Jacobs (Page 133)
Author Archives: James R. Jacobs
US govt a big user of Amazon web services
As readers know, we've been tracking on the wikileaks cables (and I highly recommend WikiRiver to do that!). One of the things that came up early on in this story was news that Amazon had kicked Wikileaks off of its Web servers (with Paypal and Visa later following suit). Wikileaks tweeted the following response: "If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books." Buried in the deluge of news about Wikileaks was this post by Dave Winer (who created WikiRiver) "US govt a big user of Amazon web services." Turns out the US government does a large and growing amount of business with Amazon Web Services including Web and application hosting, backup and storage, and high performance computing.
Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services, entitled "Amazon Web Services Year in Review." It contained a paragraph, quoted below, that explains how their government business grew in 2010. "Government adoption of AWS grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government's cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE's National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. To learn more about how AWS works with the federal government, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/federal/."Continue reading
Boarman named Public Printer in recess appointment
The Government Printing Office (GPO) has been busy today! Hot on the heals of their announcement about the resignation of Public Printer Bob Tapella, President Obama announced today his list of recess appointments including naming William J. Boarman as the next Public Printer of the GPO. Continue reading
Crowd-sourcing transcription of historical texts
University College London has a treasure trove in the papers of the Enlightenment philosopher [w:Jeremy Bentham]. In the last 50 years, it has published 27 volumes of his writings — less than half of the 70 or so volumes ultimately expected. In an attempt to spur this project along, they're crowd-sourcing the transcription of the historical documents according to the NY Times. The story also mentions another interesting crowd-sourcing project at George Mason University to reconstitute the papers of the early War Department (1784-1800) which had been destroyed by a fire on November 8, 1800. Sharon Leon, a historian at George Mason University and Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media -- developers of one of my favorite Web tools, Zotero! -- recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to design a free plug-in that any archive or library could use to open transcription to the public. Obviously crowd-sourcing is becoming an invaluable tool for expanding the reach of scholarship. Last week, I mentioned the Old Weather project which is crowd-sourcing old weather observations made by UK Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I in order to assist with climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Old Weather is part of the Zooniverse of crowd-sourcing projects to help scientific projects. Some, like Daniel Stowell, the director and editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, IL, point out that hiring of nonacademic transcribers is not a panacea and in fact could produce so many errors as to make crowd-sourcing expensive and even more time consuming in correcting errors. But, as Ms Leon points out, “We’re not looking for perfect. We’re looking for progressive improvement, which is a completely different goal from someone who is creating a letter-press edition.” Dare I point out that the FDLP has been crowd-sourcing US government documents since 1813?! As Tomas Jefferson wrote in a 1791 letter, “Let us save what remains, not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” Continue reading
2010 Census population counts released
This just in: the U.S. Census Bureau today released the first results of the 2010 census. The new census showed the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2010, was 308,745,538. Check out the Census news conference and 2010 census winners and losers.
(NYT) These are the first results from the census conducted this year, and they will be used to reapportion seats in Congress, and, in turn, the Electoral College, based on new state population counts. The figures will influence the landscape for the 2012 presidential race and the makeup of the Electoral College, with Republican-leaning states from the Sun Belt gaining more political influence at the expense of Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states. According to the new counts, Texas will gain four seats, Florida will gain two, while New York and Ohio each lose two. Fourteen other states gained or lost one seat. The gainers included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah; the losers included Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New Jersey.Continue reading
Public comments on Ithaka S+R FDLP Modeling draft documents
January 5, 2011 / Leave a comment
Starting today and continuing for the next few days, we will be posting comments here on the first three documents from the Ithaka S+R FDLP Modeling Project.
- Background (final draft)
- Environmental Scan (final draft)
- DRAFT White Paper on Existing Library Networks
Ithaka S+R is now moving forward to the analysis phase of the contract. We thank Ithaka S+R for their work so far and hope that our readers will make the time to read through the drafts and also give their comments to the Ithaka S+R team.The three Ithaka S+R documents are largely descriptive rather than evaluative and will inform the recommendations from Ithaka S+R, which will come later. In our comments on these documents we will draw some conclusions and attempt to find meaning in the overview that Ithaka S+R has provided. Our comments will be informed by our daily work in both the physical and digital realms of government information.
We will address questions such as:
- What approaches to government information in the digital age are succeeding and what approaches are failing?
- How can libraries lead and create their own future?
- What can we learn from users?
- What can we learn from the history of the FDLP that applies to our current environment?
- Will the FDLP help or hinder libraries?
For those that are interested (or masochistic :-)), attached and linked here is a PDF of our notes in stream of consciousness on the current drafts. We used Pirate Pad to collaboratively take notes and discuss issues. We've sent these to the Ithaka S+R project team -- but don't say we didn't warn you ;-). Continue reading →Continue Reading →