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Acting Public Printer Vance-Cooks confirmation hearing to be Public Printer
Davita Vance-Cooks (short biography (PDF)) sat today for her confirmation hearing to be the 27th Public Printer of the United States. Here's the video of the full hearing. Committee Chairman Senator Charles Schumer, who could not attend the hearing, in a statement, praised Vance-Cooks for her leadership and urged colleagues to confirm her as the 27th Public Printer. If confirmed, Vance-Cooks would be the first woman and first African-American Public Printer of the United States. More from the GPO press release (PDF):
The U.S. Senate’s Committee on Rules and Administration held the confirmation hearing of Davita Vance-Cooks to be Public Printer. The hearing was chaired by Senator Angus King and attended by ranking member Senator Pat Roberts and Senator Amy Klobuchar. Senator King read into the record an introduction of Vance-Cooks submitted by Senator Mark Warner. Vance-Cooks answered questions on her leadership, accomplishments and experience in the private sector and while holding executive positions at the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). Vance-Cooks explained how GPO is no longer just a printing operation, but has transformed into the digital information platform for the Federal Government. “I have an unwavering belief in the vital mission of GPO—Keeping America Informed,” said Vance-Cooks. “I will ensure that GPO stays dedicated to that mission.”Continue reading
Great list of notable 2012 govt documents. Thanks @GODORT #FDLP
Library Journal has just published "Notable Government Documents of 2012: Looking Back, Moving Ahead." Every year a panel of judges from the ALA's Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) receive submissions and compile a list of notable state and local-, Federal-, and international documents -- including links to and distributors for all of the documents. Check out the amazingly diverse topics covered by govt documents including bees, FOIA, the space shuttle, zombies (yes zombies!!), CA high speed rail, birds and dragonflies and damselflies (oh my!), Documents.OK.gov, cannabis, water and many more. Great job by the community and the committee. Every library should have all of these items in their collections at the very least. FYI, The 2013 process will soon begin. You too can submit your favorite new documents to committee. Continue reading
Library of Congress’ FY 2012 Annual Report
The Library of Congress recently released its Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress FY 2012 (PDF) (get LC's annual reports 2000 - present here and 1866 - 2007 at HathiTrust). Quite an impressive list of statistics!
FY 2012 LC Fast Facts:
- Responded to more than 700,000 congressional reference requests and delivered to Congress more than 1 million research products and approximately 30,000 volumes from the Library’s collections
- Registered more than 511,539 claims to copyright
- Provided reference services to 540,489 individuals in person, by telephone and through written and electronic correspondence
- Circulated more than 25 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to more than 800,000 blind and physically handicapped reader accounts
- Circulated nearly 1 million items for use within the Library
- Preserved nearly 6 million items from the Library’s collections
- Recorded a total of 155,357,302 items in the collections:
- 23,276,091 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
- 12,638,773 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), mono- graphs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other print material
- 119,442,438 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
- 3,420,599 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other re- corded formats)
- 68,118,899 manuscripts
- 5,478,123 maps
- 16,746,497 microforms
- 6,589,199 pieces of sheet music
- 15,704,268 visual materials, as
- 1,354,126 moving images
- 13,640,325 photographs
- 104,270 posters
- 605,547 prints and drawings
- Welcomed nearly 1.7 million onsite visitors and recorded more than 87 million visits and 545 million page views on the Library’s website (at year’s end, the Library’s online primary- source files totaled 37.6 million)
- Employed 3,312 permanent staff members
- Operated with a total fiscal 2012 ap propriation of $629.2 million, including the authority to spend $41.9 million in receipts
Cerf warns: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow
Vint Cerf, Google's "Internet Evangelist," speaking at the Computer World Honors awards program on Monday, warned about the dangers and difficulties of long-term digital preservation. He said what's needed is a "digital vellum" to do long-term digital preservation in the same way as physical media has been preserved. Perhaps he needs to talk to libraries ;-)
Cerf warned that digital things created today -- spreadsheets, documents, presentations as well as mountains of scientific data -- won't be readable in the years and centuries ahead. Cerf illustrated the problem in a simple way. He runs Microsoft Office 2011 on Macintosh, but it cannot read a 1997 PowerPoint file. "It doesn't know what it is," he said. "I'm not blaming Microsoft," said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist. "What I'm saying is that backward compatibility is very hard to preserve over very long periods of time." The data objects are only meaningful if the application software is available to interpret them, Cerf said. "We won't lose the disk, but we may lose the ability to understand the disk." It's not just PowerPoint slides either, he said. The scientific community collects large amounts of data from simulations and instrument readings. But unless the metadata survives, which will tell under what conditions the data was collected, how the instruments were calibrated, and the correct interpretation of units, the information may be lost.Continue reading
Large and small examples of the sequester’s effect on the US
Rachel Maddow had some examples of how the sequester -- or as she so elegantly put it, the "nearly universally agreed-upon to be stupid self-inflicted problem we made for ourselves in Washington" -- has negatively effected the US, with last friday being a mandatory furlough day for 115,000 federal employees. Maddow pointed out that this was the "largest govt shutdown since the '90s."
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