Category Archives: Blogging history

Borrowing from BoingBoing, one of our favorite blogs, we’re instituting a new series “this week in FGI blogging history” where we’ll go back in the FGI vault to see what we were writing about 1 year ago, 5 years ago, and 9 years ago (November will be our 10 year anniversary!). Enjoy and let us know what you think.

One year ago this week:

Lunchtime listen: Jacobs and Jacobs interviewed on the Library Cafe: Jim and James talk with Thomas Hill about FGI, the FDLP, and the future of government information. Tom is a librarian at Vassar College and hosts the Library Café.

Digital Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard: We propose the “Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval” (DSSOA) as a simple way of describing digital objects created from printed books and other non-digital originals as surrogates for the analog original. The DSSOA denotes that a digitization accurately and completely replicates the content and presentation of the original. It can be used to express an intended goal during the planning stages of digitization and to guarantee the quality of existing digital surrogates. The DSSOA Criteria can be used to evaluate individual digital objects or entire completed collections. DSSOA is independent of production technologies and methodologies and focuses instead on the perspective of consumers — including libraries that rely on digital surrogates.

Five years ago this week:

OpenSecrets.org Goes OpenData: Today the Center for Responsive Politics has announced that it’s putting 200 million data records from its archive directly into the hands of citizens, activists, journalists and anyone else interested in following the money in U.S. politics. The data are available through the site’s Action Center. Thanks OpenSecrets!

Nine years ago this week:

Govtrack: Legislative Tracking for the Common Citizen: http://www.govtrack.us/ is a creative use of freely available government information resources to create something new and potentially valuable, but still free.