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Help improve public access to Congressional/legislative information #FDLP
FGI just signed the letter below written by the Sunlight Foundation asking Congress to improve public access to legislative information by directing the Library of Congress to make their Thomas database accessible in bulk format. If you and/or your organization believe that free access to Congressional information is of critical importance, please please consider adding your name to the list of signatories on the letter. Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation's policy counsel and director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, requests that people sign on by COB on Monday April 2nd. Interested people may also email Daniel at dschuman@sunlightfoundation.com) with how they would like to be identified on the letter. Daniel thanks you and so do we!
Dear Congressman/Senator: We are writing to ask you to improve public access to legislative information by directing the Library of Congress to publish the THOMAS database online. Congress created THOMAS with the mission of making federal legislation freely available to the public. While times have changed, and technologies have changed, THOMAS has not kept up. As a result, millions of Americans access basic information about legislation and congressional actions through online information providers like GovTrack, OpenCongress, and Washington Watch. These free non-governmental websites are forced to rely on brittle programs to harvest information from THOMAS’s complex website. This harvesting is imperfect, expensive, and time consuming. The better approach -- which has been adopted by industry and many in government -- is to publish legislative information "in bulk" in addition to other means. Bulk access would in essence make the entire legislative database available for download, instead of requiring users to gather information by visiting hundreds or thousands of web pages. It would make it easier for third parties to build innovative new tools, and ensure that Americans have the most accurate information at their fingertips. Congress already expressed its support for bulk access downloads in 2009, but the Library of Congress, which oversees THOMAS, has not acted. In the meantime, GPO, the executive branch, and the House of Representatives are already publishing information online in bulk. The time has come for action. In this year's legislative branch appropriations bill, we urge you to direct the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS within 120 days. The Library should also immediately create an advisory committee on improving public access to legislative information composed of people inside and outside of government. Congress should ensure that THOMAS lives up to its potential of making the legislative branch more open and transparent. For more information, please contact Daniel Schuman, policy counsel, the Sunlight Foundation, at 202-742-1520 x 273 or dschuman@sunlightfoundation.comContinue reading
Digital #FDLP: Louisiana GODORT keynote address
[UPDATE 3/25/12: for those of you on ipads/iphones (which don't play well with flash), I've attached the PDF version below. JRJ] I just got back from Shreveport, LA (and boy are my arms tired :-)). I was honored to be invited as the keynote speaker at the Spring 2012 meeting of the Louisiana Government Documents Round Table (LA GODORT) during the 2012 LA Library Association annual conference. We had a great conversation about the future of government information and the FDLP -- and I reminded everyone to submit their FDLP library forecast survey!! I showed a few case studies describing ways that librarians could build digital govt documents collections (including Everyday Electronic Materials (EEMs), LOCKSS-USDOCS, and Archive-it). Thanks again to Miriam Childs, Stephanie Braunstein and the rest of the LA GODORTers for a wonderful time!
The Impact of Disclosure on Public News & Knowledge
In honor of Sunshine Week the Sunlight Foundation has created Back to the Source: REDACTED in which they take original investigative articles and manually black out all the information that would not be known without existing transparency measures. It is worth taking a look at just how little we would know with the Freedom of Information Act and other public disclosure laws.
- Back to the Source REDACTED: The Impact of Disclosure on Public News & Knowledge, by Melanie Buck, Sunlight Foundation (March 14, 2012). While journalistic skill and technique are essential for writing a good investigative article, we often take it for granted that journalists have access to the information they need to write complex news stories. Without publicly available data, much of our news would not be possible. We've been looking at investigative articles as part of an ongoing series called "Back to the Source" for the last several months. Now we've decided to amp it up a bit and make redacted visuals to explicitly demonstrate how little the public would know without laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available.
Accuracy of Digitization
The Update on February 2012 Activities of the HathiTrust reports on research being done by the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) to quantify occurrences of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors in the HathiTrust corpus. OCR is the technology that converts a scanned image to text that can be searched and analyzed. Members of the HTRC examined 256,000 non-Google digitized volumes from HathiTrust using a clever algorithm that compared OCR text to a dictionary of known words. Using a supercomputer and a set of rules that were verified by a human expert, they found that 84.9 percent of the volumes examined (217,754 of the 256,416) had one or more OCR errors and 11% of the pages (7,745,034 of the 69,297,000) had one or more errors. The average number of errors per volume was 156. As we at FGI have argued here before, we believe that it essential to take into account OCR accuracy and error rates when digitizing paper collections. This is particularly important when digitizing books that contain statistical tables since it is harder to use current OCR technologies to accurately convert image scans to numbers than it is to convert scans to text. It is also harder to evaluate the accuracy of such conversions; you can't use a dictionary of known statistics the way you can use a dictionary of known words. (The HTRC study did not, apparently, examine accuracy of statistical table conversions.) Because of the large volume of such information in government publications, this is a very important issue as we collectively try to digitize our paper collections, evaluate their accuracy and usability, and determine how many paper copies we need to keep after digitization (see Achieving a collaborative FDLP future). Continue reading
Who Is Protecting the People’s Property?
April 10, 2012 / Leave a comment
A new article worth reading!
- Who Is Protecting the People's Property?, by Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, SRRT Newsletter, Issue 178, (March 2012).
...Some librarians are discarding the paper Serial Set when they buy the digital version. The publishers were only able to digitize the whole set because missing volumes were provided by libraries... Tax supported libraries and librarians preserved them for several hundred years. But now, preserving them has become a burden and space is needed for the machines needed to read the digital version that libraries will pay for with more tax dollars.
...We need to think and plan like librarians and prepare for the future. Our collections were built by thousands of librarians who cared about future readers. Some of them have retired rather than see their collections destroyed. Some have been persuaded to sign letters of support for policies they do not support. Some are desperately trying to protect their collections. Some have had their collections taken away and some have had their jobs taken away. Most of them are still trying to serve the needs of the American people. Documents librarians need your help to convince library directors and the policy makers of ALA to protect the past to ensure a good information future for all...
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