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State Agency Databases Activity Report: 7/24/2011
VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project welcomed Julie Huskey as our latest volunteer documents specialist. Julie has adopted Tennessee and has fixed a number of broken links. That leaves the following pages as orphans waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist: Connecticut District of Columbia Illinois Indiana Mississippi New Jersey New Mexico Texas Vermont West Virginia Wisconsin If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details. WIKI ACTIVITY See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights: SUBJECT PAGES We have several "subject focused" pages of state agency databases. We moved this list to the front project page. In additon, the Biographical Databases page has been updated. We fixed the Colorado link and added resources from Florida, Indiana, and North Dakota. If you spot problems with any of the other "subject focused" pages, please let me know. Preferably with new links to replace broken ones. REFORMATTING The State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project simply wouldn't be viable without our volunteers. So we've reformatted all the state pages so that the volunteer name and contact information stands at the top of the page above the table of contents. DATABASES ADDED Kentucky (Glen McAninch) Kentucky Financial Incentives Project Database - From the web site, "is a searchable database of all projects approved for incentives by either the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) or the Bluegrass State Skills Corporation (BSSC), which are active as of January 1, 2008 through the present. Missouri (Annie Moots) Active Missing Persons Map - Click on a county to see a list of missing persons along with details about them. Tennessee (Julie Huskey) License Verification - From the website, "The Tennessee Health Related Board's website verification system is the official licensure verification site of the Health Related Boards. The site contains data obtained from primary (original) sources and is updated daily" Washington (Marilyn Von Seggern) Cleanup Site Search - A searchable inventory of sites currently being investigated, cleaned up, or that have already completed the cleanup process. Sites can be searched by ID number, name, and location (address, city, county or zip code). DATABASES REMOVED Missouri (Annie Moots) Uniform Crime Reporting Statistical Analysis - Searchable by time frame, year, type of report, and geographical area. Continue reading
State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/17/2011
VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project welcomed Brenda Hemmelman as our latest volunteer documents specialist. Brenda has taken over the care and feeding of the South Dakota project page. Brenda has not only fixed all of the broken links on the South Dakota page, but has also added a number of new databases including the Cemetery Record Search, which is considered to be a great resource for pre 1940s burials. In other volunteer news, we are currently in discussions with a few people over the future of the California page and we hope to have it adopted out in the next week. That leaves the following pages as orphans waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist: Connecticut District of Columbia Illinois Indiana Mississippi New Jersey New Mexico Tennessee Texas Vermont West Virginia Wisconsin If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. WIKI ACTIVITY See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights: Nebraska - Extensive link fixing. DATABASES ADDED Arkansas State Vehicle Inventory Search - Searchable by agency, vehicle type, plate number, and most common reported use. Delaware Delaware Environmental Navigator (DEN) - "Will allow the public to view all facility information, violations, enforcement actions and monitoring results pertaining to Air Quality, Waste Water, Water Supply, Hazardous Waste, Hazardous Waste Annual Reports, Solid Waste, Contaminated Site Cleanup, Underground Tanks and Vapor Recovery, Above Ground Tanks, Septic Permits, Wetlands, Ambient Water Monitoring Data and Corrective Action Sites." Nebraska Nebraska Memories - Images of Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials. Continue reading
State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/10/2011
Activity continues at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project. See a blow by blow list of changes from the previous seven days at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Some highlights from this week are: DATABASES ADDED Arkansas Licensed Athletic Trainer Search - Searchable database of licensed athletic trainers, by first name and last name. Connecticut Arthropod (i.e. bugs) Management Database - Intended for commercial plant growers, this database "allows you to search for insects and mites that are pests on trees, shrubs and other plants in the landscape, the nursery or Christmas tree farm." Searchable by damage type, pest and plant. One of each, plus a "profession" must be selected to ensure a successful search. Louisiana Confederate Pension Applications Index Database - This database consists of alphabetically arranged pensions granted from 1898 for veterans and widows. The pensions may include service information, occupation, place of residence, and number of children. The collection also contains a few applications for individuals other than veterans or widows that were not granted. This particular database was also added to our Official Records Databases page. South Carolina Orders - The database of Orders of the Public Service Commission is being expanded to cover orders and rate requests from 1990 to present. Searches can be by keyword, with filtering by industry. Washington Classics in Washington History - A searchable database of more than 160 scanned Washington history publications in 14 subject categories such as geography, territorial and state government, exploration and early travel, and women's stories. DATABASES REMOVED Arkansas Parenting Program Directory - Basic information about existing parent education programs in Arkansas. Directory is searchable by county and keyword. ---- In addition to the changes above, the SADATFS Volunteer Guide was updated with some style guidelines and a clarification was made to the "What is a Database?" page. We continue to need people to adopt the following orphan state pages: California Connecticut - Links fixed this week through govdoc-l crowdsourcing! District of Columbia Illinois Indiana Mississippi New Jersey New Mexico South Dakota Tennessee Texas Vermont West Virginia Wisconsin Continue reading
Sometimes even the live links are dead (or languishing)
Readers of FGI are well acquainted with link rot, where internet links break over time. Today I'd like to talk about something more subtle with no obvious way to detect the problem. On the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I had a link to APOC InfoQuick, a database of disclosure information for public officials and lobbyists from the Alaska Public Offices Commission. Today I visited the link at https://webapp.state.ak.us/apoc/index.jsp and chose the "lobbyist reporting" menu item because I thought it would be fun to list BP lobbyists in a personal blog entry I was drafting. The lobbyist reporting section had a Search Lobbyist Registrations link. I clicked on it, searched for BP and got some listings. But only from 2007, the first year that Sarah Palin was Governor. Searches in other parts of the lobbyist reporting system confirmed that NO information was available after 2007. I started to wonder if I'd missed the session law that repealed lobbying reporting requirements. Then I noticed that the URL started with "webapp" and thought that it might be good to see if this database was still linked from the APOC home page. It wasn't. Now they had a link called "search reports" at http://doa.alaska.gov/apoc/SearchReports/index.html. The page features two reporting systems for public officials - An "interim reporting system" for reports filed 2010 and later and "searchable campaign reporting" which is the public official/candidate portion of APOC InfoQuick. This explains why APOC InfoQuick wasn't taken off the live web. Current information on lobbyists in Alaska is still available, just not database searchable. You can access various PDF lobbyist reports from 2005 forward at http://doa.alaska.gov/apoc/TrainingReports/lobbyist.html. I have no information on why lobbyist information is no longer database searchable and speculating why would take me out of my comfort zone of not discussing policy choices made by the level of government I work for. The main point I'm making is that most librarians and other information specialists are pretty comfortable with link checking and fixing broken links when we find them. But what can we do when a site remains on the web but has stopped being updated? Especially when there's no note on the old site about the change? Continue reading
“Enhancements To WorldWideScience.org Include Arabic Translation, Mobile Capability, and Multimedia Results”
From the OSTI: Arabic has been added to the suite of translated languages at WorldWideScience.org, bringing the total number of translated languages to 10. At WorldWideScience.org, your query can be translated into the languages of the search engine’s 80-plus databases and the results can be translated into your preferred language. In addition, WorldWideScience.org has added a new multimedia search capability, including search of speech-indexed scientific videos from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and CERN. Speech-indexing is provided by the Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS). Also, a mobile version of WorldWideScience.org (http://m.worldwidescience.org) has been launched, which will mark another first in the field of federated search. Continue reading
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