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Demonstration videos of GPO’s FDsys database
Check out the search demonstrations of GPO's FDsys (nee Future Digital System). GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) will "manage federal govt documents, allow them to be uploaded, accessed via the internet, included in the depository library program (italics added!), and preserved for the future." The video images are a bit fuzzy, but you can see that the basic utility of FDsys from an end-user's perspective is getting close to full functionality. I'm most interested in APIs and other tools and services for exporting large chunks of data and associated metadata for reuse, digital deposit into library repositories/LOCKSS caches etc and generally being able to expand on access, preservation and long-term sustainability. Hopefully, future video demonstrations will elaborate on those possibilities.
- part 1: simple search
- part 2: advanced search
- part 3: citation search
- part 4: boolean search
- part 5 is mentioned in part 4, but there's no video available as of 11/28/08 from GPO's youtube page.
Planned Launch of GPO’s Federal Digital System (Fdsys)
The first public release of GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) http://www.gpo.gov/projects/fdsys.htm will launch later this year. Staff in the Superintendent of Documents Library Services and Content Management unit at GPO have been working with GPO's Program Management Office who are responsible for developing this system. We want to ensure that the requirements for the Federal Depository Library Program will be met. In order to ensure that we are accurately communicating the requirements capabilities of the system, we are requesting your feedback. Based on your knowledge of FDsys, what are your expectations for the first public release? We want to make sure we continue to get this information in the hands of the development team and keep lines of communications open. Additional information should be also be shared with GPO's Program Management Office at pmo@gpo.gov Continue reading
GPO/GODORT Conf Call Minutes Posted
Bill Sleeman, chair of the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT), recently posted the minutes to the GPO / GODORT Steering Conference Call of March 12, 2008. These conference calls take place from time to time and often have news of value. The minutes can be found (may have to scroll) at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/GODORT_Chair and covered the following topics, among others:
- Request for Information for Mass Digitization Opportunities
- Status of EPA Web Harvesting
- Status of the Federal Digital System (FDSys)
- Addition of pre-1976 cataloging to the Catalog of Government Publications - in progress.
- Continued distance ed through OPAL
- Current stats on the newish Government Information Online reference service.
LH & RHM: Status of EPA harvesting project: GPO worked through 300 of the documents to gather information on what it will take for GPO to provide access to harvested materials (process, workflow and staffing implications). So far: the back end automation of meta-data extraction is not ready; parameters for metadata that accompanies the files needs improvement to automate de-duping; and the rules, methods and mechanisms for harvesting need to be refined (approximately 28% of material was not in scope). Basically, it is still taking more staff time to make these available than GPO can afford. BS asked about the FGI taxonomy experiment and if GPO would be investigating the results of that effort. GPO may incorporate that information into the project as the project moves forward.GPO's results of automated harvesting finding a lot of out of scope material and difficult automated extraction of metadata are about what I expected based on my own experience and from my reading of the literature. Whether or not GPO builds on our modest taxonomy experiment (Thanks Bill!), I think that a GPO - community/citizen collaboration will be needed to begin getting a handle on web-based agency documents. They could start simply by publishing their spidering logs and see what happens. Or perhaps they can obtain some of the $2 Billion/week currently being spent elsewhere. If GPO choose to take the mass collaboration route, I hope the documents community is in the forefront of helping them. If you're interested in taking part in our tagging experiment, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We will be running the project through April 18, 2008. To see what has been tagged so far, please visit http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject. OPAL Training Here are the notes on this subject:
LC: OPAL, GPO continues to use OPAL for online training and demos. At present, technical capabilities limit presentations to slide shows, such as PowerPoint presentations. Interactive web functions will be added in the future. January call for participation in creation of tutorials netted one submission; hoping to generate interest at DLC.The FDLP has over 1200 libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? A majority of FDLP libraries are teaching oriented academic libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? Hello! I know I'm not the only one who has insisted that GPO provide training between conferences for those of us who don't get out much. The documents community has a great reservoir of government information expertise. We should be actively aiding GPO in their efforts to spread that expertise. I admit that GPO's one submission wasn't from my library. I have a pretty new docs staff that's still getting up to speed. But that can't be the case everywhere. If only 10% of FDLP libraries could step up with a program, that would still be 120 programs -- twice a week for a whole year. Just so I can at least pretend to put my money (or staff time) where my mouth is, I will spend some time next month looking at our library's gov info information strengths, our customer needs and patron interests. And then sometime during the summer I or someone else from our library will submit a program. If you run a depository, will you commit to doing the same? Not only does GPO need our help, so do our colleagues. FGI thanks the GODORT and GPO personnel who participated, Jill Vassilakos-Long for taking the minutes and Bill for posting them to the ALA GODORT Wiki. Continue reading
A First Look at FDSys
The Government Printing Office released two videos demonstrating the "Proof of Concept" release of the Federal Digital System (FDSys):
Search - 3:22
Submission - 9:21
The videos require Windows Media Player to view and one of our volunteers was unable to view the videos using his Mac version of WMV. But I did get a look.
Everything below is subject to GPO's own caveat that this "proof of concept" version will change a lot between now and the first public release in late 2008.
I was impressed with the search functionality. The search box is simple with few options, but navigation boxes on the right hand side of the screen allow one to quickly zero in on likely documents. Search results may also be sorted by title, relevance, type of resource and date issued. Individual records have links to the content, preservation metadata and more.
The only problem I had with the search was the fact the search defaults to "OR". GPO itself now understands that is a problem based on beta user input and the video narrator promised this would be fixed in the public release. I have to admit that I don't understand how anyone in the age of Google would have made a default "OR" to begin with. But what's important is that the problem is being fixed.
The Submission section of FDSys will not be available to the public, but is interesting to watch the demo to see what is involved with document creation. Currently the ability to add metadata does not include keywords, which is something I hope will be included in the official release. Given GPO's move towards brief records under some circumstances, it would be very helpful to have agency generated keywords in FDSys.
There is some information in the agency submission side of FDSys that I hope carries over to either the public side or at least for FDLP librarians. FDSys requires an agency contact for every document. It would be helpful to librarians to a contact for documents in case something goes out of print or if a user had in-depth questions about the content of a given document.
Overall, this looks like a promising start. No mention of the alert features and push delivery slated for future releases, but hopefully those will be demoed soon.
Continue reading
Delivery by FTP and RSS coming in FDSys
The Government Printing Office released a new technical document on the Federal Digital System (FDSys) called FDsys System Release and Capabilities v5.0, December 2007.
In paging through this document, I was pleased to learn that when the latest release (1C) is deployed, FDSys will support delivery of documents in formats including PDF by FTP and RSS. The sections making note of these new features are brief:
4.10.5 Delivery by RSS
FDsys will allow users to sign up to receive DIPs via RSS.
4.10.8 Delivery by FTP
Release 1C.4 builds upon 1C.2 by allowing users to request delivery based on user defined criteria.
Depending on how these features are implemented, it could be exciting for federal documents stakeholders including depository libraries.
As previously announced, I believe, people will also be able to get notifications of new content without having to get full file downloads:
4.10.22 User Notifications
Release 1C.4 will build upon Release 1C.2 by providing additional email and RSS notifications. Users will be able to sign up to receive notifications for system events, business events, and job processing events. This includes receiving a notification when now content is added to a collection or when there is a match to a user defined string.
According to the release schedule, some of these features will appear by November 2008 and others won't be ready till 2009. But it looks like GPO is on the right track and bringing out features long sought by many in the documents community. We at FGI are cautiously optimistic.
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