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IASSIST 2008 conference: the technology of data
As you can see by the flurry of blog posts, Shinjoung and I are trying to catch up after an extremely busy week in which we helped out with the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 34th annual Conference hosted at Stanford University. The workshops and programs (at least what I was able to attend in between running around, helping attendees get settled and work out their technology issues, helping to stream the video into Second Life ...) were extremely interesting. I even got to talk for a few minutes to Catherine Ruggles, one of the plenary speakers, who's the daughter of Richard Ruggles. I told her about scanning the 1965 report from the Social Science Research Council chaired by her father, which seemed to please her! Now I'll have just enough time to catch up on sleep and then it'll be off to Anaheim for the ALA annual conference. I'll be hosting a preconference called Docs2.0, leading a session on digital collections at the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting, participating in the Publications Committee (anybody want to be the new editor for Documents to the People (DttP) (.doc) or write an article for the new GODORT occasional paper series?!) and generally being in 2 places at once the whole weekend. Please say hi! if you see me running around. There's always time to chat :-) Continue reading
GODORT preconferences still open to registration
ALA annual conference is coming up and there are a couple of GODORT preconferences that may be of interest to FGI readers. Since they're on different days, you could attend both! Want to learn more about Web2.0 technologies and documents librarianship? There's still time to register for the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. The 1/2 day preconference will be chock full of both hands-on work and discussion about Web2.0 tools and how they can be used to help documents librarians with their collections and services. FGI volunteers Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs will be presenting about RSS and del.icio.us; Additional speakers on the slate are Amy West, David Oldenkamp, and the keynote will be John Wonderlich, Program Director of the Sunlight Foundation. The other preconference of interest is entitled, "Got Elections? Informing the Public" on Thursday, June 26, 8:30am - 4:30pm. This is cosponsored by GODORT, ACRL, and LPSS. At this lively full-day workshop with nationally recognized speakers, attendees will learn Who Decides? (Information on Voters), Who Runs? (Information on Candidates), Who Cares? (Information on Issues), and Who Wins? (Information on Election Results). Help library and online users make sense of the information they find. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center. Location: California State University Fullerton, Pollak Library, 800 N State College Blvd. Speakers: Rhodes Cook, Political Analyst, RhodesCook. com; Stephen Woods, Social Sciences Librarianm Pennsylvania State University; Chris Palazzolo, Librarian for Political Science & International Documents, Emory University; John Hernandez, Politics and U.S. Documents Librarian, Princeton University; Erik Estep, North Carolina Reference Librarian, East Carolina University; Jerry Wong, Information Services Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau Tickets: Advance: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/ Retired Member: $100. Onsite: GODORT Member: $140; ALA Member: $165; Non-Member: $215; Student/Retired Member: $115 Event Code: GO1 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
GODORT preconference: Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community
We at FGI are trying to get the word out about the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. Registration is now open and seating is limited to 35. So do it now! (FGI is bringing speakers and refreshments!!). For further questions, email James at jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu. This program will highlight tools like wikis, blogs, social tagging, custom search engines, flickr and other Web services, and will focus on how these new technologies can enhance library services. Speakers will highlight projects and give hands-on training to set up and administer these services. Attendees will leave the program with knowledge of tools to help them collaborate, build Web collections, and better connect with their users, as well as having real examples of projects to use as templates. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center. Speakers:
- James R. Jacobs, International Documents Librarian, Stanford University. "Social tagging for building subject portals"
- Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota. "Integration of 2.0 tools like Instant Messaging (IM) for reference"
- Jim A. Jacobs, Data Librarian Emeritus, University of California at San Diego. "RSS for documents librarians"
- David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University. "Custom search engines with GoogleCSE"
- John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation. (keynote) Open House Project
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Tickets:
Advance: GODORT Member: $100; ALA Member: $125; Non-Member: $175; Student/ Retired Member: $75.
Onsite: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/Retired Member: $100
Event Code: GO2
Go here to register. You'll be glad you did!! Continue reading
Hearing On Sensitive But Not Classified Information (1987)
Proving that everything old is new again in terms of information restriction, I came across this title from my federal depository's shelves: Hearing on sensitive but not classified information : Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Thursday, May 28, 1987 by United States. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. I thought this part of the introduction was interesting reading:
The difference of opinion was over the means to protect this information. In general, the library and information science communities felt that sensitive material should be classified in order to relieve these communities of the burden of limiting access to information and determining which information should not be made available to foreign nationals or governments. In general, the government and the defense establishment would prefer that the library and information communities exercise a degree of judgement in releasing sensitive data to foreign nationals in order to slow up the flow of valuable technological and other information to the East Bloc. Classifying much of this information would take time and expense for all concerned, as well as limiting the flow of sensitive information to all Americans.In my view the information flowing to the Eastern Bloc couldn't have been that useful since the Warsaw Pact imploded barely two years after this hearing. In this hearing, Sandra K. Peterson of Yale University represented the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT). Her testimony begins on page 41 of the hearing proceedings. Time constraints keep me from giving you most of Ms. Peterson's testimony, but a key point was that the government's proposed definition of "Sensitive but unclassified" was so broad that GODORT believed "Much of the information that the federal government collects compiles, produces, publishes and disseminates falls within these definitions." Towards the end of her prepared testimony, Ms. Peterson emphasized GODORT's basic position which I believe they hold today. I know we do at FGI:
In summary, GODORT believes that unclassified government information of all formats should be accessible by the American public.Hear, Hear! Now if we could just make the SBU concept go away. Seems like there is more work to do. Continue reading
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