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Tag Archives: GODORT
ALA GODORT Wants YOU to help build 50-State Database Registry
As part of their activities in the last ALA annual meeting, the GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force (SLDTF) approved the creation of a fifty-state registry of state government produced databases on the new GODORT wiki. SLDTF believes that there will be great value to librarians and end users alike in having the "invisible web" of state produced databases together in one place. You can find the home page for this project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Right now, only Alaska has a developed page which you can find at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Alaska as an example for what SLDTF hopes the other state pages will look like. Once this registry is complete, it will have a number of uses, not the least of which will be showing that documents librarians are tech savvy people who know where the information is buried even when Google can't find it. BUT, they need your help to make this happen. There are four ways you can help with this project: 1) Go to the wiki and start adding any databases you are familar with. Just click on the "edit" tab. Registering with the GODORT wiki is recommended but not required. 2) Agree to be a "documents specialist" for a particular state and post your contact information so people who are not comfortable with editing wikis can e-mail updates to you. 3) Recruit state agency department webmasters, other state employees or other subject specialists to contribute to the database listing. 4) As you become aware of a new state (or local) government database, e-mail Daniel Cornwall, project coordinator (dan DOT cornwall AT Alaska DOT gov) or the documents specialist for that state if you are not comfortable with editing a wiki. To me, this seems like a perfect collaboration project for the documents community. You WILL benefit from learning where your state's databases are and posting them to this annotated registry. The rest of us will benefit from having similar databases available from the fifty states and learning about your state's unique content. So, help ALA GODORT and yourselves by contributing to this project! If you adopt a state's page, would you leave a comment here so people can see how the registry is coming along? Continue reading
Iowa Publications Online – Thanks SDLTF!
As part of the ALA meeting: State & Local Documents Task Force, GODORT Annual Meeting: Washington D.C. Saturday, June 22, 2007; 8:00-10:00am Renaissance Hotel: Congressional A/B There will be an open forum that I hope all ALA-attending FGI readers will visit: "Preservation of born digital Iowa online state publications (technological aspects). Barbara Corson, Program Director for Library Services for the Iowa State Library, will be speaking about the technical nuts and bolts of the Iowa Publications Online Project. If you want to know how to preserve born digital State Publications you will want to come to this session. " Compliments to SLDTF for having a session on preserving born digital publications. We at FGI hope it is one of many to come out of ALA Godort meetings. If you attend, please send a write up to admin AT freegovinfo.info. If you're like me and not able to attend ALA this summer, check out the Iowa Publications Online Project and its associated FAQ. Continue reading
James’ open tabs 1/26/07
It's been one of those crazy weeks with lots going on. So rather than blog all the things that I had planned to blog about this week (and last week while in Seattle for ALA!), here's the list of open tabs on my browser. Ahhhhh, I feel better now :-)
- Sloan Foundation funds "open" alternative to Google Book Search [Shoutout to Rick Prelinger!]
- Copyright, DRM Technologies, and Consumer Protection March 9 & 10, 2007 ~ University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law
- The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?. article by Cass R. Sunstein
- Why reference and authority matter [Thanks jessamyn!]
- GODORT's new wiki!. Try it, you'll like it!!
- How to disable Google personalized search. For you privacy nuts...er...concerned folks out there.
- Jake Appelbaum lecture on anonymous communication. And another for the privacy-concerned.
- WIPO anti-podcasting treaty refuses to die
- BoingBoingBoing podcast 9: Matt Haughey of MeFi
- Sen. "Series of Tubes" Stevens introduces DOPA II: the sequel
GODORT update
Now I'm at the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) update. On the agenda are Cheryl Nyberg, University of Washington law library talking about the Washington State Digital Archive, Matt Brosius from OECD, and Judy Russell, soon-to-be-retiring GPO superintendent of documents. Cheryl mentioned that the information in the state archive is "open source" in that all content is not tied to individual software and so can be preserved and shifted into new and/or future systems. Much is available including purchase of "certified" copies of records in cases where records/documents are needed for legal proceedings. Nice touch! Unfortunately, they're using a plugin called Djvu. The plugin is necessary to view the documents. It's basically a PDF viewer from a private company. I recently ran into this plugin for while using the Spectator Project, a 19th century digital newspaper project, and was dismayed (as was the user I was helping) because the plugin could not be installed on the public computer that she was using. I would HIGHLY recommend that future archives projects -- not to mention current ones like the WA state archive -- should give users multiple ways to access documents. Access is the key right!! Washington State library is actively harvesting WA state documents, storing them locally and linking them to the WA State library catalog. Shouldn't EVERY state library be doing that?!?! Also in the works are a plan to connect the digital archive and state publications. This will happen by the 4th quarter of 2007 hopefully. Next up is Matt Brosius: Matt will talk about what it took to get Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) into the digital realm with their e-books. OECD publishes @ 150 book titles/year plus 20 serials and 40 statistical databases. They're mandated to recover their costs of publishing. The process of shifting to online started in 1998, launched December, 1999. They decided on an e-journal infrastructure that could recoup costs. All books are in PDF format. Metadata for almost all chapters of almost all books (abstracts by authors) make access very good. Matt noted that the OECD search engine is not very good. They're moving into XML in order to be more flexible in the future. Online access has risen every year. Bibliographic information is listed on every page so that users will know where they are. They also have several thousand excel spreadsheets of data, and will soon have citation management integrated into the SourceOECD system, videos and podcasting. Matt mentioned GAPMINDER, but I haven't had a chance to look into that further. If anyone does, please leave a comment with your thoughts. Next up is Judy Russell: Bruce James retired on 1/3/07. there's no news on a replacement for Public Printer. GPO is in waiting mode in terms of appropriations. The shift to a democratic majority means that things are in a holding pattern. It will probably take a month or more for the Senate appropriations com to get together. GPO has been talking with the administrative office of the US courts to provide access to US courts' PACER system (public access to court electronic records). It is expected that this will happen through the FDLP (I didn't get the whole gist here because the mic was not very close to Judy. Sorry!). Expectation is that this will go through by 3rd quarter (sept?) 2007. Also a project going on with NTIS to give access to their bibliographic records. Depositories will be able to download at no charge their documents connected to these records. There will be a beta phase of this project. Send an email to epruszko@gpo.gov if you're interested in being in the beta rollout. Legacy digitization project is continuing as well. Web discovery project is going forward. GPO has 2 vendors crawling, identifying and targeting documents on the EPA Web site. 3 crawls were done. A huge amount of content was harvested and now GPO will be looking through to deal with it. A large amount of individual assessment, cataloging and purl creation will need to be done before these documents will be available. Continue reading
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