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GPO’s “Google”?
A Washington Times article about FDsys describes it as GPO's "Google" for Federal Documents:
Web users could just as easily use Google or other search engines to find government information, but FDsys assures access to the original, authentic versions of government documents.I am amused by the comments posted to this article so far:
Why would you call this "Google" for documents, unless you are simply try to get web hits by using the google name. I went to the site and it is not immediately clear where in tarnation to find anything. I'm 38, computer literate and immediately find the site unappealing, and definitely not user friendly. The genius of google is it's simplicity. The GPO site is just like the GPO building itself Old, archaic, and difficult to navigate. I suppose if I was in the business of publishing paper copies, I wouldn't want people finding things easily online either.Perhaps a government documents librarian could help you navigate it? ;-)
$20 million, five years, and it's still not as good as Google - classic government work. Why didn't they just give the docs to Google and let them do it?Because Google would mess it up even worse. Look at Google Books and how they block full access to public domain government documents! Sigh...why did the article have to mention Google?
I found the search engine very easy to use and very powerful -- apparently it's metadata-aware, so it can do much more sophisticated searches than Google allows. It also looks like they built in a nice drilldown feature that lets you find what you're looking for when you don't know what you're looking for.Glad this user noticed that. And my favorite quote:
It's a good start at providing information to interested citizens. The information overload will be intense.Yes, it is a good start. But the info overload is already intense! Continue reading
Google and WhiteHouse.gov and broken links
It is the time of transition and a lot of links in google searches to whitehouse.gov are broken and new pages are apparently not indexed yet. I imagine that google will update these links soon, but be aware. If you have hard links to White House pages (e.g., Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Office of Homeland Security, Office of National AIDS Policy), you might want to check them! Continue reading
Not Your Father’s Censorship
Not Your Father's Censorship, Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms, by HARRY LEWIS, The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Chronicle Review", Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B9. [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time]
Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales.... Should we feel comfortable relying almost exclusively on private companies to help us find the truth, when we cannot know what version of the truth they are showing us?... Storing information and making it available are now service businesses, and therein lies another censorship opportunity.... U.S. copyright law is such a heavy club that it can abet censorship by parties that simply object to what people are saying about them....Harry Lewis is a professor of computer science at Harvard University and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008). Continue reading
Much Government Information Still Not Searchable on Google, etc.
Firms Push for a More Searchable Federal Web, By Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post,December 11, 2008; D01. Here is another article about the problem that commercial search engines have in indexing government information. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that the "vast majority" of U.S. government information is still not searchable or findable. J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships, estimates that 1,000 federal government Web sites are inaccessible to search engine crawlers.
A person using one of the search engines, for example, can't find Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against a given company, can't discover the picture of a specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian and can't search by name for the details of a Vietnam War casualty. And for many Web users, if an online item can't be found with a Web search engine, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist.What's the problem? Often, it is simply a matter of agency budgets. "[I]nformation technology officials in the federal bureaucracy said that the transition may require significant manpower and that the costs could be large." One official said that "With limited resources as always, it's a little bit hard." Continue reading
tag cloud of the google book deal
I've been so busy lately (research time of the term, helping to organize the first ever Stanford Open Source (un)conference...) that I've neglected to comment on the Google Book Search Copyright Settlement. The library blogosphere is abuzz, so I won't add anything else, just point to some people I trust who've tracked on the Deal much closer than me (like Peter Brantley, Karen Coyle, John Wilkins, and James Grimmelmann; Siva Vaidhyanathan has links to them all plus some of his own commentary!) But I DID want to show the tag cloud of the agreement. Notice anything?
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