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Tag Archives: Google
Google map tool shows where to vote
Here's a handy little google tool to help you find out where to vote. Go to the 2008 US Voter Info google map, put in your address and voila! you have your voting station and can easily get driving/walking directions. the sidebar also includes information on voter registration, contact information for local voting officials and a link to the Google 2008 election site to track what's happening on election day. This map tool was developed by state and local election officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Los Angeles County and the Voting Information Project in conjunction with the League of Women Voters. [shout out to the UC Berkeley Library govblog from whom I got the tip!] Continue reading
Google and the Search for Federal Government Information
A couple of weeks ago, Bonnie Klein, of the Defense Technical Information Center, submitted a comment here with a link to an article she wrote about the effectiveness of using Google and other commercial search tools to find government information. I recommend it highly:
- Google and the Search for Federal Government Information, by Bonnie Klein, Against The Grain, v.20, no. 2 April 2008.
Google VP for search quality talks about searching
An interesting interview with Udi Manber, vice president in charge of search quality at Google:
- At Google, a search guru's dream comes true, by Stephen Shankland, CNet, June 5, 2008.
The other difference is it depends on location. If you do the same search from a different country, you get different results, even if it's the same language. We will tune the results by the country in which you're searching. It's by language and location.Continue reading
Pentagon Audit of Iraq Spending
I always find it odd when news reports cite government documents without giving a link or good reference to them. It seems to me that this is something news web sites should do regularly. These reports are not always that easy to track down. Case in point: today's New York Times has a story about a Pentagon report:
- Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says, By James Glanz, New York Times, May 23, 2008
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.Using Google to search on the title of the report plus "site:.gov" yields nothing this morning, although the report is available from two different government web sites. The report is available at the site of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee Holds Hearing on Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds for Iraq, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, along with other statements and documents.
- Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, U.S. Defense Department, Office of the Inspector General, Report No. D-2008-098, (May 22, 2008).
Creating Gov Doc “Libraries” in Google Books
Digitized Government Documents in Google Books has been written about quite a lot over here at the FGI (check them out) and I'd like to revisit this topic again but with a different focus.
I was searching for Civil War era government documents for a History Professor, and I realized that we did not own one of the documents he sought. Before suggesting that he interlibrary loan a copy of this document, I decided to search online for a full-text digitized version. Alas, it did not exist in the digital realm, but I did find some other digitized gov docs pertaining to his research needs in Google Books. We were both elated, he because I had found what he needed, and I because so many documents I found digitized on Google Books were the same documents we had lost to mold and water damage from Hurricane Rita!
Out of curiosity, I did a Google Book search for other types of government publications and found these gems:
Trial of the Conspirators, for the Assassination of President Lincoln
Illustrations of the Gross Morbid Anatomy of the Brain in the Insane (isn't that a Cypress Hill song? Nevermind...) by the Government Hospital for the Insane.
How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette (not published by the Government Printing Office, but it is a book housed in the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection in the Library of Congress).
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion
Most of these documents were scanned at large research universities or depositories, but the quality is not always decent andcan sometimes border on the illegible. I was quite amused when I discovered a staff person's hand digitized on this document's cover:
However, there are bigger snafus than a digitized librarian's hand. For example, despite government documents being in the public domain, Google Books treats most post-1922 (i.e. post-copyright law) government documents as copyrighted material by only allowing a limited view! For more details, please read James Jacobs' post on this issue.
Despite all these issues (which have yet to be resolved), I decided to take advantage of the access to full-text, pre-1922 government documents and create a McNeese Gov Docs "Library"account in Google Books for my depository. The account also allows you to subscribe to updates of its holdings via an RSS feed. I put a link to the library account and the RSS feed on my depository's homepage and our "Gov Guides" wiki. I'll add more of these interesting and old documents as I come across them, especially those pertaining to Louisiana or documents that were lost to Hurricane Rita.
Here are some tips for finding gov docs in Google Books: Use Advanced Search, and in the Publisher field, type in Govt OR GPO OR "Government Printing Office". You can also search by agency, (i.e. "Department of the Interior") by typing the name of the agency in the Author field.
Have fun exploring and building your own digital collections, but please let me know if you find some really cool gov docs, ok? Continue reading
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