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The Federal Government Must Reimagine Its Role As An Information Provider
Here is a pre-print (not-final version) of a paper with fascinating ideas about distribution of government information:
- Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P and Felten, Edward W, "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" (2008). Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, 2008.
...reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.While the paper does not address preservation and long term access explicitly, it does suggest that the government should provide a "permanent location" with a permanent URL for "each piece of government data." It also implies (I think) that something like LOCKSS will ensure authenticity and permanent access ("As long as there is vigorous competition between third party sites, we expect most citizens will be able to ?nd a site provider they trust.") I believe that oversimplifies the problem and relies too much on hope and not enough on a social commitment to preservation through public funding of memory organizations. Thanks and a tip of the hat to Joshua Taubere (GovTrack.us) for pointing to this article. He describes and comments on the paper in a post on the Open House Project blog: (Government Data and the Invisible Hand June 6th, 2008 by Joshua Tauberer). Continue reading
Internet Archive Slideshow @ Wired.com
The Internet Archive has many fans here at FGI. If you're not familiar with this project, go check out the slide show at Wired magazine about the mechanics of the Internet Archive Book-Scanning project. "While Google has made headlines over the last two years for scanning thousands of copyrighted works for its Book Search project, the Internet Archive is quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day...the text collection on archive.org is the world's largest online collection of free books, with nearly 350,000 titles and growing." I wrote about creating a digital government documents library with Google Books a few weeks ago, but the Internet Archive also has a plethora of digitized government publications, as pointed out to me in the comments. Since then, I've been happily "bookmarking" government documents of interest to my patrons and my depository. These bookmarked documents can be shared via a wiki subject guide or a social bookmarking tool of your choice. However, unlike Google Books, there is no RSS feed for recently bookmarked documents, and your bookmarks are not arranged via topic or title order, but by the date you bookmarked them. Maybe these features could be suggested to them or brought up in the forum? You can also contribute or donate to the Internet Archive as well. Nevertheless, the satisfaction you get from using and marketing this non-profit, actual library should be rewarding enough! Continue reading
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