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“Making a Passport” Video
The State Department's DIPNOTE blog posted a video of Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack discussing the process for creating a passport and its new security features. For the video's transcript, go to http://video.state.gov. Continue reading
More GPO Scrutiny from The Washington Times & GPO Responds
The Washington Times published the concluding article on their GPO Passport story on Friday:
"When the government finally built a backup passport center to be used in case Washington became debilitated, it picked a location directly in the path of potential future disaster, the hurricane-prone Mississippi Gulf Coast, which was ravaged by Katrina just a few years ago.
...The Times examined the state of America's new e-passport program, disclosing in stories this week that the GPO outsourced production of key components for the passport to overseas facilities and has charged the State Department substantially more than it actually costs to make each passport. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday her department is investigating the pricing issues, and two congressional committees also launched investigations into the security issues raised by having the crown jewels of America's border-security system produced overseas".More details on the State Department's investigation can be found at this article also published by The Washington Times. Also, some members of Congress are investigating the passport security issue, according to an article from The Washington Times, as well as an editorial addressing these GPO passport issues. GPO responded to the second story in a press release dated March 27th and also responded to the third story on the secure production facility via a press release dated March 28th:
"During the investigatory process, GPO did several site analyses for different locations. GPO and the State Department determined Stennis Space Center met all the requirements and to be the most secure and cost effective location".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
Washington Times Scrutinizes GPO
This article was published in The Washington Times yesterday: "Outsourced passport work scrutinized". Several concerns were cited, including security and profits:
"Documents and interviews with Bush administration officials said the GPO made about $100 million in profits on the production of electronic passports since 2006 and their sale to the State Department far beyond the costs. The profits are raising questions among congressional investigators about whether the GPO is complying with laws that limit its business activities to recovering printing costs on a break-even basis".GPO replied with their side of the story via a lengthy press release.
"The current agreed upon price between GPO and our customer (the State Department) for the production of the e-passport is $14.80 per book. That includes: materials, labor, overhead, required inventory, the secure production facility and future investments. GPO does not have any role in setting the price to the public for a passport, the State Department determines that price. ...GPO is unlike most other Federal agencies in that all GPO activities are financed through a business-like revolving fund. The revolving fund functions as GPO’s checking account with the U.S. Treasury. The fund is used to pay all of GPO’s costs and the fund is reimbursed by our agency customers when they pay GPO invoices".Today, the Washington Times published the second part of this three-part story: "GPO profits go to bonuses and trips".
"When the government's main printing agency booked $100 million in unexpected profit it went on a spending spree: large bonuses to top managers, trips to Paris and Las Vegas, and an official photo of the boss that cost $10,000. The bonuses, some nearly as high as $13,000, and travel are raising questions among congressional investigators and Government Printing Office officials about whether the agency is misusing its newfound wealth and whether it received the proper authority for some of the larger compensation payments from the Office of Budget and Management".I'll be honest...my head is spinning. I'm trying to find out more information about this and understand some of these issues. What do you think about all this? I'll be sure to post a link to the third part of this story and any responses from GPO that are released. Stay tuned... Continue reading
Communications Inside GPO
GPO will be presenting information about its internal communications at the conference Strategic Internal Communications In Government - West: Engaging Employees To Drive Change in June in San Diego, CA.
Jeffrey S. Brooke, ABC, Director of Employee Communications, and Terri C. Ehrenfeld, Employee Communications Specialist will be presenting. Here is the abstract of their presenation:
Ghosts, New Years’ Resolutions and Other Agency Information: How To Create Simple Employee Polls That Gather And Distribute Important Information The U.S. Government Printing Of?ce (GPO) started polling employees on October 31, 2007 with this question: Do you believe in ghosts? From this humorous beginning, a weekly employee poll located on the home page of GPO’s intranet site caught on like wild?re. GPO’s Employee Communications Of?ce uses their weekly polls to gather business-related information, to solicit suggestions, to entertain – and to provide education and resources. In this presentation you will learn how to:Continue readingThis session will provide a live demonstration to show how easy it is to create your own employee poll.
- Use simple, commercially-available software to launch your own employee polls
- Promote the poll site to employees and encourage participation
- Create a mix of questions that gathers and distributes valuable information – and uses educational entertainment to keep employees coming back for more
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