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Calling all independent government observers!
Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org -- along with folks from several other great orgs -- is organizing a non-conference in Chicago this August. He's looking for 100 delegates to meet and work on issues of making government information more accessible to more people in a variety of formats. Find out more information here. Are there any FGI readers out there interested in going? So far, there are 3 working groups (case law, municipal govts, and copyright) but I'd love to put together a library working group. Any takers? Leave a note in the comments to let us know you're interested in going. In your comments, it'd also be good if you left your ideas about what tasks a library working group could handle. Think of this as pre-un-conference agenda setting :-)
The Internet has created a new generation of individuals and institutes that practice the time-honored tradition of observing and reporting on the activities of government. These are reporters in the sense of court reporters, not journalists, auditors as in independent investigators rather than CPAs. The classic independent observer is the court reporter, such as Henry Wheaton and Richard Peters, two businessmen in the early days of the Republic who took it upon themselves to collect, print, and sell the decisions of courts. Indeed, it was a business spat between those two that led to the classic pronouncement by the Supreme Court on works of government:Continue readingThe Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right. Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834)The new breed of government observers span all walks of life. In addition to a vibrant commercial sector, there are increasingly a number of nonprofit, academic, and individual citizen efforts."
Recycle your PACER documents
Here at Stanford, the campus recently enjoyed the excitement that is Recyclemania. (Stanford actually won the Gorilla Prize!) In the spirit of Recyclemania, I want to share an amazing project for recycling PACER documents. The site, brought to you by Carl Malamud and the good people at Public Resource, gives everyone a chance to liberate PACER case downloads. How do you do it? Here are the simple instructions from the site:
"Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain. We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. "Interested in helping, but you don't have the time to recycle documents onto the site? Well, lucky for you, the site also allows you contribute with Digital Offsets. The digital offsets are a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org which will then be utilized to purchase PACER Documents for the site. Are you lucky enough to live near one of the 16 libraries with FREE access to PACER? Perhaps, you want to sign up to join the Thumb Drive Corps, who will go to these locations with a jump drive and download as many PACER documents as possible for the Pacer recycling site. So, what is good for the bottle, is good for the docket.... -Erika Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: Carl Malamud
Interviews with Innovators: Online Access to Public Information: Carl Malamud, IT Conversations, March 18, 2008.
For many years Carl Malamud has been a tireless crusader for online access to U.S. public information: SEC filings, patents, Congressional video, the Smithsonian's historical photgraphy, and most recently, case law. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Malamud about his strategies, accomplishments, and future plans.This is an inspiring interview. If only there were libraries and library directors who had the simple, effective vision that Carl has!! Continue reading
2 Million Pages of legal documents made available free online
Creative Commons has announced that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.
"Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information."
Boston Public Library Digitization Project
Carl Malamud says his motivation is to make the workings of the government more accessible at no cost and that "This is society's operating system."
- Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web. By John Markoff, New York Times (December 27, 2007).
Continue readingA digital library partnership, including two nonprofit organizations and the Boston Public Library, is preparing to begin making digital copies of the library's paper-based government documents collection, which will then be made available on the Internet.
The project, which will take two years and require the hand scanning of millions of pages of government hearings and related publications, will cost an estimated $6 million, according to the project's sponsors.
Boston Public Library librarians said they planned to begin by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which is regularly sought after by its patrons.
The project is being undertaken by Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library.
The project is the brainchild of founders of the two organizations, Carl Malamud and Brewster Kahle...
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