Farewell OpenCongress, hello GovTrack
The news just hit the street that Sunlight Foundation’s OpenCongress will be retired on March 1. OpenCongress has been a valuable tool for Congressional information seekers since 2007. But this news is actually a good thing. OpenCongress will now point users to GovTrack.us which also has a long history of valuable information service. And what’s […]
Thoughts on the connection between collection development and research/information need
A friend just posted this really interesting Atlantic article on Facebook about “redlining” and a project called T-RACES, or Testbed for for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces that brought me back to my first year as a govt documents librarian in 2002. “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood.” Alexis C. Madrigal. […]
John Oliver shows the incredible hypocrisy of voter ID laws
Voting is one of our basic rights in the US — though you might not know it from the tragically low turnouts in US elections. Some of that can be blamed on voter apathy, but much can also be blamed on voter ID laws put in place to suppress voter turnout of especially African American […]
Do libraries need more shelving? Isn’t everything digital?
We here at FGI have been making the argument against the destruction of physical collections in connection with digitization efforts for a long time (see e.g., Wait! Don’t Digitize and Discard! A White Paper on ALA COL Discussion Issue #1a and What You Need to Know about the New Discard Policy). So it’s nice to […]
Marine Corps Film Repository
University of South Carolina Plans to Preserve, Digitize U.S. Marine Corps Film Repository InfoDocket. The university’s Moving Image Research Collections will digitize the Marine Corps Film Repository, with plans to eventually place the films online for the public to view free of charge.