State Agency Databases Activity Report 6/7/2013
With the June quarterly link check looming next week, activity continues at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. For a full listing of activity in the past week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are the customary highlights: DATABASES ADDED CALIFORNIA (Joel Rane) Nautical Fiction List - An annotated bibliography of novels, along with some short stories, poetry and drama, on the subject of the oceans or seafaring. Searchable by author. Georgia (Chris Sharpe) OASIS (Online Analytical Statistical Information System) - Set of interactive tools used to create maps, tables, or charts from Georgia's health data repository. It is currently populated with Vital Statistics (births, deaths, fetal deaths, induced terminations, pregnancies), Hospital Discharge, Emergency Room Visit, Arboviral Surveillance, Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS), STD, Motor Vehicle Crash, and Population data. TEXAS (Ann Ellis) Texas Medical Board "Look Up a Doctor" - Within this database, patients, consumers, doctors and other health care professionals can locate health care providers and institutions, medical suspensions, various rules and regulations, statistical reports, and practitioner demographics arranged by date. NEW MISSOURI RESOURCES ADDED TO BIOGRAPHICAL DATABASES Despite the page name of Biographical Databases, this page also contact static biography resources because project volunteers thought this would be valuable. Missouri volunteer recently added these resources to the page: Governors - Chronological list of the governors of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. Lieutenant Governors - Chronological list of the lieutenant governors of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. Secretaries of State - Chronological list of the secretaries of state of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. State Auditors - Chronological list of the state auditors of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. State Treasurers - Chronological list of the state treasurers of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. Attorneys General - Chronological list of the attorneys general of Missouri with party, term, home county, and dates of birth and death. State Legislators - Alphabetical list of state legislators including party, office, county/district elected, and years served. Covers 1820 - 2000. Officers of the Missouri Senate and House - Chronological list of officers, including President Pro Tem-Senate, Secretary of the Senate, Speaker of the House, and Chief Clerk of the House, for each session. Covers 1820 - 2011. Judges of the Missouri Supreme Court - Chronological list of judges with home counties and terms served. Covers 1820 - 2011. U.S. Representatives - Alphabetical list of Representatives of the U.S. Congress with district, party, and year elected. U.S. Senators - Alphabetical list of Senators of the U.S. Congress with party and year elected. In addition to the changes mentioned above, Joel Rane, volunteer for California also added a large number of links to California university library catalogs. Continue reading
Library of Congress’ FY 2012 Annual Report
The Library of Congress recently released its Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress FY 2012 (PDF) (get LC's annual reports 2000 - present here and 1866 - 2007 at HathiTrust). Quite an impressive list of statistics!
FY 2012 LC Fast Facts:
- Responded to more than 700,000 congressional reference requests and delivered to Congress more than 1 million research products and approximately 30,000 volumes from the Library’s collections
- Registered more than 511,539 claims to copyright
- Provided reference services to 540,489 individuals in person, by telephone and through written and electronic correspondence
- Circulated more than 25 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to more than 800,000 blind and physically handicapped reader accounts
- Circulated nearly 1 million items for use within the Library
- Preserved nearly 6 million items from the Library’s collections
- Recorded a total of 155,357,302 items in the collections:
- 23,276,091 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
- 12,638,773 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), mono- graphs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other print material
- 119,442,438 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
- 3,420,599 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other re- corded formats)
- 68,118,899 manuscripts
- 5,478,123 maps
- 16,746,497 microforms
- 6,589,199 pieces of sheet music
- 15,704,268 visual materials, as
- 1,354,126 moving images
- 13,640,325 photographs
- 104,270 posters
- 605,547 prints and drawings
- Welcomed nearly 1.7 million onsite visitors and recorded more than 87 million visits and 545 million page views on the Library’s website (at year’s end, the Library’s online primary- source files totaled 37.6 million)
- Employed 3,312 permanent staff members
- Operated with a total fiscal 2012 ap propriation of $629.2 million, including the authority to spend $41.9 million in receipts
Cerf warns: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow
Vint Cerf, Google's "Internet Evangelist," speaking at the Computer World Honors awards program on Monday, warned about the dangers and difficulties of long-term digital preservation. He said what's needed is a "digital vellum" to do long-term digital preservation in the same way as physical media has been preserved. Perhaps he needs to talk to libraries ;-)
Cerf warned that digital things created today -- spreadsheets, documents, presentations as well as mountains of scientific data -- won't be readable in the years and centuries ahead. Cerf illustrated the problem in a simple way. He runs Microsoft Office 2011 on Macintosh, but it cannot read a 1997 PowerPoint file. "It doesn't know what it is," he said. "I'm not blaming Microsoft," said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist. "What I'm saying is that backward compatibility is very hard to preserve over very long periods of time." The data objects are only meaningful if the application software is available to interpret them, Cerf said. "We won't lose the disk, but we may lose the ability to understand the disk." It's not just PowerPoint slides either, he said. The scientific community collects large amounts of data from simulations and instrument readings. But unless the metadata survives, which will tell under what conditions the data was collected, how the instruments were calibrated, and the correct interpretation of units, the information may be lost.Continue reading
International List of Transparency Organizations
The Sunlight Foundation is compiling a list of "transparency advocates" (CSOs, groups, networks, government projects) from all around the world. They are making their findings public as a spreadsheet available as a google doc ( https://docs.google.com/a/sunlightfoundation.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoQuErjcV2a0dF85QTRRSEFtR3pfcjN4VHdwLVYzSXc#gid=0 ). In addition to name and URL, the list includes focus areas and social media links and much more. So far they have a list of over 500 opengov groups across the globe. If you don't see your transparency organization in the list, submit information about it to Sunlight Foundation here: http://snlg.ht/19tUoCS
- International Transparency Organizations, Sunlight Foundation.
Law Libraries and the FDLP: An Interview with Sally Holterhoff
Law Libraries and the FDLP: An Interview with Sally Holterhoff, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Washington Blawg (June 3rd, 2013).
AALL past president Sarah (Sally) G. Holterhoff is the Associate Professor of Law Librarianship and Government Information/Reference Librarian at Valparaiso University Law School Library. Sally has chaired AALL's Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Task Force since its creation in 2012. The Government Relations Office recently sent Sally a number of questions about the mission of the task force, it's past and present work, and the role of law librarians in the FDLP.Continue reading