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
State Agency Databases Activity Report 6/2/2013
Activity continues at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. For a full listing of all activity during the past two weeks visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED MARYLAND (Siu Min Yu) Maryland Vital Records -- Search for death records in the State of Maryland. Please read the Vital Records Indexing Project information before starating your search. To search, click the link "Search MD Vital Records" from the upper left hand side of the page. WASHINGTON (Marilyn Von Seggern) Search Case Records - Search for a case by court date, case number, or personal or business names associated with a case. A separate Name Search looks across court levels, and an Attorney Search finds district and municipal court proceedings associated with a Bar Number. WYOMING (Karen Kitchens) Wyoming Legislation - This library of legislative materials contains journals, or digests of the journals, from the first territorial legislature that convened in 1869 up to the present. It also contains digitized bills from 1873 to 2000, in addition to bill actions—a record of actions done on each introduced bill—from 1957-2000. LET US KNOW ABOUT PRESENTATIONS OR DERIVATIVE PROJECTS If you have used information from the State Agency Databases Project in a presentation or in a derivative project, we would love to hear from you! Send an e-mail to the project coordinator at danielcornwall@gmail.com and we will note and/or link your talk/project from our page. Continue reading