State Agency Databases Activity Report 4/14/2013
It was another busy week at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. For a full list of last week's activity, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are the week's highlights: PAGE REORGANIZATION April Sheppard reorganized the Oklahoma page into the project's standard format. We hope this will make Oklahoma resources more directly comparable to those listed for other states. DATABASES ADDED COLORADO (Samantha Hager) Minority and Women-Owned Businesses - a searchable database of minority and women-owned businesses from the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Find businesses by name, topic, or NAICS. MARYLAND (Siu Min Yu) Waste Kitchen Grease Transporters Search - From the website, "Search here for certified transporters of waste kitchen grease. You may search by the type of certificate, the name of the company registered, or the license plate of the vehicle registered." SOUTH CAROLINA (Ed Sperr) State Salaries Over $50,000 WYOMING (Karen Kitchens) Wyoming State Trademarks - This database covers state trademarks issued between 1906-current located at the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office. New applications and renewals are added monthly. This database will ultimately include the inactive applications and mark images for Wyoming trademarks located at the Wyoming State Archives, back to the first state trademark in 1881. PROJECT WIKI SEEN AS USEFUL TO JOURNALISTS We were pleased to learn that State Agency Databases Project got a brief shoutout from staff at NPR Stateimpact. At around the 52 minute mark of Basics of Data Journalism (April 11, 2013) at http://vimeo.com/63929281, the "State Agency Databases wiki" compiled by ALA is cited a very useful resource. We're happy to see the news of this project get beyond the library community. Finally, this will be the last activity report for April due to some vacation time. We expect the next activity report will be May 5th. Continue reading
Video: The Basics of Data Journalism (April 11, 2013)
Video from NPR Digital Services on the value of government information resources in journalism. Provides examples of data driven stories, discusses where to find data and how to effectively use data without making "rookie mistakes." Also contains information on using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get data not currently accessible. If you watch till the end, you'll see a mention of the usefulness of the State Agency Databases project at about 52:00.
The Basics of Data Journalism (April 11, 2013) from NPR Digital Services on Vimeo
Is your Web site archive ready? Use this test to find out
I had a good time yesterday on a panel about Web archiving and digital preservation at the Society of California Archivists General meeting 2013 (slides to be posted there soon). The panel was organized by Scott Reed at the Internet Archive, and included Scott, Claude Zachary (University of Southern California), myself and my Stanford colleague Henry Lowood. One of the coolest things -- other than the fascinating keynote by Dr. Michael Cohen, who talked about "Culture Wars: Engaging Undergraduates in Documenting the Crisis in California Through the Historian's Eye Project" -- was learning about the site archiveready.com. This is a handy little tool to test your Website's archivability. Paste in your url, and it goes through and checks things like standards compliance, accessibility, CSS, site maps, external media and proprietary objects like flash or quicktime, and lastly whether or not your site is already being collected by the Internet Archive's Wayback machine. Freegovinfo did pretty well in the test with an overall rating of 78%. We lost points for having some external images and external scripts (google analytics and a facebook badge), but I don't consider those things critical to the site for the long-term. How does your site do? Are you ready to be archived?! Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Jacobs and Jacobs interviewed on the Library Cafe
Jim and I had a great time last week talking with Thomas Hill about FGI, the FDLP, and the future of government information. Tom is a librarian at Vassar College and hosts the Library Café, a "weekly program of table talk with scholars, artists, publishers and librarians about books, ideas, and the formation and circulation of knowledge." Thanks Tom for the opportunity to talk about the future of the FDLP and government information and for allowing us to upload a copy of the audio file to the Internet Archive.
CRS on Private Laws
If you provide public service for legal or government information, you have probably come across "private laws" and may have wondered what they are. These are not secret laws (which are laws that the public cannot even see!). These are private laws, which means that they usually deal with immigration issues or claims against the government. You might find this CRS report of interest:
- Procedural Analysis of Private Laws Enacted: 1986-2013, by Christopher M. Davis, Congressional Research Service, RS22450 (April 9, 2013)