The future of libraries and the value of libraries is content — including free content
Today I was re-reading an article from a few years ago and was struck by how prescient it was in providing a formula for the success of libraries. Here are some of its main points:
- Find a niche with growth potential (serve a community).
- Organize information to make it useful
- The internet is a distribution channel -- not a product (add value!)
- Turn words into math (sophisticated mathematical formulas can find patterns in content and make it more discoverable)
- Separate the signal from the noise (Type the word "jaguar" into Google's search engine and you'll get 64 million results. Fix this!)
- Computers can't do everything (humans indexers and editors make the difference that algorithms cannot)
- Print's not dead, it just needs online help
- Westlaw rises to legal publishing fame by selling free information, By Erin Carlyle, City Pages, (April 29, 2009).
Compilations of public laws
The U.S. House Office of Legislative Counsel produces a number of compilations of public laws for use by the committees. Recently, they made them over 250 of these compilations available to the public on their web site:
- Statute Compilations: A list of our frequently requested compilations in PDF format.
[T]he frequently requested compilations of those public laws that either do not appear in the United States Code or that have been classified to a title of the Code that has not been enacted into positive law. They have been prepared by our Office for the use and convenience of the Members and committees of the House.
- Unofficial documents: The compilations of public laws, as amended, provided at this site are unofficial documents and should not be cited as legal evidence of the law.
- Status: Please note carefully the date of the last amendment compiled, as some of these files have not yet been updated to reflect the most recent amendments enacted.
When bits go bad: the Atlas of Digital Damages
Ever heard the term "bit rot" or wondered what actually happens when electronic files go bad? The Atlas of Digital Damages is a collection of files with corrupted bits, so you can visually see what happens. The Atlas is a flickr album, or rather "a staging area for collecting visual examples of digital preservation challenges, failed renderings, encoding damage, corrupt data, and visual evidence documenting #FAILs of any stripe." So, in addition to viewing these examples, you too can contribute examples to help build the Atlas' collection. A blog post by Barbara Sierman, from the National Library of the Netherlands, first posed the question and well, folks ran with the idea and created this "crowd sourced effort" to document digital degradation. See, "Where is our atlas of digital damages?".
I discovered this nifty item while reading through the November Digital Preservation Newsletter from the Library of Congress (there's lots of great project updates and information, especially on the geospatial digital preservation front in there - so go check it out!)
and check out the LOCKSS project for digital preservation approaches and methods to prevent bit rot on a large scale.
[This post was nicely sent to us by our pal Kris Kasianovitz, International, State and Local Government Information Librarian at Stanford. If others want to send us items of interest, please send them to freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com. Thanks Kris!!] Continue reading
Ironic CRS report on government transparency
The Congressional Research Service has a new report on government government transparency, which, ironically, does not mention the fact that the report is available to the public in spite of the congressional policy that bars CRS from making this report public. Thanks and a big hat tip to Secrecy News, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists, for making the report available!
- Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch, by Wendy Ginsberg, Maeve P. Carey, L. Elaine Halchin, Natalie Keegan, Congressional Research Service, R42817 (November 8, 2012).
- The Meaning of Transparency, and More from CRS, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, (November 13th, 2012). It also does not consider in any depth how technological changes are affecting government information policy, perturbing or mooting longstanding official positions on disclosure and non-disclosure. Nor does it explore political obstacles to greater transparency (such as the congressional policy that bars CRS publication of this very report on transparency).
New version of the US Code online
Here is an announcement from the Office of Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives of a new version of the United States Code.
From: Seep, Ralph, Office of Law Revision Counsel Subject: OLRC website Beta 2 announcement A little over a year ago, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives released beta version 1 of a new website for the Office and the United States Code. Beta version 2 is now being released for testing and feedback. It is available at http://uscodebeta.house.gov. You are invited to test version 2 and give us your comments about its features, content, and ease of use. Version 2 includes the following new features:Continue readingDefault searching and browsing in the most current version of the Code (formerly USCprelim) Ability to search and browse previous versions of the Code back to the 1994 main edition (either separately or concurrently) Internal links to referenced Code sections External links to referenced Public Laws and Statutes at Large citations (back to 1951) will be included in the near future. Since the new release is a beta, there will be a period of testing for both new and existing features. Following this period, which is anticipated to last several months, beta version 2 will replace the existing US Code website at http://uscode.house.gov. Your comments and questions about version 2 are welcome and can be sent to uscode@mail.house.gov. Thank you for your assistance. Ralph V. Seep Law Revision Counsel