FCC’s digital outreach
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) posted a summary of its "digital firsts" over the last few years on its blog yesterday. This short piece gives a sense of the digital shift in government in a very short time. Two thousand tweets, Facebook, Flickr, online datasets, online maps, broadcast inspection files (!), APIs, LinkedIn, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.
- Digital Firsts, by David Robbins, Managing Director, Official FCC Blog (August 15th, 2012).
DMCA overkill: NASA video of Mars removed from YouTube
Hours after NASA's successful landing on Mars of its Mars rover, one of NASA's official clips from the mission was pulled from YouTube, and replaced with a notice from the video site indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." The video was replaced and Scripps apologized, but it is an example of how the scale are tipped in favor of the "content industry" and even obvious, public-domain content gets caught in the privatization of information trap. EFF has the background on the technology and how it works:
- Mars Landing Videos, and Other Casualties of the Robot Wars, by Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Aug 8, 2012). [T]he problem likely lies not with the DMCA itself, but with the additional (and voluntary) automated Content ID system YouTube has developed. Content ID uses digital fingerprinting technology to identify duplicate audio and video on YouTube and, depending on the "business rules" configuration of the designated rightsholder, blocks or places ads next to videos. Unfortunately, the robots behind that copyright enforcement machine have the tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, even when it ends up silencing real -- human -- speech. Continue reading
California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money
It costs money (at least in the short run) to make governments open and transparent. Even if open government is better for democracy and cost-efficient and cost-effective in the long run, governments may use the short-term cost as an excuse to curtail openness. OMB Watch reports that, as part of its Budget Act of 2012 (passed in June), California suspended the state's open meetings law for the next three years in an effort to cut state expenditures. The California open meetings law "requires cities and other agencies to publish the agendas of public meetings before they occur and make the minutes of these meetings available to citizens after they occur." As OMB Watch says, "In suspending the law, the state is sacrificing not only a fundamental element of a democratic society, but a vital tool that can actually save money."
- California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money, OMB Watch (August 14, 2012). The state, facing increasingly tight budgets, suspended the law to save money. Under state rules, California is required to reimburse cities and counties for the cost of complying with mandated requirements, which includes its open meetings requirements. However, California has not reimbursed local governments for open meetings costs since 2005, accumulating a debt estimated at $96 million. By suspending the open meetings provision in the Brown Act, California expects to avoid paying open meetings costs for the next three years, as well as eliminate the current debt owed to local governments.
August 2012 LoC Digital Preservation newsletter now available
Hot off the presses, the August 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available. In this issue:
Happy reading! Continue reading
- Summary of DigitalPreservation 2012
- Rescuing the Tangible from the Intangible
- From AIP to Zettabyte: Comparing Glossaries
- One Family's Digital Archiving Project
- Fighting the Battle for Fleeting Attention
- Profile of William Kilbride
- Training Digital Curators
- Upcoming Events (Designing Storage Architectures, NDIIPP at Book Festival and others)
- Meetings Roundup (Open Repositories, Preserving Online Science, Data Intensive Research)
- Resources (Digital Disaster Planning, Digital Preservation in a Box, and others)
Check out LoC’s Area Studies webinar on Web archiving
Y'all should attend. The speaker is Abbie Grotke, who was one of our group of guest bloggers from the End of Term Archive last month. Register early. Or have a viewing party so you can share one Webinar connection with multiple people. But do it. You won't regret it!
FEDLINK invites you to the next Library of Congress Area Studies Webinar Series: "Web Archiving at the Library of Congress and Around the World," to be held on Thursday, August 30, 2012, 2:00-3:00pm ET. Since 2000, the Library of Congress has been archiving born-digital web content documenting a variety of events and themes. The Webinar will provide an overview of the Library's web archiving program and a look at international work and collaborative efforts by libraries, archives, and other organizations. The speaker is Abbie Grotke, the Web Archiving Team Lead in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. She came to the Library in 1997 to work on American Memory digitization projects. Since 2002 she has been involved in web archiving and the digital preservation program at the Library of Congress. REGISTRATION INFORMATION: This program is FREE however there is a maximum capacity so registration is required. The webinar will be recorded and available for later viewing if you are unable to participate. Please register by Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GNBSWYM. If you experience problems with the registration link - please email your name/email/library name to fliccfno@loc.gov and we will get you manually registered for the webinar. For more information or to request ADA accommodations, please contact Dr. Anchi Hoh, Program Management Specialist, at adia@loc.gov.Continue reading