C-SPAN’s essential video record of Congress has new clipping tool
Gary points to a great, newly enhanced tool from C-SPAN that allows you to create and share video clips in its extensive video library of Congressional proceedings and Committee hearings. The tool is available for all of C-SPAN's online video content, which includes Book-TV and Booknotes, C-SPAN specials, interviews, news conferences, White House events, National Press Club speakers, and more. The archive includes every program aired on C-SPAN since 1987, almost 190,000 hours of video!
- The Wonderful C-SPAN Video Library Releases Enhanced Video Clipping Tool, by Gary Price, infoDOCKET (June 22, 2012). All of the material is searchable not only with metadata but also using each word spoken during a program. That's right, transcript search.
- Clipping in the Video Library, by RXB, C-SPAN video library blog (June 22, 2012). Over three million clips have already been created by users.
- C-SPAN Video Library. Here is a four minute sample: a clip on the Volker Rule, taken from the two hour and fifteen minute testimony of Jamie Dimon on July 13, 2012 before the Senate Committee Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, about J. P. Morgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss on May 10, 2012.
Sunlight releases Scout to help track legislative/regulatory process
Today, our pals at the Sunlight Foundation released Scout, a new tool that allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions -- at both the state and federal level! They'll also soon release their Open States tool to target the legislative process of all 50 states. Thanks Sunlight!
Start by entering a keyword or phrase you would like to get updates about, such as the vaguely defined "cyber threat" included in CISPA or any references to the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Scout then saves your subscriptions and sends notifications via email or text message whenever the subscribed issue or bill is talked about on the floor of Congress, mentioned in new regulations, appears in state and federal legislation or when Congress is moving forward for a vote. Through your profile you can create as many alerts as you'd like and group them by tags with the additional option to make them public for others to follow your issues. You can also complement a Scout subscription by adding optional external RSS feeds, such as press releases from a member of Congress or an issue-based blog.
The Digital Preservation Network
The focus of the Digital Preservation Network, which is being created by research-intensive universities, is "the complete digital scholarly record" and its goal is to ensure the long-term preservation of that record. Already, twenty-nine organizations have agreed to participate in start-up planning and committed "seed capital" to fund initial planning efforts. Its Brief Overview describes some of the thinking that is going into this effort, which sounds remarkably like the FDLP and what we at FGI have been advocating for the digital FDLP:
- The Digital Preservation Network: Overview of the Initiative (Feb 21, 2012). [PDF 3 pages] Over time, reliance on common approaches, technologies and organizations creates risk of common points of failure in securing long-term preservation of the record. To avoid the catastrophic loss of scholarship, we must build and sustain a diverse ecosystem that can ensure the survival of scholarship in digital form for future generations. We envision a system that is scalable, sustainable, and complementary to existing collection and preservation efforts--the Digital Preservation Network (DPN or Deepen). DPN will create a federated approach to preservation of academic content. It will build upon the higher education community's current investments to create sufficient diversity of preservation approaches to assure access to the digital scholarly record far into the future.... The objects and metadata of the scholarly record must be replicated across: 1. Diverse software architectures 2. Diverse organizational structures 3. Diverse geographic regions 4. And in the future, diverse legal/political environments (nations) ...This diversity requires a supporting ecosystem for preservation that enables higher education to own, maintain and control the scholarly record throughout time. While commercial entities may partner with us to contribute to this effort at different points in time depending on priorities and business models, final control must reside with the academy.
Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
June 18, 2012 / 1 Comment on Comparing Hathitrust and Google Books as repositories of government documents
Here are 2 recent items analyzing Hathitrust and Google books for their efficacy in giving access to Federal government documents. The first is an article by Laura Sare (Texas A&M) and compares Hathitrust with Google Books. The second is a presentation by Brian Vetruba (Washington U in St Louis) at "Leveraging Your Strengths: Regional Government Documents Conference" at the Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis on May 4, 2012. A Comparison of HathiTrust and Google Books Using Federal Publications. Laura Sare. Practical Academic Librarianship: The International Journal of the SLA Academic Division. 2(1) 2012 p. 1-25. (attached below. Fair use claim)
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