U.S. Copyright Office Posts Two RFI’s About Crowdsourcing and Developing a “Virtual Card Catalog” of Historical Records
Yesterday, the U.S. Copyright Office posted two RFI's. The first, is to learn more about software to build a virtual card catalog of historical copyright records. The second, is to learn more about crowdsourcing the data capture from about 70 million catalog cards. For those of you interested, you can find highlights, links to the full text docs, and a bit of background in a new LJ infoDOCKET post. Direct to: U.S. Copyright Office Posts Requests for Information About Crowdsourcing and Developing a “Virtual Card Catalog” of Historical Records (via LJ infoDOCKET Continue reading
Celebrating Collaboration in Ohio
The Spring 2012 issue of DttP:Documents to the People has an article that shows the power of librarians working together: Laster, Shari. Crossing Institutional Boundaries to Build a Digital Collection. Dttp: Documents to the People, v.40, no. 1, p.25. The article describes a project by the Ohio Government Documents Roundtable to build a collection of digitized publications from the War Relocation Authority. What distinguishes this article from others about building digital collections is that this was done under the umbrella of a state government documents roundtable with the support of a number of Ohio libraries. I find this to be an exciting model for collaboration elsewhere. According to Ms. Laster, future plans of Ohio GODORT include adding new collections, which will probably require the development of a process for distributed digitization. All of us at FGI wish them well in that work and hold up Ohio as an example of how other state GODORTs might be able to collaborate on projects of statewide interest. Continue reading
Cool new tool from Sunlight!
Gary Price points out a great new tool for getting alerts on Federal and State Government Info:
- Scout: A New Alerting Tool (Beta) for Fed/State Government Info From Sunlight Labs, by Gary Price, Infodocket (April 25, 2012).
- Scout. Scout is a free service that provides daily insight to how our laws and regulations are shaped in Washington, DC and our state capitols.... Scout allows anyone to subscribe to customized email or text alerts on what Congress is doing around an issue or a specific bill, as well as bills in the state legislature and federal regulations.
State Agency Databases Activity Report 4/22/2012
While it has been nearly a month since my last report on the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases, our volunteer document specialists have stayed active. WIKI ACTIVITY For a play by play of the last two weeks worth of activity, see http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Below are some highlights: HEALTH CARE PRACTIONER DATABASES Lynn McClelland did link checking this past week fixing a significant number of links for Arkansas, Maryland, New Mexico and Oregon, among others. NEBRASKA Beth Goble checked links and added a database of legislative transcripts. NORTH CAROLINA Jennifer Davison reorganized the page and fixed some broken links. UTAH Susanne Caro added the following database: State History Publications Online - Full text for Utah State History and the Utah State Historical Society publication beginning with the first issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1928. Includes books, periodicals,professional and technical literature searchable by keyword, date and table of contents. OTHER ACTIVITY Daniel Cornwall (Alaska) touched on the SADATFS project in a webinar titled "Databases By Alaskans" which can be viewed at http://library.state.ak.us/is/info_services_training.html. Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: Mike Wash
Mike Wash, currently the chief information officer of the National Archives and Record Administration and previously the Government Printing Office's chief technical officer, is interviewed in this podcast. He speaks with the Library of Congress's Mike Ashenfelder about Wash's work at the GPO and NARA, including the creation of a new GPO digital publication system, Fedsys, and leading NARA closer to the national goal of creating permanent public access to government content.
- Mike Wash, National Archives and Record Administration, Series: Conversations about Digital Preservation, (April, 2012) 57:57 minutes. download MP3.