State Agency Databases Activity Report 1/8/2012
Welcome to the first State Agency Databases activity report of 2012! We have a lot of activity to report from the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project. STATISTICS FOR 2011 - PARTIAL YEAR We started making note of project statistics in May 2011. This enables us to report partial year statistics (May - Dec 31) for our project pages. Here are a few highlights for 2011: Total visits to state database pages - 73,606 Total visits to subject based database listings - 10,325 Top five states by number of visits: Missouri 5592 Florida 3694 Alaska 3438 California 2786 Ohio 2437 Bottom five states by number of visits: New York 478 Vermont 470 West Virginia 397 Maine 383 Minnesota 307 Most popular subject page - Prisoner Locaters - 6,239. This is also the most popular page in the entire project. The full set of project statistics for our site can be found at http://tinyurl.com/StateAgencyDBstats2012 as a Google Spreadsheet. NEW ORPHAN STATES FOR 2012 As a result of the yearly page review procedure put in place last year, the following states have become available for adoption: Maryland Minnesota New York Rhode Island Utah West Virginia If adopting any of the above states interests you, please review our Volunteer Guide. If you think you can fulfill the basic responsibilities listed AND can start modifying your page within two weeks of receiving a wiki login, please e-mail me at danielcornwall@gmail.com. SUBJECT PAGE ACTIVITY Prisoner Locater Tools - An offender lookup tool for Utah was added to the page. OTHER WIKI ACTIVITY For a blow by blow list of changes to our project over the past 14 days, please see http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED NEW MEXICO (Adrienne Walker) The Judicial Branch of New Mexico - This online case lookup is maintained by The New Mexico Courts. This database gives access to the lower court cases of the New Mexico District Court, Magistrate Court and Municipal Court data. Municipal court data is limited to criminal Domestic Violence and DWI historic convictions from September 1, 1991 onwards. Searches can be conducted by name, case number or DWI. NEW YORK (Orphan - Added while reformatting page) New York State Kosher Food Registry Search - Registry is searchable by product (type or name, packaged or unpackaged), by food establishment name, by store (name or location), by name of certifier. Records for products include brand, name, size and certifying agency. NORTH DAKOTA (Kathryn Thomas) State Document Depository - State Documents can be searched in the library catalog. Lists of recent arrivals can be viewed by agency name and then by document title. UTAH (Orphan - Added while reformatting page) Utah Burials Search - Database of people buried in Utah. May be searched by deceased name, dates of birth and death, and burial place (any, county, city/town, cemetary). Records contain name, birth date, death date, burial date, place of birth (when available), place of death, grave location, source (when available), comments, when available. Continue reading
House Oversight Committee + Carl Malamud have released 1,139 Committee Videos dating back to 1994
Watching Them Watching: Issa Touts Video Archive of Oversight Hearings, by Nick Judd, TechPresident (January 6 2012).
As of today, the House Committee on Government Oversight under Rep. Darrell Issa has released 1,139 videos of hearings going back to the 103rd Congress of 1993-1994, committee staff announced today. These videos, dusted off from the House committee's archives, join hundreds more going all the way back to 1987 on House.Resource.org, a repository for archived video and hearing transcripts gleaned from C-SPAN, the House and the Internet Archive as part of a collaboration between Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.org and House Speaker John Boehner. At the start of this Congress, Boehner asked Issa's Oversight committee — which had been recording its own video of hearings, doubling up on video already recorded by the House Broadcasting Studio, since the 2010-2011 session of Congress — to take on archiving and publicising video of committee hearings as a pilot project. The House this year also launched its own streaming of floor proceedings.Continue reading
Publishers Applaud Legislation To End Open Access to Federally Funded Research
Last month Rep. Darrell E. Issa introduced legislation, the Research Works Act that would effectively prohibit the federal government from requiring open, free access to federally funded research. The Association of American Publishers issued a statement in support of this legislation.
- Publishers Applaud “Research Works Act,” Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing, Friday, 23 December 2011.
- Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science?, by Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic (Jan 5 2012). [The] bill would prohibit all federal agencies from putting any privately published articles into an online database, even -- and this is the kicker -- those articles based on research funded by the public if they have received "any value-added contribution, including peer review or editing" from a private publisher. This is a direct attack on the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central, the massive free online repository of articles resulting from research funded with NIH dollars. Similar bills have been introduced twice before, in 2008 and 2009, and have failed both times.
Feds need to revamp Dot-Gov
As the federal government attempts to consolidate its web presence and reduce the number of dot-gov web sites, it faces a huge task. When the British government did something similar, it reduced the government's 2,000 websites by more than 75 percent and shifted its online organizing structure from being based on the interests of agencies creating content to focusing on the interests of the citizens consuming that content. That effort took five years. The U.S. Government has 16,000 or more web sites. Currently it is hard for citizens to find the information they need because the sites are so badly done that typical web-wide searches often list government data well below less authoritative, outdated or recycled sources and the agencies themselves have clunky internal search engines. An article in NextGov about the current state of dot-gov web sites has a number of interesting tidbits of information worth thinking about.
- Feds aim to serve citizens better by revamping Dot-Gov, by Joseph Marks, NextGov (Jan. 3, 2012).
- While the government is publishing more information than ever through about 18,000 websites, it's become increasingly difficult for agency information to reach the public.
- Much of the dot-gov reform effort has so far focused on eliminating excess government sites that sprouted up during the Web-crazed 1990s and now do little but diminish the dot-gov domain's gravitas.
- The federal Web presence is also pockmarked with stand-alone sites such as MLKday.gov, which are officially top-level domains but don't have much content and aren't regularly updated.
- an informal survey in October with a custom-built Web crawling tool showed at least 200 ... had likely been unofficially retired.
Update on the State of GPO
Library Journal has an article with information about GPO's budget, the status of FDSys, and discussions on regional library issues:
- GPO Names Acting Public Printer, Issues Assurances About FDLP, FDsys Despite Budget Cuts, By Michael Kelley, Library Journal (Jan 3, 2012).