Return of the guest blogger! welcome law librarian Peggy Jarrett to FGI
It's been a few months since we had our last blogger of the month. But I'd like to introduce Peggy Jarrett to the podium for the month of September. Peggy comes to us from the University of Washington's Gallagher Law Library. I was able to twist Peggy's arm even as she so kindly hosted me at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2011 annual conference -- which I highly recommend our readers attend, especially those in the Boston area where the 2012 conference will be held. Take it away Peggy! And as always, if you're interested in taking a turn at the FGI podium, please contact us at freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com. That is all. Continue reading
Peggy Jarrett: blogger of the month for September, 2011
Peggy Jarrett is the Documents and Reference Librarian at the Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington School of Law. She’s been at Gallagher for 21 years, and before that, spent 7 years working as a law firm librarian in Seattle and Washington D.C. Her interest in government information dates back to the summer of 1973, when as an impressionable youth, she spent the summer watching the Watergate hearings. She is particularly interested in public access to state legal information and the intersection of reference and collection development. Her favorite part of her job is talking to students from the Law Librarianship Program at the UW Information School about government documents. She is currently a member of the Depository Library Council. Continue reading
Open Data, New Orleans
The city of New Orleans announces a new site for open data from the city:
- Data.NOLA.gov | Enabling New Orleans Aug 20, 2011 | This site is a catalog of public data sets produced by the City of New Orleans. We're starting small, with data sets that are found within the Department of Information Technology & Innovation, and will be adding data sets from other departments over time.
Budget Cuts Have Negative Effect on Performance.gov
New Performance.gov website faces performance problems of its own, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (08/26/2011).
A last-minute deal between the Obama administration and House Republicans to avert a government shutdown in April cut fiscal 2011 funding for online open government initiatives by more than three quarters to just $8 million. [An] OMB official said Thursday the administration does not consider the current version of Performance.gov to be compliant with the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act... ...The current version of Performance.gov does have a search bar, but it is only minimally functional. Searches for the names of federal agencies, such as "defense," "agriculture" and "transportation" for instance did not turn up any results. When the funding deal with lawmakers was reached, then-federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told Congress he would cut two planned open government initiatives and suspend planned improvements to others, including Performance.gov.Continue reading
Extending Collection Development to Web Archives
This isn't new information, but I don't think we've mentioned it here before. UNT, one of the participants in the End-of-Term Web Archive project (EOT), which aimed to capture the entirety of the federal government's public Web presence before and after the 2009 change in presidential administrations, is hosting a project to investigate innovative solutions to issues around web archives. The issues include being able to to identify and select materials in accord with collection development policies and being able to characterize archived materials using common metrics in order to communicate the scope and value of these materials to administrators. The project will use 10 librarian Subject Matter Experts who will classify the EOT collection according to the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification System. The project will also develop a set of metrics to enable characterization of materials in Web archives in units of measurement familiar to libraries and their administrations.
- Classification of the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Collection Development to Web Archives, University of North Texas Libraries (21 April 2011).
- End-of-Term Web Archive