State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/17/2011
VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project welcomed Brenda Hemmelman as our latest volunteer documents specialist. Brenda has taken over the care and feeding of the South Dakota project page. Brenda has not only fixed all of the broken links on the South Dakota page, but has also added a number of new databases including the Cemetery Record Search, which is considered to be a great resource for pre 1940s burials. In other volunteer news, we are currently in discussions with a few people over the future of the California page and we hope to have it adopted out in the next week. That leaves the following pages as orphans waiting for a volunteer government documents specialist: Connecticut District of Columbia Illinois Indiana Mississippi New Jersey New Mexico Tennessee Texas Vermont West Virginia Wisconsin If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. WIKI ACTIVITY See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights: Nebraska - Extensive link fixing. DATABASES ADDED Arkansas State Vehicle Inventory Search - Searchable by agency, vehicle type, plate number, and most common reported use. Delaware Delaware Environmental Navigator (DEN) - "Will allow the public to view all facility information, violations, enforcement actions and monitoring results pertaining to Air Quality, Waste Water, Water Supply, Hazardous Waste, Hazardous Waste Annual Reports, Solid Waste, Contaminated Site Cleanup, Underground Tanks and Vapor Recovery, Above Ground Tanks, Septic Permits, Wetlands, Ambient Water Monitoring Data and Corrective Action Sites." Nebraska Nebraska Memories - Images of Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials. Continue reading
Role of libraries
On a quiet Sunday, here are two quotes that I find both memorable and inspiring when I think of the role and future of libraries. These days we see so much emphasis placed on fast access to current, popular, "must see" information. Although libraries have a role to play in that as well, few if any institutions have the long-term role that libraries have.
We mustn't model the digital library on the day-to-day operation of a single human brain, which quite properly uses-or-loses, keeps uppermost in mind what it needs most often, and does not refresh, and eventually forgets, what it very infrequently considers -- after all, the principal reason groups of rememberers invented writing and printing was to record accurately what they sensed was otherwise likely to be forgotten. -- Nicholson Baker. Double Fold. NY: Random House, 2001. p245. Libraries exist to preserve the thoughts and deeds that no one else has time for anymore, to collect items that might not be used for another ten, fifty, one hundred years -- if ever. It is this last uncertainty that makes libraries the most heroic of human creations. -- Paul Collins. Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World. New York: Picador, 2001. p.285-286.Continue reading
NARA engages Wiki-transcribers
The National Archives asking volunteer transcribers at Wikisource to turn paper and ink historical manuscripts into simple, searchable Web text.
- National Archives' first Wikipedian in residence to bring more holdings to the public, by Joseph Marks, NextGov (07/11/2011).
A major barrier, McDevitt-Parks said, is the quality of the Archives' digitized files, the most important of which were scanned in the 1990s using early technology that makes them difficult to read online. ...Unfortunately, it's hard to [make the case to] go back and scan things that are already scanned when there are millions and millions of things that aren't in any digitized form at all.I think there is an important lesson here. As we develop policies for our individual libraries today and plans for the FDLP of the future, we should always remember that digitization technologies improve over time and the uses we make of digital documents evolve over time. We should avoid choices that are merely good-enough today. We should aim for a future that will enable us to increase access and functionality in the future, not lock us into what we are technologically capable of today. Continue reading
A frustrated scholar warns of trusting Google
We've written here before about Google cancelling its newspaper digitization project. Here is a new story with some details about how Google took the most extensive searchable archive of Mexican historical newspapers in the world (The "Paper of Record" archive) and abandoned it.
- How Google Disrespected Mexican History, By Richard J. Salvucci, Miller-McCune (July 10, 2011). So you want Google (or perhaps any commercial enterprise) to digitize your books and papers and make them available to everyone for all eternity? Profits and losses come and go, but history is forever and not necessarily responsive to market incentives. Be careful what you wish for. Google may give it to you, or, then again, maybe not.
Census cuts could end some surveys
Census cuts could end some surveys, By Carol Morello, Washington Post (July 12, 2011).
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...The agency, which is closing half its regional offices to save money, has warned that cuts [of 25 percent, as proposed under a bill being considered by the House Appropriations Committee] would likely mean an end to next year's Economic Survey, which is conducted every five years and is used to calculate the nation's Gross Domestic Product, among other things. There also could be deep cuts in the American Community Survey...