New Blogging Team for Lost Docs Blog
On behalf of Free Government Information (FGI), I am pleased to announce that a three member team of volunteers is taking over the posting and management of the Lost Docs Blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info. Your new maintainers are: Meredith Johnston - Self described independent scholar with an MLIS and a MA. GODORT member since 2007. Jeffrey Hartsell-Gundy - Government Information & Law Librarian of the Miami University Libraries. He blogs documents for the University at www.lib.muohio.edu/blog/71. John Cash - Catalog specialist at Wells Library, Indiana University with over 10 years worth of documents experience. We at FGI are pleased that these three documents community members are stepping forward to continue the process of illuminating the fugitive document submissions to GPO. How the blog works will remain the same. Keep sending your fugitive documents receipts from GPO to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. I am still in the process of training the new team in posting, tagging and reporting on new fugitive reports. Thanks in advance for your continuing patience during this transition time. Continue reading
FDsys Court Opinions Project and PACER
GPO has announced that it is partnering with the Federal Judiciary to create a one-year pilot program providing free public access to court opinions through GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys).
This seems to be a laudable project, but it is important to note that this is not free access to PACER. PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is a fee-based service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
Document Coverage. The GPO pilot project will only provide access to court opinions. PACER provides access to court opinions and more:
- a Case Locator service (a national index for U.S. district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts)
- listings of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys and trustees
- compilations of case related information such as cause of action, nature of suit and dollar demand
- chronologies of dates of case events entered in the case record
- A claims registry
- A listing of new cases each day in all courts
- Judgments or case status
Court Coverage.The GPO project will begin by providing access to 12 courts and expand to 42 when fully implemented. PACER provides access to 216 federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.
Fees. The GPO project will provide free access to opinions from selected courts. PACER provides only limited free access. Although the GPO announcement says, "Free access to opinions in all Federal courts is currently available via the Judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records service (PACER)," this is not strictly true. PACER charges for each search and for each page of documents retrieved and then "waives" the first $10 of charges in each quarterly billing cycle. (Expanded PACER Fee Waiver.) The PACER fee schedule includes price caps and exceptions making it is hard for any particular user to accurately predict whether any particular information need can be met for free or if a large fee will be imposed. As noted here and here, and here, fees can mount up quickly, restrict use, and limit access.
Document Formats. Although the GPO announcement is not explicit about the formats of documents that it will make a available, FDsys typically makes documents available in PDF and plain text. PACER makes information available in PDF, HTML, and (apparently) plain text output from databases. (See FAQ 'How do you determine what a "page" is for billing purposes?') As noted here, formats matter and neither GPO nor PACER have committed to providing structured, tagged, machine-actionable formats.
The future.
Court decisions are a vital part of public information. One recent survey listed PACER access as third in a list of the "Most Wanted Federal Documents." (Show Us the Data: Most Wanted Federal Documents, By Center for Democracy & Technology & OpenTheGovernment.org, March 2009.) If the GPO pilot project is successful, I would hope that it could expand to include more courts and more of the content that is now available through PACER.
It is my understanding, however, that there was a PACER presentation at the spring Depository Library Council meeting and the Council is working on a recommendation to expand a PACER fee waiver in depository libraries. Although I do not have the details of that proposal, it certainly sounds like an attempt to re-intermediate libraries in an age of disintermediation. Such attempts usually fail. (See FGI response to Ithaka draft values proposition for the FDLP and Public comments on Ithaka FDLP Modeling Project draft documents (II) for more on the disintermediation issue.)
A previous PACER free pilot project was stopped abruptly when officials got upset that their system was being used too much. (Is PACER a portent of things to come?.) A similar attempt by GPO to provide a service for free inside depository library buildings and charging a fee for that same service outside those buildings failed. (This was the early days of the FDsys predecessor, GPO Access; see Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program.) The attempt by the Library of Congress to produce a restricted access "e-LCSH" was apparently abandoned.
The current PACER FAQ says that "information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission" but also warns that "misuse" (which "includes, but is not limited to, using an automated process to repeatedly access those portions of the PACER application that do not assess a fee") "is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution or civil action." It seems clear that the courts continue to resist true free access to this information. We can only hope that the current GPO/FDsys project will help turn that attitude around.
Continue readingNew ESRI site offers free mashups of LANDSAT data
Interior to offer new mashup capability for its extensive satellite data library, By Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (05/03/2011).
Interior Department contractor Esri, a map software developer, is expected Tuesday to launch a commercial tool that will enable programmers and non-techies alike to manipulate Interior's library of Earth surface images and data captured by satellite over the past four decades, federal and company officials said. On the new, free website, users can generate mashups showing, for example, how regional property values or Southern crop production have changed throughout the years.The ESRI website is esri.com/landsat-imagery All USGS Landsat data acquired since the program's inception in 1972 also is available at no charge through the federal site Earth Explorer. Continue reading
Congressional Secrecy
Steven Aftergood calls the current state of access to Congressional Research Service reports "Congressional Secrecy." And so it is.
- Wanted: Better Access to CRS Reports, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (May 5, 2011). [T]he New York Times cited a Congressional Research Service report that was performed "in February" concerning the impact of the debt limit. But that report has been updated and superseded, though one might not know it due to congressional secrecy policy, which precludes direct public access to CRS publications.
Siva Vaidhyanathan on Google
Siva Vaidhyanathan addresses how our assumptions and beliefs are limiting our choices and hurting us.
- Can Google Do No Evil?, By Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Chronicle Review" (May 1, 2011). [subscription required] The problem is that we have been fooled. The very idea that a company can actually pledge something like "Don't be evil," and that we believe it, has done us great harm.
At the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival, the radio journalist Brian Lehrer asked Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, about the potential for regulation: "Is there ever a point at which Google becomes so big that it's kind of scary and needs to be regulated as a public utility?" The meeting room filled with laughter before Schmidt could respond. So Lehrer, a knowledgeable and experienced interviewer, continued: "Seriously, literally, is there a point where you need to be regulated as a public utility?" "Would you prefer to have the government running innovative companies, or would you rather have the private sector running them?" Schmidt responded. "But Eric," Lehrer interjected, "I would expect a more sophisticated answer from you. As we saw with the banks, it's not a question of Soviet-style communism or free-market capitalism. Banks needed smart regulation." Not so for Internet companies, Schmidt insisted. Google had been--and would always be--"based on a set of values and principles."As Siva points out no market, firm, or technology, is truly "unregulated." And the mission of Google is not to do good, but to make money. And we (libraries in particular) "have outsourced so much of our daily decision making to a single company that we can't comfortably challenge its role in our lives." It would be a lot easier for more people to understand Lehrer's question and Siva's analysis if libraries were providing better community-based views of digital information through building digital collections and robust indexing tools. In the absence of public alternatives that select, organize, and preserve digital information, most users accept commercial indexes of the "whole" internet as not just "good enough" but the only imaginable possibility. Siva calls this "Public Failure." He says this occurs when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfinanced. The result? "The public institutions that were supposed to provide ... services were prevented from doing so. Private actors [fill] the vacuum, often failing spectacularly and costing the public more than the institutions they displaced." If libraries fail to provide community-based, public alternatives soon, that laughter that greeted Lehrer's question will soon turn into ironic regret as our choices are increasingly limited, our fees raised, and our privacy compromised by commercial interests that may think they are "doing no evil," but that succeed only in doing commercial good and fail to even try to do any public good. The whole article is well worth reading. Continue reading