March 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
REPORT In February 2010, we posted 25 "lost docs" e-mail receipts sent by GPO to the librarians who reported these missing documents. These civic minded librarians in turn e-mailed us their receipts. How many reports did GPO receive? Only they know, but the more people who send their fugitive docs e-mail receipts to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info, the more accurate our count will be. This month's count is particularly underreported. Owing to my attendance and blogging at the 2010 Public Library Association Conference and participating in an excellent distance delivered Museum Registration class, I was unable to post many lost documents receipts I got. They will be posted in April. My apologies to the librarians who sent me reports but failed to see them posted. Of the 25 reported items that were posted to the blog in March, three items have been cataloged by GPO since the initial report. You can view this list by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with March 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records. In our view, three of the items reported to GPO and posted to the blog in January were either out of scope for the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) or were already in the catalog. You can view these items by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/false/ and looking for items with March 2010 dates. In two of these "false positive" cases, it looks like GPO had received the tangible item near the published date of the item and cataloged an electronic equivalent, but did not distribute the tangible item to the Federal Depository Library Program. This may or may not be in accordance with GPO SOD 301 which states that budget permitting, tangible documents will be offered when both tangible and online formats are available. With the available information in these two CGP records, it is unclear whether GPO made a conscious, budget related decision to not offer these publication or just forgot to send them out. We encourage GPO to begin putting notes explaining why a given item was not distributed to the FDLP into the item's bibliographic record. If you are interested in viewing this category of publication, visit http://lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/explain/ and look for items with March 2010 dates. We strongly encourage people with instances of CGP cataloged but non-distributed federal documents to use GPO Help and not GPO's Lost Docs form. APPEAL If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:
- If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
- Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
- Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
- Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/ or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.
This week’s hot docs from ResourceShelf
Our pal Gary Price runs both ResourceShelf and Docuticker, two must-read sites for docs geeks and great tools for library collection development. He just sent some highlights from the last week on ResourceShelf. Be sure to check out the Docuticker ticker in the left column. You can also find Gary on twitter (@resourceshelf).
- A New Blog From the GPO: Government Book Talk
- Online Databases: The New and Improved Prints and Photographs Online Catalog from Library of Congress What a difference! Awesome!!!
- Gov Docs: Public Printer of U.S. Tapella Visits and Does Some Research With Archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero at the National Archives (Even a Picture (-:)
- U.S. Gov Info: Banking Agencies Modernize Uniform Bank Performance Report (UBPR) New Way to Access Data
- CRS — Government Collection of Private Information: Background and Issues Related to the USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization
- Local Government: California Interactive Map: California: Compliance With Water Quality Laws
- U.S. Government: A Searchable Database of Earmark Data and More Make sure to note the links at the bottom. One is a story from The Hill newspaper.
Three Spendid Govdocs
In the process of searching the March batch of publications reported to the Lost Docs Blog against the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP), I came across the amusing factoid that there appear to be three and only three federal government documents with the word "splendid" in their title, at least according to the CGP:
- Splendid vision, unswerving purpose : developing air power for the United States Air Force during the first century of powered flight. D 301.82/7:C 33
- Tearing up the ground with splendid results : historic mining on the Coronado National Forest / 1995 Farrell, Mary M. A 13.101/2:15
- The most splendid carpet / 1978 Anderson, Susan H. I 29.2:C 22
The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future
"By an overwhelming margin, technology experts and stakeholders participating in a survey fielded by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center believe that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.... This publication is part of a Pew Research Center series that captures people’s expectations for the future of the Internet, in the process presenting a snapshot of current attitudes."
- The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future, by Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie Pew Internet & American Life Project (Mar 31, 2010)
The State of Linked Data in 2010
The State of Linked Data in 2010, by Richard MacManus, Read Write Web (March 31, 2010).
... Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data. However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn't yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it's often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can.... The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom.Continue reading