Then and Now: Economic Information from the Government
As Jim mentioned, GPO has posted presentation materials from the recently concluded Depository Library Conference. One of the files worthy of your attention is the presentation slides from: A Tale of Two Economies: Government Information from the New Deal and Now by Marianne Ryan, Associate University Librarian for Public Services, Northwestern University Library and Catherine Jervey, Director, Market Planning Legislative and Historical Services, LexisNexis Academic and Library Solutions The slides give a govdocs powered, side by side comparison of the reactions of FDR and President Obama to their respective economic crises. It makes for interesting reading and puts today's economic troubles in perspective. It's not touched on in the presentation slides, but I'm interested in a big difference between the 1930s and today. For the most part, regular people didn't have access to the New Deal legislation before it was passed. Today, whether or not it's taken advantage of, people around the country have access to proposed legislation in their own homes. Would the wide-ranging legislation of the New Deal have been passed if there had been wide public access to the proposed legislation? It's an interesting "What If" scenario. Continue reading
Digital City Governments
Each year the Center for Digital Government takes a survey of U.S. cities to evaluate how municipalities are integrating information technology into operations to better serve their citizens.
- Digital Cities Survey.
- Top Digital Cities Announced for 2009, By Casey Mayville, Digital Communities (Nov 3, 2009).
Public Data on Private Schools
The Washington Post has a story today about "a little-known database on the Department of Education's Web site" -- the Private School Universe Survey (PSS):
- Mining the Web for public data on private schools, by Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post (November 2, 2009).
Private schools have a reputation for being, well, private. Private about their size, private about their students, private about rates of college-bound students. The information on their Web sites, which is sometimes meager, and the material that a pesky parent can wrangle from an admissions director sometimes seem to be all that is available to interested families. But a little-known database on the Department of Education's Web site has a surprisingly comprehensive profile of the nation's private schools. The Private School Universe Survey, part of the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, is a biennial roundup of private schools with information on enrollment, demographics, college attendance rates and number of days in the school year.Continue reading
A handful of classics from Peggy Garvin
The Government Domain: A Handful of Classics, By Peggy Garvin, LLRX (October 31, 2009) This is an update by Peggy Garvin of her tracking of federal web sites for her book, e-Government and Web Directory: U.S. Federal Government Online (formerly: United States Government Internet Manual). In it she notes that many federal government sites are not well optimized for indexing and ranking by popular search engines and that government web databases are still a large part of what is called the Deep Web or "the UnGooglable". She also found, in talking to professionals who are not information professionals, that "some standard government web resources are not as universally known as I had imagined. These are federal government resources that librarians know well and -- if they're like me -- tend to assume everyone knows. Everyone doesn't." She advises us to "Do the newbies a favor and clue them into a few old favorites" and she lists some of hers in this article. Continue reading
Problems with Accessibility of California Law
Law student, Robb Shecter, who has created the OregonLaws.Org web site, wrote us recently about the fact that California Codes have accessibility issues:
The California Codes are published online (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html) with crucial information absent (removed?) that renders them nearly impossible to use: No Section names ("leadlines") are present in this version-for-the-public. For example, the Sections relevant to the California Highway Patrol are presented like this: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&group=02001-03000&file=2250-2269 The sections are thus relatively unusable, greatly increasing the cost of legal research and defeating access and transparency for nearly all people. The missing information is also crucial for third parties (like me) who'd like to create easy-to-use directories of the codes. The needed information does seem to exist, however. The names for this particular section, for example, can be found on the DMV website, for example: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/vc/tocd2c2a2.htm Those DMV pages are unfortunately the exception that proves the rule. After seeing these Section names, it should be immediately obvious that these represent a crucial element of the codes that should be published along with the codes.Continue reading