CRL Free Webcasts on The Future of Primary Sources
The Center for Research Libraries is offering a series of brief (22 minute) webcasts on the broad topic of The Future of Primary Sources during the week of October 5-11. Each of the three webcasts covers a different topic and each will be available at three different times. The three webcasts are "The Historical Record in the Post-Newspaper Age," "Political Science, Sociology, and Economics," and "Chemistry." Each webcast will "survey new and emerging forms of evidence and documentation, profile major organizations that produce and maintain this evidence, and outline the challenges for preservation." Registration is required. See http://www.crl.edu/acls/agenda.asp for links to the schedule and registration and technical details.
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is engaged in a series of case studies, funded by the National Science Foundation, to examine the longevity of digital resources. The case studies investigate the conditions that help digital content last for substantial periods of time, as well as the factors that threaten the survival of digital knowledge. To obtain scholarly input on these studies, CRL will hold a series of brief online forums for researchers in the fields of history, social sciences, and chemistry. CRL seeks forum participation from scholars who depend on traditional or electronic source materials. The forums will focus on three major types of research materials: electronic news, social science data, and chemical information.Continue reading
Sunlight calls on GPO to publish The Constitution Annotated in XML
220 Years Later, It’s Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML, By Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation, (09/17/09).
The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases. Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO.Continue reading
Google’s Role in the Government Cloud
An announcement from Google and more articles about the federal government's cloud computing initiative (see: Feds go for the Clouds) help reveal the advantages and difficulties of the initiative.
- Google Apps and Government, by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise Official Google Enterprise Blog (September 15, 2009).
- Government Steps Into The Cloud, By Charles Babcock InformationWeek (Sept. 15, 2009)
- Google Plans Private Government Cloud, By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek(September 16, 2009).
While there is agreement on the general outline of cloud computing, security in the cloud needs to be better defined and implemented, Kundra said. ...Users who ship data to the cloud will need contractual guarantees that it will be maintained with the same level of security as it was in-house, but neither vendors nor users are sure yet how such guarantees can be made.Google's announcement addresses some of the issues of security and responsibility. Google says that it intends to build a separate "Dedicated Google cloud for government customers in the US." Claburn reports:
"The government cloud will come from Google-owned-and-operated facilities," said Google Enterprise director of product management Matthew Glotzbach, in a phone interview. "It will be sections of existing facilities. But it will be a fully parallel instance of Google Apps. The difference being we're working with the government to meet the specific needs of government data regulations." ...Google's reticence to allow IT professionals to inspect its data centers as part of their due diligence has been a source of criticism in the past.So, the emphasis in the government announcements is on cost savings and efficency tempered with an awareness of the need for security and accountability. As I said in an earlier post, it seems that this is probably a step forward for government information technology, but it remains to be seen if it is a step forward for government information. Continue reading
Professor Posts “Illegal Copy” of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws
From Slashdot:
- Professor Posts "Illegal Copy" of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws Slashdot, September 16, 2009.
How are Government Agencies Doing with Gov 2.0?
From Mark Drapeau via O'Reilly Radar this excellent critique of government's use of Facebook. He thinks agencies may have signed up lots of Facebook fans but they aren't participating in the collaborative culture:
But it's not novel and it's not social and it's not engaging. The execution is flawed, the tactics are questionable, the strategy is vague, and the goals are unclear. And all the government pages in the top 10 list effectively look the same. Monkey-see, monkey-do.Read the article here. Continue reading