September 10: House Hearing on Digital Books
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on "Competition and Commerce in Digital Books" at 10 a.m. tomorrow, September 10. The hearing will be webcast; the link is on the committee's hearings calendar page. ALA has some information available on its site. See: Library Associations submit testimony... and the ALA Google Book Settlement page. Continue reading
Gov 2.0 Expo and the Apps for America 2 Challenge Winners
The Sunlight Foundation announced the winners of their "Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge" at the O'Reilly/techweb Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in DC yesterday. The web applications were to be built with data available from the U.S. Data.gov site. And the prizes go to...
First prize: DataMasher.org. Combine and compare government data at the state level.
Second prize: GovPulse. Making Federal Register access easier.
Third prize: ThisWeKnow.org. Find government info by zip code.
Prize for best data visualization: QuakeSpotter.org. Global view of earthquakes with links to quake-related tweets.
Get complete information from Sunlight's press release.
The one-day Gov 2.0 Expo is over, and the two-day Gov 2.0 Summit (with bold face names) is in progress. They are tweeting up a storm over at the Hyatt, using the hashtag #gov2s.
[Update: They are using the #g2s tag, too.]
I will blog more later on how the Gov 2.0 Expo went.
Continue reading
8 more collections added to GPO’s federal digital system (FDsys)
The Government Printing Office (GPO) has just released 8 new collections into the Federal Digital System (FDsys) -- http://www.fdsys.gov/. That brings the number of collections in FDsys to 21 -- very cool indeed. The new collections are:
- Congressional Directory (105th Congress to present)
- Congressional Record (Bound) (1999 to 2001)
- Congressional Record Index (1983 to present)
- Economic Report of the President (1995 to present)
- GAO Reports and Comptroller General Decisions (1994 to 2008)
- History of Bills (1983 to present)
- United States Government Manual (1995/1996 to present)
- United States Statutes at Large (2003 to 2006)
Tag cloud of Obama’s back-to-school speech
Tomorrow (Tuesday, September 8th, at 12:00 PM EST) President Obama will give a speech to the nation's children in Arlington, VA encouraging students to take personal responsibility for their education. The White House has released the speech early because of some controversy raised by conservatives accusing the president of "trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas." As you can see by the tag cloud below, the President's speech is about education, responsibility and school, nothing more.
Utah Phillips on labor day
Happy labor day! I'm thankful for for the [w:Eight-hour day] and so many more reasons to celebrate labor day. A great reminder about the meaning of labor day is to listen/watch the folksinger and storyteller -- and Utah state archivist in the 1960s -- Utah Phillips. Phillips -- who defined himself as a folks singer, pacifist, activist, agitator, Catholic anarchist, union worker, feminist -- was a truly great and honorable man who chronicled and advocated for the labor movement. The video below is from a 2004 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Phillips passed away on May 23, 2008.