Doctorow on why search is too important to leave to one company
Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google, by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian, 2 June 2009.
It's a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It's too much power for a handful of companies to wield. The question of what we can and can't see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There's no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.Continue reading
State Dept. Hosts TED Talk
State Dept. Hosts TED Talk, Tech Daily Dose, June 2, 2009.
The State Department on Wednesday afternoon will host the first ever U.S. government-sponsored Technology, Entertainment, Design, or TED, event. Speakers include social-media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody; philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund; futurist Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog; economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion; and data visionary Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institutet Professor of International Health.... Video from the State Department event will be posted on the TED Web site, www.TED.com.Continue reading
REALLY Special Libraries
Resource Shelf has a great posting in honor of the 2009 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference coming up June 14-17 in Washington, DC: Resources of the Week: REALLY Special Libraries, By Shirl Kennedy. These are not government information collections, per se, but some clearly are related and have government information. Lately, friends and colleagues have been reminding me that many library directors don't understand the value of having local copies of digital government information when "everything is on the web." Really. That's what some library directors say. This attitude has at least two big problems, one of which is highlighted by this feature on special libraries. The first problem is the one we at FGI write about a lot: the problem of relying on someone else to provide long-term access and preservation to something that your users value. This is the problem of giving up control because you no longer actually have a collection, just pointers. The other problem is the one that this special libraries feature implies. That is the important role libraries can have (yes, even in the digital age!) of selecting, acquiring, and organizing information from disparate sources into a cohesive collection for a (not necessarily geographically-based) community. I recently read something a user wrote complaining about having to rely on "searching" to find everything. Search works when you know what you are looking for, but when you don't know something exists, or its relationship something you do know exists, you can't search for it. (To some extent this is the problem of undiscovered public knowledge. See Don R. Swanson, "Undiscovered Public Knowledge," Library Quarterly 56, April 1986: 103-118.) Libraries can build collections that are more usable than random searching of "everything" (that's searchable and still available) by keyword. Continue reading
Thank you! — May 2009 BOTM
It appears that my time is up as the guest blogger for the month of May. I just wanted to use my last post to thank everyone for this opportunity. As a long time reader and fan of FGI, I must say that guest blogging for this month has been a real treat for me. Continue reading
The Printing Habits of Federal Government Employees
According to a recent report by Lexmark that details the printing habits of federal employees, the US Government spends 1.3 billion dollars on employee printing, of which $440 million is wasted on unnecessary printing. Some of the interesting nuggets from the study include:
- On average, each federal employee prints 30 pages each work day, totaling 7,200 pages per employee per year
- Federal employees estimate that they immediately discard 35% of those pages the same day they are printed
- 89% of federal employees report that their agencies do not have formal printing policies in place