Guide of the Week: North Korea
With North Korea once again pushing its way to the front of the headlines, this is a good time to show off a librarian produced resource guide from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki on this pariah nation: North Korea Country Guide (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008) Like the other excellent country guides produced by the UCB govpubs library, this guide is broken into the following sections:
- Government Information
- Country Profiles
- Articles & Databases
- Diplomatic Relations
- Health
- Peacekeeping & Military Information
- Resources in the Catalog
- Related Topics
No visit to the agency would be complete without a trip to the [REDACTED] reports that between 9:30 and 10:55pm, guests spent 2/3 of an average day's sales, carting away cart-loads of t-shirts, caps, and infants/children's outfits.The secret's out. The CIA has a gift shop. The redaction would look somewhat less silly and pointless if they had just redacted the gift shop manager's name. But I digress. The good librarians at the University of Colorado at Boulder have provided a wealth of resources for anyone who wants to take a peak behind the screaming headlines of this deeply insular and often confusion producing country. Are you a librarian with a handout or guide to an issue in the news? Then link it to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki. Continue reading
The Digital Government Society of North America
Here is an interesting organization that you might not be aware of, the Digital Government Society of North America. The Digital Government Society of America (DGSNA) is a global multi-disciplinary organization of scholars, researchers, educators, students, government professionals, and practitioners who are interested in the development and impact of digital government or e-government. DGSNA focuses on creating a support network of individuals interested in the linkages among the democratic process, government management, innovation, information, and technology. Benefits of membership include:
- Opportunity to exchange knowledge and information with other members in North America and throughout the world
- (In development) access to a membership database to find others who share your interests or have special expertise
- Discounted registration fees for our annual conference
- Subscription to a monthly e-newsletter, dgOnline
- Access to a library of over 2,000 articles and papers
- Discounted access to scholarly and professional journals
US Census Bureau’s DataFerret
DataFerrett (Federated Electronic Research, Review, Extraction, and Tabulation Tool) is a free data mining and extraction tool developed by the U.S. Census Bureau that allows users to search, browse, combine, tabulate, recode, and analyze statistical data from a network of online data libraries. The DataFerret software can be downloaded from the website or ran in the browser via a java applet. Some material to read before getting started:
Available data sets included:- American Community Survey (ACS)
- American Housing Survey (AHS)
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
- Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES)
- County Business Patterns (CBP)
- Current Population Survey (CPS)
- Decennial Census of Population and Housing
- Harvard-MIT Data Center Collection
- Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA)
- Local Employment Dynamics (LED)
- National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS)
- National Center for Health Statistics Mortality (MORT)
- National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HANES)
- National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)
- National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS)
- National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife (FHWAR)
- Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE)
- Social Security Administration (SSA)
- Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)
- Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD)
UNL’s Government Comics Digital Collection
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Library has recently put together a very unique collection of government information. Free and available to all, UNL's Government Comics Collection is a digital library containing 174 scanned comics books from various government entities. In the government realm, comics books have had a long and rich history as a delivery medium for government information. UNL has managed to successfully amass a pretty impressive collection. (found via MetaFilter) Continue reading
Why free PACER access matters
A recent event shows why free access to the federal courts' Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is important. That event is Chrysler's bankruptcy. This is an event of high enough interest that PACER itself chose to highlight their holdings of the Chrysler bankruptcy docket. Perhaps highlight is too strong a word. To see anything you need a PACER account and be prepared to pay fees under these conditions (bolding mine):
Access to web based PACER systems will generate an $.08 per page charge. The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches.) The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded.If PACER access were free, any interested citizen could monitor the bankruptcy case for themselves instead of getting a filtered view from media. They could see how the company, the shareholders and the union were being treated in the process. PACER will continue to generate documents of national interest as GM follows Chrysler into bankruptcy court. Congress ought to mandate free access to all of PACER. The cost to do is an infinitesimal portion of the money paid for auto industry bailouts. Continue reading