Grants.gov slows down with (gasp!) 2500 users!
Grants.gov ("your source to FIND and APPLY for federal government grants") announced on its blog (which is at blogger.com, not a .gov domain, by the way), that it "continues to experience system slowness due to the high volume of users. We have over 2500 users logged-on and over 1200 users conducting searches." Imagine! a government site with 2500 users! Imagine the site sagging under the weight of this! Imagine e-gov! Imagine the government not being prepared to deliver! Imagine the irony! ugh... For more on this, see: Stimulus Applications Could Overwhelm Grants.gov, By Sarah Cohen, Washington Post, March 11, 2009. To be fair, the folks at grants.gov are trying. According to what Netcraft reports, grants.gov is evidently run by a commercial outfit and has multiple servers and probably has load-balancing run, apparently by Big-IP. According to the Washington Post story, "the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the portal, recently added more storage space for the system [Huh? How about processing power!?] and is working on other modernization efforts." This is not the first time grants.gov has revealed bureaucratic contempt for users; see also: Should Grants.gov Be Abolished? and Grants.gov is Windows-only. The moral, though, is that .gov needs lots of work and lots of money and lots of smart people if we are to be able to rely on having adequate access to online government information. We all want it and are told that online access is the only alternative etc. etc. But until Congress adequately funds IT, we'll have problems like this every time people actually want to use .gov sites in even moderate numbers. Remember when Congressional web servers bogged down when lots of people wanted to read the stimulus bill and email their Representatives? (Surprise! Democracy in action, and Congress was not ready for it.) Sigh... Continue reading
First U.S. Public Access Policy Made Permanent
First U.S. Public Access Policy Made Permanent, Jennifer McLennan, ARL, March 12, 2009.
2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal....Or, maybe that should be 'permanent - for now.' Alas, John Conyers is still committed to his so-called 'Fair Copyright in Research Works Act' (HR 801): Permanent, for Now: Bill Solidifies NIH Mandate but Legislative Challenge Looms, by Andrew Albanese, Library Journal, 3/12/2009. Continue reading
lessig redux h.r. 801
The "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" (H.R. 801) back and forth between bill sponsor Representative John Conyers and bill opponent Lawrence Lessig continues ... LESSIG - A Reply to Representative Conyers, 03.09.2009: "This bill is nothing more than a "publishers' protection act." It is an awful step backwards for science -- as 33 Nobel Prize winners, the current and former head of the NIH, the American Library Association, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have all said. And Mr. Conyers knows this. Practically the identical bill was introduced in the last Congress. Mr. Conyers' committee held hearings on that bill. The "open access" community rallied to demonstrate that this publishers' bill was bad for science. Even some of the cosponsors of the bill admitted the bill was flawed. Yet after that full and fair hearing on this flawed bill, like Jason in Friday the 13th, the bill returned -- unchanged, as if nothing in the hundreds of reasons for why this bill was flawed mattered to the sponsors..." Continue reading
Artists and the recession
A recent National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Note says that "Artists are facing sharp increases in unemployment. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the artist unemployment rate reached 6.0 percent for a total of 129,000 unemployed artists."
This is part of the interesting series of NEA Research Notes. NEA also has a series of Research Reports. The Research Reports series includes the November 2007 newsworthy item: To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence and the 2004 report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Continue readingOpen Up Government Data Wiki
Over at the Wired magazine "How-to wiki," there is a page about making government data more easily available.
- Open Up Government Data [wiki], Wired How-To Wiki, Based on work by Alexis Madrigal.
We've established this wiki to help focus attention on valuable data resources that need to be made more accessible or usable. Do you know of a legacy dataset in danger of being lost? How about a set of Excel (or — shudder — Lotus 1-2-3) spreadsheets that would work better in another format? Data locked up in PDF's? This is your place to report where government data is locked up by design, neglect or misapplication of technology. We want you to point out the government data that you need or would like to have. Get involved! Based on what you contribute here, we'll follow up with government agencies to see what their plans are for that data — and track the results of the emerging era of Data.gov. With your help, we can combine the best of new social media and old-school journalism to get more of the data we've already paid for in our hands.From the look of it, I'd say that the folks who designed this page are not familiar with the many existing sources of government data, but that's just a guess. Nevertheless, I think this is worth monitoring and I hope that librarians contribute to it. (It's easy! "Just jump in and edit the wiki. Add links to data that's out of date or in danger of being forgotten or that comes stored in a less-than-ideal format. Help define how Data.gov gets built by making sure that the data you need is included." And... "If you're not comfortable with the MediaWiki formatting language, feel free to get in touch with Wired.com staff writer, Alexis Madrigal, either by e-mail alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com or on Twitter: @alexismadrigal.) They note:
We're not writing a policy paper here. We're trying to highlight datasets and sources of knowledge that the new Administration — and it's open-data friendly CIO — could make more widely available and accessible with small, concrete actions.Already on the list: Economic Research Service, ClinicalTrials.gov, creating a data catalog of every agency's data streams, "View Data Release From the User's Point of View, not the Agency's", and more. It also lists "Models for Government Data Release, Transparency" such as ESDIS (Earth Science Data and Information System Project at Goddard). Continue reading