12 to 11 Days to Government Information Liberation
Daniel and Jim raise several good points. I will break from the possession obsession and move on to some other issues I think will impact the future success of government information services in our bibliographic institutions and with our communities. And Daniel is right, this time of change and upheaval is also an opportunity to take an advantage of putting some emphasis in our message about civic engagement and librarianship(speaking as a poor citizen from Illinois who has, perhaps, experienced enough political revolution -- from triumph, to tragedy and now to a pathetic comedy of ego and errors.) Specifically -- how do those of us responsible for government information in library institutions take advantage of the public's need to figure out what is going happening out there? In the Gutenberg traditions, we did with our collections, bibliographic tools/structures, and a hard-won pragmatic expertise on helping people find information and/or knowledge to their questions. How do we do it in a world of civic information transformed by digital technology? There are four ways we can do this, and I will discuss each (with a specific suggestion or two of how to approach the problem) over the next ten days. 1. How do we work within our professional associations. and with other advocacy groups, on how to better understand and collaborate with the public/non-governmental institutions responsible for creating and the several layers of civic information content and infrastructure? 2. How do we establish some kind of clear understanding of what our institutional role should be/might be in the preservation of the vast number of digital and tangible formats now used by these public institutions? 3. Can we agree on clear guidelines and expectations of what it means to effectively (and actively) promote the access and use of civic information within our communities? 4. In terms of education and professional knowledge -- what are the essential skills, outlook, tools necessary to support a librarian who specializes in government information services? I figure these points will keep us well occupied long after liberation day. See you on Day 10. Continue reading
In openness move, Change.gov lists Obama Biden Transition Project Donors
The Obama-Biden Transition Team, Donors
In keeping with President-elect Obama's pledge to run the most open and transparent transition in history, the Obama-Biden Transition Project has voluntarily chosen to release the names of its donors on a monthly basis.Change.gov is using Blist.com, a nascent Web application from a Seattle-based start-up, to display the information. See story: Obama embraces Web-based list sharing program, CongressDaily, 01/05/2009. Continue reading
Employment Situation – Commissioner’s Statement from BLS
Keith Hall, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, issued a statement on the current employment situation. The total number of job losses in 2008 was 2.6 million and the rate of unemployment increased from 6.8 % to 7.2 %. He states that it is “the highest rate since January 1993.” Although employment declined in several major industrial sectors, it increased in healthcare. In the last year, 372,000 jobs were added in the healthcare sector. Details of the depressing employment situation are readily available for access. 1) Employment Situation 2) Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) 3) Mass Layoffs (Monthly) 4) Regional and State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) Continue reading
Center for Responsive Politics announces new open data tools
The Center for Responsive Politics has announced two...
...valuable tools that will make it easier for data-users to work with CRP's information: the identification numbers that we apply to candidates for federal office and the codes we apply to the more than 400 sectors, industries and categories whose political influence CRP tracks. We're making this information available to facilitate the sharing of the quality, improved data that the Center for Responsive Politics works hard to provide to the public. -- 2009: The Year of Open Data, by Massie Ritsch, OpenSecrets.org, January 8, 2009.They also offer "easy-to-use widgets that you can paste onto your website or blog to incorporate our analysis of election financing and industry influence." Continue reading
NY Times Announces the Congress API
Announcing the Congress API, By Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis, New York Times, January 8, 2009.
The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes. The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity. Our data comes directly from the U.S. House and Senate Web sites, and is updated throughout the day while Congress is in session....You have to register for an api-key to use the system, but it is free (for now). Check it out here! (Note that this an API and returns XML so that you can build live data applications. You agree not to "archive any of the API content for access by users at any future date after you have finished using the service...." It is for building interactive applications.) Continue reading