Obama using YouTube for weekly radio address
Your Weekly Address from the President-elect at Change.Gov says:
For the first time, the weekly Democratic address has been released as a web video. It will also continue to air on the radio. President-elect Obama plans to to publish these weekly updates through the Transition and then from the White House. Today's address from the President-elect concerns the current economic crisis.Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Guides related to financial oversight
As promised, starting this week, Guide of the Week is supporting the "__ Days to Government Information Liberation" initiative by highlighting guides from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki that shed light on important Presidential transition issues as defined by the Government Accountability Office's urgent issues page at http://www.gao.gov/transition_2009/urgent/. This page highlights the following 13 "urgent issues":
- oversight of financial institutions and markets,
- U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,
- protecting the homeland,
- undisciplined defense spending,
- improving the U.S. image abroad,
- finalizing plans for the 2010 Census,
- caring for service members,
- preparing for public health emergencies,
- revamping oversight of food safety,
- restructuring the approach to surface transportation,
- retirement of the Space Shuttle,
- ensuring an effective transition to digital TV, and
- rebuilding military readiness.
- Banking, Banks and Credit Unions (University of Colorado at Boulder Government Publications Library, 2008)
- Government Documents on Banking (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last updated 3/10/2008
- Housing (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2001) Last updated 3/10/2008
- Annual Report Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
- House Financial Services Committee
- Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
- Australia Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance, & Public Administration
- FDIC Institution Directory contains demographic data and financial profiles of each FDIC-insured depository institution derived from quarterly reports filed with Federal regulators.
- Community Reinvestment Act Database "The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods." The database includes bank ratings and performance evaluations.
- Credit Union Data Detailed data on individual institutions and tool for data comparison.
68 Days to Government Information Liberation
As I watch and read the what is happening at the national level (presidential transition, financial crisis, two major world wars, a major meeting of the 20 largest economies in Washington, D.C.), I wonder if government/civic information librarians can learn and sustain a collective knowledge building effort that captures the added value, bibliographic structures, and shape of the policy narrative I refer to in earlier posts. What I have in mind is modeled on the weather alerts here in the Midwest -- trying to get early word out about violent weather nearby; are the various community alerts issued about missing people or crime nearby. So, what I suggest is something that I call an Adelaide Alert (in honor of Adelaide Hasse.) The purpose of these alerts would be to put together web tools or resources that help explain and track major complicated public policy and government events. These events are so profound (and at times, predictable) that if an organized group of government information librarians can get their act together to cooperate across geographic and institutional lines, they could sustain a major reference source that would be free to anyone with access to the web. Think of it as an information grange or cooperative. These tools would list significant official sources that discuss the event; would provide a timeline or outline of how the event came to be and what might happen; would list secondary or authoritative non-government resources. It would be updated on a regular basis and maintained by the cooperative. Yes, they could by wikis, they could be web pages, they could be whatever social software we would choose to use. If we truly get radical, these large-scale reference cooperatives could be coming the cutting edge for preservation. In other words, for those of us so inclined, we could be sure that the important government/official sources part of the Alert are preserved in some coordinated fashion (much along the lines LOCKSS project.) This kind of collaborative large-scale work would mean we are not reacting to our community's need for information, but actually anticipating them -- liberation might be the easy compared to sustaining the fruits of that liberty. See you on day 67. And Jim, thanks for the substantial response to Day 69 -- I am composing a reply to be posted in the next couple of days. Continue reading
Support OpenDocument
OpenDocument campaign page gets a revamp: Support OpenDocument. This is where you can find out what it is, what you can do, who else is using it and more.
The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word-processing documents. The OpenDocument format is supported by free software applications such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and KOffice.Continue reading
Tell Change.gov to…change
You may have noticed some of our recent blog posts that discuss the copyright status of the President-elect's website, Change.gov, as well as the vanishing contents of the website, among other concerns. We here at FGI created a standard letter for you to use (see below) if you wish to contact Change.gov and let them know your concerns. You can email the change.gov website by going to their Contact page at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact If you do contact them, let us know in the comments of this post so that we have an idea on how many emails have been sent. Thanks!
Hello, I strongly urge you to change the copyright statement on your site to clearly state that all information on the site is in the public domain. According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. ยง 105, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." Since the site is in the .gov domain, people expect the material on the site to have been produced by government employees and thus as being in the public domain. If the bulk of material at change.gov was not created by federal employees, then I suggest that you post a blog entry explaining why your material is under copyright. You should also explore moving your content to a .org domain, which internet users understand can have copyrighted material. It would be ok to leave a redirect from change.gov to the new site as long as the new site was clearly labeled non-government. There has been much discussion over this matter at the Free Government Information website, which you can read about here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/876. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Sincerely, Rebecca Blakeley Government Documents LibrarianUPDATE: Removed the portion of this template letter that asked for them to return the missing "Agenda" pages of the website. They've been restored! Continue reading