OMB sponsors online discussion of privacy issues
OMB sponsors online discussion of privacy issues, By Nancy Ferris, FCW, October 23, 2008.
The Office of Management and Budget has asked the National Academy of Public Administration to hold a public discussion this month of health care privacy issues through an interactive Web site. The “National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy” will take place the week of Oct. 27 at www.thenationaldialogue.org.The site is also using Twitter (use tag #nationaldialogue) and Youtube (see: http://www.youtube.com/user/natldialogue). "A panel of academy fellows will review the postings and produce a report in December with recommendations for the new administration." Continue reading
Rebecca Troy-Horton
Rebecca Troy-Horton (f/k/a Rebecca Blakeley) is a Reference Librarian at the New Hampshire State Library. She was head of the Government Information Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana from 2007-2011. She was selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader and a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2009.
Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Indiana
In case I haven't made it clear by now, the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) Handout Exchange Wiki has guides for all levels of government information. For instance this week's guide: Indiana Government and Politics (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2008) is dedicated to the US State of Indiana, which has emerged as a battleground state in the 2008 Presidential Election. So what has Bert Chapman found out about Indiana resources? Here is a sampling of the materials he has listed:
- Here Is Your Indiana Government HSSE REF 353.9772 In2c
- Election Report: State of Indiana HSSE REF 324.772 In22a
- West's Indiana Law Encylopedia HSSE REF 347.03 W52
- Indiana Campaign Finance Database
- AJR Newslink Indiana Newspapers
Google map tool shows where to vote
Here's a handy little google tool to help you find out where to vote. Go to the 2008 US Voter Info google map, put in your address and voila! you have your voting station and can easily get driving/walking directions. the sidebar also includes information on voter registration, contact information for local voting officials and a link to the Google 2008 election site to track what's happening on election day. This map tool was developed by state and local election officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Los Angeles County and the Voting Information Project in conjunction with the League of Women Voters. [shout out to the UC Berkeley Library govblog from whom I got the tip!] Continue reading
APIs in 15 Minutes
There is a lot of talk about making data accessible via APIs, but there is also a lot of confusion about what this means, how to do it, and why it is beneficial when the average citizen cannot make heads or tails of an API. API stands for "Application Programming Interface" but typically what we are discussing when we talk about APIs around data is a way to access data in a machine readable format. A machine readable format is something that is more or less understandable by a computer program, so that it may be used to present data in new and interesting ways. The house.gov website has a listing of all representatives by state but a computer program has no way of knowing how to understand this listing. A more useful listing might look like an excel (or CSV) file that listed each congressperson's name in the first column, state in the second, and so on. This is the fundamental advantage of an API, it makes data available in a way that a computer program can understand so that more complicated things can be done by such a program. (eg. draw a map with states colored according to their representatives' party affiliations) A side effect of this computer readable format is that it is possible to ask more useful and specific questions of the data. When you go to the above house.gov site it is possible to get a listing of all Representatives, but it is impossible to say "show me all representatives that are Democrats from North Carolina" or "show me all representatives named John." With an API this kind of query is typically very simple, as an example in the Sunlight Labs API this could be done by going to a URL like http://services.sunlightfoundation.com/api/legislators.get?state=NC&party=D. It is the availability of these APIs that have allowed all sorts of interesting sites that combine data from multiple sources known as "mashups." One of the earliest and most popular examples was a site called HousingMaps that combines Craigslist housing data with Google maps. A handful of APIs exist to help make government data more accessible, through which it is now possible to make mashups using government data. A rich sampling of them includes:
- Sunlight Labs API
- Capitol Words API
- FollowTheMoney API
- GovTrack.us API
- MapLight.org API
- NYTimes Campaign Finance API
- OpenSecrets API
- Project Vote Smart API
- Watchdog.net API