Lunchtime Listen: Open Access to Government Documents
This is a presentation by Stephen Schultze, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard on the topic "Open Access to Government Documents." He focuses on CRS reports, Oregon State Codes, and PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). The presentation is available as streaming video, downloadable video, and as a downloadable audio-only MP3 file.
- Open Access to Government Documents, Berkman Center. October 13, 2008.
In the past twenty years, a remarkable number of government documents have been put online. In some cases, these documents are made easily and freely accessible. In others, technology has failed to overcome barriers or even created new barriers to access. One particular subset of documents -- opinions, dockets, and the full public record in federal court cases -- remain behind a pay wall. Although the U.S. Government cannot hold copyright in documents it creates, it has for a long time long charged for the cost of creating and maintaining these documents. While the courts understandably seek to pay for the services they provide, this talk will argue that there is an alternative path in which the public benefits far outweigh the costs. Stephen Schultze makes a dynamic case for free access to government documents, in honor of Open Access Day 2008. Produced 13 Oct 2008Continue reading
NYTimes Announces Campaign Finance API
The New York Times has just announced an API that makes available the data they have gleaned from the Federal Election Commission's electronic filings for the presidential candidates.
"The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code."This allows people with the appropriate technical skills to build mashups and other web services that take a look at donations by individual or by area with relative ease. In essence it is now possible for web developers to create views on this valuable data that previously would have involved digging through millions of FEC electronic filings. It should also be possible for researchers with moderate technical knowledge to analyze the individual contributions going to candidates to perform statistical and other analysis on what makes for a very interesting dataset. The New York times providing this service is certainly a positive step towards helping people make use of what is one of the richest (pun not intended) datasets the federal government has to offer. Continue reading
Gov Data Mashups: Apps for Democracy Contest
Are you a techie who has a passion for government information, transparency, coding, mashups, and/or web 2.0 tools? Then sign up for the Apps for Democracy contest! In conjunction with the DC Government’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, the contest is offering $20,000 in prizes to be given to 60 different creators. The goal of the contest is "to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC." For more information, visit the Apps for Democracy website, and you can follow the contest on Twitter or through their Facebook Group. Dang...if only I was better at coding... Continue reading
Animated Universal Declaration of Human Rights
As you know, December 10 is Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Well check out this beautifully animated (although not word-for-word accurate) version created by the Human Rights Action Center to celebrate 2008 as the 60th anniversary of the UDHR. That music will stick with you for a while too!
What do you want to know about Archive-it?
I'd like to survey you, our loyal FGI readers. I'm co-presenting with Molly Bragg at next week's Depository Library Council conference about digital collections using archive-it (see title and abstract below). I've got an outline but I'd really like to know what questions YOU have about archive-it and digital collections. What do YOU want to know about archive-it? So, please please please leave a comment here so that my presentation will be even more amazing :-)
Title of Presentation: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: Archiving and Preserving Born Digital Government Documents Abstract: Stanford University Library has been a federal depository library since 1895. In 2007, the library began collecting born digital documents using Archive-It, the web archiving service from Internet Archive (www.archive-it.org). In this presentation James Jacobs will discuss his group's objectives and procedures for selecting and archiving digital content and share examples of the unique content preserved. Molly Bragg will present an overview of web archiving projects and tools used and developed by Internet Archive. These tools are used by libraries around the world to preserve government documents and other born digital content.Continue reading