FGI at SAA
I just got back from another fun-packed week of teaching the data services workshop at ICPSR, and next week I will be speaking briefly at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists on "The challenges for preservation of government information in the digital age" (Appraisals/Appraisers Section Meeting) on Friday. Stop by and say hello! Continue reading
Library Partnership Saves Government Sites
Library Partnership Preserves End-of-Term Government Web Sites, The Library of Congress, News Releases, August 14, 2008.
The Library of Congress, the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas Libraries, the Internet Archive and the U.S. Government Printing Office today announced a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 19, 2009. This harvest is intended to document federal agencies' online archive during the transition of government and to enhance the existing collections of the five partner institutions. ...The project will also call upon government information specialists -- including librarians, political and social science researchers, and academics -- to assist in the selection and prioritization of web sites to be included in the collection, as well as identifying the frequency and depth of the act of collecting. The Government Printing Office will lend expertise to the curation process along with libraries in its Federal Depository Library Program. A tool has been designed by the project team and developed by the University of North Texas to facilitate the collaborative work of these specialists, and will be made available to participants in August 2008.See also: Project will preserve Bush administration Web sites, By Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov (08/15/08). Continue reading
Planned Launch of GPO’s Federal Digital System (Fdsys)
The first public release of GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) http://www.gpo.gov/projects/fdsys.htm will launch later this year. Staff in the Superintendent of Documents Library Services and Content Management unit at GPO have been working with GPO's Program Management Office who are responsible for developing this system. We want to ensure that the requirements for the Federal Depository Library Program will be met. In order to ensure that we are accurately communicating the requirements capabilities of the system, we are requesting your feedback. Based on your knowledge of FDsys, what are your expectations for the first public release? We want to make sure we continue to get this information in the hands of the development team and keep lines of communications open. Additional information should be also be shared with GPO's Program Management Office at pmo@gpo.gov Continue reading
Guides of the Week: Georgia and Russia
Because they've been in the news, I'm highlighting the Georgia and Russia country guides produced by the Government Publications Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that have just been posted to the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange. Both guides are broken down into the following sections:
- Government (direct from country) Information
- Country Profiles
- Articles & Databases
- Diplomatic Relations
- Health
- Peacekeeping & Military Information
- Resources in the Catalog
- Related Topics
Help USGS Find the Missing!
While searching at the USGS Publications Warehouse, I noticed one of the available tabs was MIA. Clicking on this tab brought me to the MIA Publication page, where USGS asked the public's help in tracking down missing publications. Here's their explanation:
Listed below are all the USGS series that are currently or will soon be loaded into the Publication Warehouse. Each series may have missing report numbers or unverifiable citations. Missing report numbers are gaps in the numbering sequence of a series. We do not know if the report was ever released or if there is a reason why the report number was skipped. These reports may have been cancelled, recalled, or destroyed. Report numbers may have been issued in blocks and some may never have been used. Unverified citations Unverified citations are citations for any publication where there was some information about the publication available but that information could not be confirmed, the publication itself has not been found, and we are not sure if the publication was actually released. Many of the unverified reports were found referenced by other publications as "in press".Please visit the site for a list of the missing and help out if you can. You'll be responsible for putting more government information on the web. Continue reading