Chicago meeting of the Independent Government Observers Taskforce
I am SOOO bummed that I can't be in Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday, but I hope there are some Chicago area librarians who can make it to the first "non-conference" of the Independent Government Observers Taskforce (IGOTF). Carl Malamud and his posse has pulled together a group of Govt observistas to...
Doesn't that just sound like something in which libraries should be involved?!?!? To top it off, I just saw the agenda for the Municipal govt group (on google groups) and the first item is:
- Encourage technical coordination
- Encourage training and outreach efforts
- Raise visibility of efforts by citizens to increase transparency of government
- Determine the need for and arrive a plan for the creation of support services, such as scanning of archives or hosting of content.
Cataloging and standardization*So please, Please, PLEASE get yourself over to the Gleacher Conference Center at the University of Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday (Aug 4-5). If anyone DOES go, please drop updates in the comments or send notes to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info and we'll post to FGI!
How to make available data easier to find and work with (clearinghouses, indexes, formats, etc.)
LOGISTICS: August 4-5, 2008Continue reading
Gleacher Conference Center
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
Map ORGANIZER: Public.Resource.Org LOCALHOST: EveryBlock SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS: Omidyar Network
Sunlight Foundation
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Partnering With GPO
GPO recognizes that with the ever-increasing amount of electronic U.S. Government information, we need your help! Since 1997, depository libraries have worked with GPO to ensure permanent public access to electronic content and to provide services to assist other depositories and the public by becoming a GPO partner. Our recent partnerships include:
- Government Information Online: Ask A Librarian
- Homeland Security Digital Library
- Historical Publications of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
The bad dream of DRM
DRM still sucks: Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it, by Nate Anderson, ars technica (July 24, 2008).
The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. ...[T]he Yahoo news is just another depressing reminder of all the wasted time and energy put into these schemes designed to create roadblocks for legal users.Continue reading
Guide of the Week: Consumer Issues
While we are a nation of citizens, we are also a nation of consumers. Every patron we have is a consumer and so all of them may have need for our current "Guide of the Week" from the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange: Consumer Issues and Advocacy (Mary Finley, California State University-Northridge (CSUN), 2004) Last updated 1/10/2008 Mary Finley has put together an information guide broken down into sections on Books / Complaint Guides & Consumer Agencies / Business Addresses / Brandnames / Journal Articles / Newspapers / Government Agencies & Activities / Laws and Regulations / Internet. Many of the print resources listed in this guide can be found close to you either by searching the catalog of your local library or by searching on WorldCat.org. Ms. Finley's guide references online databases that CSUN has paid for the use of their students and faculty. Some of the same databases might be available to you. Check out the Indiana State Library's listing of statewide virtual libraries at http://www.in.gov/library/inspire/other_states.html to see what desktop database access you might have. Check out the guide. Then see what else is available. And if you're a docs librarian with a handout, please share it! Continue reading
Kris Tells Us Why We Should Care
In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents. The article: Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12 Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that! As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright. The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents. Continue reading