A Strategy for Openness
[Cross posted on Legalresearchplus.com] The New York State Office for Technology and the New York State Archives, has just issued a report that "examines how the state can provide choice, interoperability and vendor neutrality in electronic document creation while ensuring electronic records are preserved and remain accessible." "The report [“A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State”] recommends establishing a statewide, cross-government Electronics Records Committee to address, in a formal, long-term and collaborative manner, all aspects of electronic record creation, management and preservation. The committee would facilitate state agency adoption, place the vendor community on notice of the state’s strategic direction and long-term commitment for technology openness, and ensure this commitment is institutionalized throughout the state enterprise and survives government leadership transitions. Another recommendation suggests the committee develops and publishes a final open records policy, and begins issuing a series of standards and guidelines for implementing the policy."
Hat tip to BeSpacific Continue readingOde to Govdoc-L
I was cleaning my condo today and ran across a "government documents jounral" that I turned in as an assignment in grad school back in 1995. Part of what I did for this assignment was to subscribe to Govdoc-l, the documents librarians' electronic mailing list. I had to report my impressions. The three things I cited 13 years ago were:
- Govdoc-L is practical.
- Govdoc'rs are helpful
- Govdoc-l is informative
Machine converts light from microfiche reader to music on a Casio keyboard
Don't go throwing out your microfiche machines just yet. At last month's Maker Faire, Andrew (aka Pillowsopher) showed off his microfiche-to-MIDI machine. The microfiche machine takes light (in this case, from the screen of the microfiche reader) and converts it into MIDI signals that can then be sent to devices that take MIDI input, like synthesizers or computers. Andrew made the machine for a San Francisco band called Microfiche. Anyone want to go to their next show on June 6?
DHS-sponsored audit: number of OSS code defects dropping
Coverity, in collaboration with Stanford University and under contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has just released their Open Source Report 2008 (PDF). Their environmental scan of major open source projects found that the number of defects in open source code is dramatically dropping! More detail is available on ArsTechnica. Now that we have definitive data that shows that open source software is strong on security, how can we get libraries to participate more readily on collaborative open source projects (like citation management, ILSs, CMSs...)? I'm reminded of a thought experiment posted by Joe Lucia, University Librarian @ Villanova University, in November 2007 on the NewGenCatalog list. In his post, Mr. Lucia called for a "shift of those investments from commercial software support (and staff technical support for commercial products) to a collaborative support environment for open source applications." Come on folks, let's make this shift happen!
In 2006, Coverity's scan detected an average of 0.30 defects per 1,000 lines of code, or, put differently, one code defects per every 3,333 lines. The lower boundary, in this case, was 0.02 (one defect per 50,000 lines) and the upper boundary was 1.22 defects per thousand lines of code. Two years later, the average defect density has fallen to 0.25, or one error per 4,000 lines of code. The upper boundary remains unchanged at 1.22, but the lower boundary has shrunk to 0, implying that repeated scanning has eliminated the errors from at least one program—at least all the errors that Coverity's 2006 static analysis program was able to detect. A 16 percent reduction in defect density over two years is a notable gain, and Coverity singled out certain participating projects as having an exceptionally low defect density.Continue reading
- Postfix
- Perl
- PHP
- Python
- Samba
Pentagon Audit of Iraq Spending
I always find it odd when news reports cite government documents without giving a link or good reference to them. It seems to me that this is something news web sites should do regularly. These reports are not always that easy to track down. Case in point: today's New York Times has a story about a Pentagon report:
- Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says, By James Glanz, New York Times, May 23, 2008
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.Using Google to search on the title of the report plus "site:.gov" yields nothing this morning, although the report is available from two different government web sites. The report is available at the site of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee Holds Hearing on Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds for Iraq, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, along with other statements and documents.
- Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, U.S. Defense Department, Office of the Inspector General, Report No. D-2008-098, (May 22, 2008).