“Making a Passport” Video
The State Department's DIPNOTE blog posted a video of Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack discussing the process for creating a passport and its new security features. For the video's transcript, go to http://video.state.gov. Continue reading
More GPO Scrutiny from The Washington Times & GPO Responds
The Washington Times published the concluding article on their GPO Passport story on Friday:
"When the government finally built a backup passport center to be used in case Washington became debilitated, it picked a location directly in the path of potential future disaster, the hurricane-prone Mississippi Gulf Coast, which was ravaged by Katrina just a few years ago.
...The Times examined the state of America's new e-passport program, disclosing in stories this week that the GPO outsourced production of key components for the passport to overseas facilities and has charged the State Department substantially more than it actually costs to make each passport. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday her department is investigating the pricing issues, and two congressional committees also launched investigations into the security issues raised by having the crown jewels of America's border-security system produced overseas".More details on the State Department's investigation can be found at this article also published by The Washington Times. Also, some members of Congress are investigating the passport security issue, according to an article from The Washington Times, as well as an editorial addressing these GPO passport issues. GPO responded to the second story in a press release dated March 27th and also responded to the third story on the secure production facility via a press release dated March 28th:
"During the investigatory process, GPO did several site analyses for different locations. GPO and the State Department determined Stennis Space Center met all the requirements and to be the most secure and cost effective location".Continue reading
GPO/GODORT Conf Call Minutes Posted
Bill Sleeman, chair of the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT), recently posted the minutes to the GPO / GODORT Steering Conference Call of March 12, 2008. These conference calls take place from time to time and often have news of value. The minutes can be found (may have to scroll) at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/GODORT_Chair and covered the following topics, among others:
- Request for Information for Mass Digitization Opportunities
- Status of EPA Web Harvesting
- Status of the Federal Digital System (FDSys)
- Addition of pre-1976 cataloging to the Catalog of Government Publications - in progress.
- Continued distance ed through OPAL
- Current stats on the newish Government Information Online reference service.
LH & RHM: Status of EPA harvesting project: GPO worked through 300 of the documents to gather information on what it will take for GPO to provide access to harvested materials (process, workflow and staffing implications). So far: the back end automation of meta-data extraction is not ready; parameters for metadata that accompanies the files needs improvement to automate de-duping; and the rules, methods and mechanisms for harvesting need to be refined (approximately 28% of material was not in scope). Basically, it is still taking more staff time to make these available than GPO can afford. BS asked about the FGI taxonomy experiment and if GPO would be investigating the results of that effort. GPO may incorporate that information into the project as the project moves forward.GPO's results of automated harvesting finding a lot of out of scope material and difficult automated extraction of metadata are about what I expected based on my own experience and from my reading of the literature. Whether or not GPO builds on our modest taxonomy experiment (Thanks Bill!), I think that a GPO - community/citizen collaboration will be needed to begin getting a handle on web-based agency documents. They could start simply by publishing their spidering logs and see what happens. Or perhaps they can obtain some of the $2 Billion/week currently being spent elsewhere. If GPO choose to take the mass collaboration route, I hope the documents community is in the forefront of helping them. If you're interested in taking part in our tagging experiment, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We will be running the project through April 18, 2008. To see what has been tagged so far, please visit http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject. OPAL Training Here are the notes on this subject:
LC: OPAL, GPO continues to use OPAL for online training and demos. At present, technical capabilities limit presentations to slide shows, such as PowerPoint presentations. Interactive web functions will be added in the future. January call for participation in creation of tutorials netted one submission; hoping to generate interest at DLC.The FDLP has over 1200 libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? A majority of FDLP libraries are teaching oriented academic libraries and GPO got ONE SUBMISSION? Hello! I know I'm not the only one who has insisted that GPO provide training between conferences for those of us who don't get out much. The documents community has a great reservoir of government information expertise. We should be actively aiding GPO in their efforts to spread that expertise. I admit that GPO's one submission wasn't from my library. I have a pretty new docs staff that's still getting up to speed. But that can't be the case everywhere. If only 10% of FDLP libraries could step up with a program, that would still be 120 programs -- twice a week for a whole year. Just so I can at least pretend to put my money (or staff time) where my mouth is, I will spend some time next month looking at our library's gov info information strengths, our customer needs and patron interests. And then sometime during the summer I or someone else from our library will submit a program. If you run a depository, will you commit to doing the same? Not only does GPO need our help, so do our colleagues. FGI thanks the GODORT and GPO personnel who participated, Jill Vassilakos-Long for taking the minutes and Bill for posting them to the ALA GODORT Wiki. Continue reading
Updates on Net Neutrality
Here are some recent items about [w:Network Neutrality] that should, alternately, make your blood pressure rise and give you something constructive to do about it! (See also: Net Neutrality on FGI).
- Comcast Blocking: First the Internet — Now the Public February 25th, 2008 by jstearns. "Comcast — or someone who really, really likes Comcast — evidently bused in its own crowd. These seat-warmers, were paid to fill the room, a move that kept others from taking part."
- Comcast Manipulating NAACP on Net Neutrality, by: Matt Stoller, Wed Feb 27, 2008. "a flyer calling for a rally protesting the FCC under the NAACP's name, put out by a PR firm, and disavowed by the local NAACP as simply a 'draft', was going around on the same day as a net neutrality hearing that Comcast packed with a crowd they hired to prevent net neutrality advocates from attending.
- Net Neutrality's Quiet Crusader By Cecilia Kang, Washington Post, March 28, 2008; Page D01. [also available here] "A soft-spoken 30-year-old PhD candidate, Ben Scott has become an operator in multibillion-dollar battles involving corporate titans, regulators and consumers debating policies over who controls the media and the Internet."
- Software for Keeping ISPs Honest, by Peter Eckersley, March 28th, 2008. "...the general problem of ISPs doing strange things to Internet traffic without telling their customers is likely to continue in the future. EFF and many other organizations are working on software to test ISPs for unusual (mis)behavior. In this detailed post, we have a round-up of the tools that are out there right now, and others that are in development..."
Re-Opened EPA Libraries Will not Be the Same
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release analyzing the March 26 EPA Report to Congress. PEER Associate Director Carol Goldberg says, “EPA is approaching the task of restoring its libraries grudgingly and appears to be trying to get by doing the bare minimum,”
- EPA to Re-Open Libraries by Fall - But They Won't Be the Same, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, March 28, 2008.
- Re-opened libraries would be limited to “core reference materials” and unspecified “resources to meet specific local needs.” The one exception is the Kansas City–based regional library whose collection had not yet been disbursed;
- All EPA libraries will be operated under the direct control of a political appointee who will review whether requests for research materials and services “meet Network standards.” ...
- EPA is not indicating when, how or with whom it will consult in order to determine “stakeholder needs” that are supposed to guide services.