EPA Management Incompetence?

Information Today published an article on the recent hearing and issues surrounding the EPA library closures that I've been blogging about this week: "EPA Library Closures: Management Incompetence or Something More Sinister?". I was hoping they would discuss or speculate what exactly the author deemed "sinister" but it's basically just an in-depth summary of the hearing and witness testimonies. Read between the lines? Continue reading

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Sunshine Week Kick Off

Kicking off Sunshine Week, Senator Clinton answered the Sunshine Campaign Survey on open government. And according to the 2008 Sunshine Week survey, 3/4 of American Adults view the federal government as secretive. Did anyone happen to attend National FOI Day on Friday? I'll have to check back on their website for a summary of what occurred. Speakers included J. William Leonard and Tom Blanton. If you are in the D.C. area on Monday, March 17th, NARA is hosting a public meeting held by the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) to solicit public reaction to its recent Report, "Improving Declassification". Continue reading

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A Mover and a Shaker!

Congratulations, Daniel Cornwall! Continue reading

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FGI on the road

Today we start a new feature, FGI on the road. From time to time we'll post upcoming events that FGI volunteers will be attending. We'll be doing this hoping that you'll stop by and say hello so we can meet and talk about government information issues!

Here are places we'll be over the next few months:

  • San Francisco Bay Area. Ongoing
    Shinjoung Yeo and James R. Jacobs put together monthly public talks and workshops for the Stanford Open Source Lab. Check the Open Source Lab blog for talk announcements. Talks are open to the public.
  • Urbana-Champaign, IL. April, 2008
    Shinjoung and James R will be participating in a brown-bag discussion with graduate students at University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
  • Stanford University. May 27-30, 2008
    IASSIST 2008 Conference
    The theme of the 2008 meeting of the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST), Technology of Data: Collection, Communication, Access and Preservation, examines the role of technology and tools in various aspects of the data life cycle. Shinjoung and James R (local arrangements) and James A. Jacobs will be there.
  • Anaheim, CA. June 27, 2008.
    ALA pre-conference Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community. Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30 (Event Code: GO2)
    James A. and James R. will be presenting and will be joining Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota (Amy was also an FGI blogger of the month), David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University, and John Wonderlich, Program Director, of the Sunlight Foundation. Registration is open, but seating is limited.
  • Anaheim, CA. June 26–July 2, 2008.
    ALA 2008 2008 Annual Conference
    Shinjoung and James R and Daniel Cornwall will be there. James R. will be doing a presentation and leading a discussion on digital collection development at GODORT's International documents task force. Daniel is planning a lunch or some other informal get together on the State Agencies Wiki.
  • Ann Arbor MI. August 11-15
    Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation
    This workshop covers the basics of providing services for social science data. James A. will be joining Diane Geraci, who starts as Associate Director for Information Resources at MIT Libraries in April, and Chuck Humphrey, the Data Library Coordinator at the University of Alberta. This workshop is part of the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research.   Registration is limited to 20.
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OpenCongress Web 2.0 Tools for Your Library

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves. One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement. If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource "with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page". OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-) I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too! Continue reading

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