EPA Guilty of “Bad Faith” in its Library Closures
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) announced that Federal Labor Relations Board Arbitrator George Edward Larney ruled that the EPA acted in bad faith when it abruptly ordered to close seven of its ten regional libraries during the past two years. The arbitrator did not order EPA to re-open the closed libraries, because Congress already ordered them to restore the libraries in pg. 35 of a statement attached to FY 2008 budget (H.R. 2764) passed on December 26th, 2007. Later this month, the EPA is supposed to report to Congress as to how and when it will reopen the libraries with the $3 million that was allocated for them to do so. Hopefully, the EPA will pay heed to the public's input (including the library and depository community) in regards to planning the restoration of these libraries. PEER Associate Director Carol Goldberg echoes this sentiment, stating that "EPA employees are not the only ones negatively affected by library closures; the public now has a much harder time learning about toxic sites in their neighborhoods, the effects of new chemicals or even their local ecological history...while this ruling is a welcome development, EPA should not continue to shut the public – which is paying all the bills – out of the planning for restoration of these invaluable assets." Continue reading
Government Agencies Tweet @ Twitter
While updating my Twitter account recently, I noticed that womenshealth.gov created their own Twitter account and added me to their network. Kudos to the government agencies who are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and getting their information out to the community! That got me wondering what other government agencies have created Twitter accounts, so I did some hunting and found a previous FGI blog entry and an article from CNET News stating that NASA wants to tackle Web 2.0 initiatives in order to "save itself from turning into a dinosaur in the Internet age". It took awhile, but I finally found the official NASA Twitter account, which I stumbled upon via the NASA Edge website and their Twitter page. The U.S. Department of State created a dipnote Twitter account for alerting users to new posts on their DIPNOTE Blog. Many non-profit organizations, such as the American Red Cross, created "tweet" alerts during the recent tornado outbreaks in the south. The Sunlight Foundation is "tweeting" public laws as they are signed. And of course, FGI is on Twitter as well! Even Presidential candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton update their Twitter accounts. I can't find one for John McCain, but it looks like Mike Huckabee joined the Twitter bandwagon too. If you find any other government agencies using Twitter, please post a comment to let everyone know. [Editor's note 6/5/09: I deleted the link to Ron Paul's twitter account as it was not actually from Ron Paul. Thanks Erin for alerting us!] Continue reading
Welcome Rebecca Blakeley, blogger of the month for March, 2008
Welcome to the podium Rebecca Blakeley, head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library. Take it away Rebecca! And many thanks to our BOTM for February, Susanna Leers. Susanna was one of our most prolific bloggers with 40(!) posts for the short leep month! To see all of Susanna's stories, go to her blog. Below are Susanna's latest 10 posts (which I generated from her RSS feed with the handy rss2js feed converter). 3 Cheers for Susanna!! Continue reading
Rebecca Blakeley: blogger of the month for March, 2007
Rebecca Blakeley is head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader. Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Feel free to visit her department's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou. Continue reading
Gaiman’s ebook is “unbelievably painful to use”
And now a cautionary tale: Neil Gaiman -- who wrote the incredible Sandman graphic novel series -- and his publisher, HarperCollins, has put up his novel, "American Gods" online for free reading from the HarperCollins Web site. Cool, right? Well not so fast. As Cory over at boingboing points out, the book is only viewable using HarperCollins' BrowseInside system which loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. And this, dear reader, is the cautionary tale. Online content is *great* for access; but it *needs* to be open and usable, not locked up within a proprietary system with poor quality scans.
The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book -- but that's only because practically no one is going to read this version, period. The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The "security" that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition. Unfortunately, the "security" has also undermined the experiment's value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn't going to cost Neil any sales, but it's also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that's completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.Continue reading