Hearing on electronic preservation in the White House
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has authority to investigate the subjects within the Committee’s legislative jurisdiction as well as “any matter” within the jurisdiction of the other standing House Committees.
Tues. Feb. 26 at 10 am the full Committee will hold a hearing entitled “Electronic Records Preservation at the White House.” According to the Committee website, the witnesses expected to testify include:
Senator Obama addresses Net Neutrality in Podcast from 2006
My Google Alert for podcasts works in strange ways. Today, for example, it sent me a podcast episode by Sen. Barack Obama done in 2006. Why it's flagging it now, I don't know.
But it's an interesting episode that addresses a major FGI interest, net neutrality. You can find the episode at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/. I think he sums up the issues well:
"It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.
But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.
Everyone who cannot pony up the cash will be relegated to the slow lanes."
If you're aware of other candidate statements on Net Neutrality, feel free to post links to them in comments. Interestingly, Sen. Obama's last podcast seems to have been on April 12, 2007. See all of his topics at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/. If you're aware of him podcasting somewhere else, let us know by leaving a comment.
Continue readingCollaborative blogs – legal issues
You and some friends or colleagues decide to start a blog together. This is pretty common, but might there be some legal issues you haven't considered? Over at InformIT, Eric Goldman has written a 2 part series that examines this possiblity. Part I discusses the legal ramifications of blogging collaboratively, and in part 2 the author points out some possible solutions and recommendations for mitigating unwanted consequences of co-blogging.
Continue readingSupreme Court Justice statistics
SCOTUSblog has announced the release of a new statpack (9 page pdf) that shows the breakdown of how each Supreme Court Justice has ruled at the quartermark of the term. One new statistic includes how often each Justice votes with the majority, both overall and in divided cases. The idea is that these figures reflect a general, if imperfect, measurement of how often each Justice is presumably pleased with the outcome of the Court’s decisions. Justice Antonin Scalia is the only member of the Court to vote with the majority in every merits decision issued so far this Term.
Continue readingThe internet, Google, libraries
Thanks to my fellow blogger for the link to Fister's article. I recently came across an article (linked through that splendid online publication brought to us by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily) that offers more food for thought. Titled Better than Free,this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses how we might be able to add value to the vast amount of free information now available - value that people will be willing to pay for. He says that "The internet is a copy machine....When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?" He discusses eight "generative values" that are better than free:
immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. All of these are relevant to librarians as we adjust our skill sets to provide information available on the internet.