2004 EPA Report Concluded Libraries had Great ROI
The Government Printing Office recently posted a small sample of EPA documents harvested from the EPA web. I'm not writing about this effort today, but so far it looks promising and I commend GPO for sharing part of the results with the community. There will be more about this later.
Today I'm writing about one of the fruits of their web harvesting. One of the reports that GPO pulled and I hope is eventually widely distributed in print is:
Business case for information services : EPA's regional libraries and information centers
by United States. Office of Environmental Information.; United States. Environmental Protection Agency. National Library Network.
EPA 260-R-04-001, Published January 2004
Because I'm uncertain what will happen to the current GPO page once the pilot is finished, I've elected to post this report to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/details/BusinessCaseForInformationServicesEpasRegionalLibrariesAndCenters.
What really impressed me about this report, which might have been mentioned before, is how the authors found a strong financial benefit to EPA running regional libraries. Here is their Executive Summary (bolding mine):
The Environmental Protection Agency?s network of regional libraries and environmental center libraries provides substantial value to the Agency, its professional staff, stakeholders, and the public. Calculated conservatively, the benefit-to-cost ratio for EPA library services ranges between 2:1 and 5.7:1. Libraries and librarians are nonetheless a significant investment, costing the Agency roughly $6.2 million annually to operate and maintain. It is an opportune time to initiate an Agency-wide dialog on the extent and nature of library services at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The rest of this 24 page report basically expands on these findings. Unsurprisingly, time as well as money were saved. According to a table at page 16 of the PDF file, 2003 reference for EPA staff saved the agency over 16,000 hours and over 14,000 hours in serving external users.
So, speaking conservatively, keeping the EPA libraries open provide $2 of benefits for every dollar spent on the libraries PLUS freed up over 30,000 hours a year that EPA staff could spend on other tasks. Makes you wonder why the agency chose to close the libraries anyway.
According to Open WorldCat, there is only one paper copy of this report in the nation's libraries. Hopefully some of you will change that.
Continue readingBook scanning projects
Two recent items that look more closely at book scanning projects:
- The Race to the Shelf Continues The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com by Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University & Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries. Searcher, Vol. 16 No. 1 — January 2008.
"So, why would a librarian choose to go with the OCA over the other partners currently available? Two words: open access. If the goal is to support open access principles and to get scanned copies of out of copyright books indexed in as many search engines as possible, then OCA is the right choice. With minimum requirements such as attribution and maximum requirements of no re-hosting, OCA leaves the greatest number of opportunities for users to discover and re-use the text that they find, making it ideal for those interested in data mining."
- Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale, by Luc Vincent, Google, Inc.
Lorcan Dempsey notes of the Google paper, "The paper outlines presentation options based on copyright status and also discusses how Google supports the document understanding community through the release of software and data sets. I was interested that there was no discussion of social features."
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Happy Public Domain Day!
This is my first post of 2008 and I wanted to wish everyone a happy public domain day! Yes that's right, besides being a day of football, resolutions, hangovers, Korean Duk-Gook (tastes just as good with veggie broth!), it's the day when the works of authors who died in 1957 (for life +50 copyright countries) or those that died in 1937 (in the life+70 countries) -- see this article for a list of countries and their copyright lengths -- go into the public domain for our collective ownership and use.
To ring in the day, John Mark Ockerbloom, Everybody's Librarian, has donated the copyrights of his 1993 Web sites to the public domain in honor of the 14 year initial term of copyright specified in the Statute of Anne and the US's first copyright law. And Wallace McLean over at CopyrightWatch.ca has a nice list of authors whose works are rolling into the public domain.
[Thanks BoingBoing!]
Continue readingWhen government information is not government information
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new service that allows you to "instantly compare what 500 of of the largest American companies are paying their top executives."
- Chairman Cox Unveils New Internet Tool With Instant Comparisons of Executive Pay (press release) Washington, D.C., Dec. 21, 2007
The announcement says that The Executive Compensation Reader is "available today on the SEC's Web site at http://www.sec.gov/xbrl."
When you go to that web site, you'll find "Interactive Financial Reports", "Executive Compensation", and (coming soon) "Financial Explorer" and "Investment Management Risk Return Summary".
But...A big, boldface disclaimer is on the bottom of the page:
These applications are on servers not controlled by the SEC. The SEC does not endorse these sites, their sponsors, or any policy, activity, product, data, or service they offer. These sites may be removed from the Internet with little or no warning. The purpose of the data reported is to test XBRL technology. The data is largely unaudited and unreviewed. It is not an official SEC filing. Use these applications at your own risk. Do not rely on the reported data, or documents rendered from the data, to make investment decisions.
The Interactive Financial Reports is a link to "http://216.241.101.197/viewer" which is run by viawest.net which describes itself as a "provider of colocation, managed hosting and business continuity solutions ViaWest has become a production partner to thousands of companies. We can design, implement and support your critical data and infrastructure – allowing you to focus on your core business."
The Executive Compensation link points to "http://216.12.130.224/" which is run by servervault.com which is also a hosting company. It's home page says it provides "secure, robust IT infrastructure management and hosting services, specifically engineered to help federal agencies and commercial entities achieve the most stringent security posture as well as comply with a wide range of IT security regulations, including FISMA, DITSCAP, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA."
Both sites sport an SEC logo and a numeric url that obscures the fact that you are looking at a .net or .com site, not a .gov site.
Is this a temporary situation and will these sites become .gov? is the SEC simply outsourcing the hosting? Or will these sites become commercial after a trial period with the companies or the SEC charging for services?
At minimum, this kind of outsourcing obscures the authenticity of and provenance of the information and makes the job of GPO, libraries, web-archivists, and citizens more difficult.
Continue readingUnclassified defense information withheld from public database
Recently the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the launching USASpending.gov, which is a relaunch of www.FederalSpending.gov, to provide citizens with easy access to government contract, grant, and other award data (See New OMB Federal Spending Database). But now, Secrecy News says that several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from USASpending.gov.
- Intel Agencies to Withhold Contract Info from Public Database by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, December 18, 2007.
Several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from a new public database of government spending.
The new database at USAspending.gov is intended to provide increased transparency regarding most government contracts.
But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld.
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