10 questions: collaborative question-building for presidential candidates
Here's a pretty cool project called 10Questions. It's sorta like Reddit for the presidential election. Here's how it works:
- You ask a video question to the presidential candidates
- You vote on the best questions
- The top ten questions get selected
- Candidates post their video answers
- You decide if they actually answered the questions
Unlike television debates, the 10Questions Presidential Forum makes full use of the web’s potential to expand participation in politics. Everyone has an opportunity to ask a question, and to rally support for their question being in the top ten. The candidates have plenty of time to formulate their answers, and can post in-depth replies. Finally, the community will be able to grade the candidates’ answers. With large numbers of people participating, the candidates will have an incentive to pay attention. Who knows, maybe we’ll even change the course of the election!Continue reading
Aids.gov podcast
The newest entrant to our government podcasts directory is the AIDS.gov podcast from the federal department of Health and Human Services. The podcasts are short videos (3-5 min) that focus on news and conversations about AIDS. Despite the fact that these podcasts have been going out since February 2007, we seemed to have scooped our friends at usa.gov because I didn't notice it on their Health Podcasts page as of October 16, 2007.
This is a decent example that publishing on the web isn't the same as either distributing a document or proactively informing the public or press. Posting something to the web without further efforts means the content lays there until stumbled upon -- in this case by my Google Alert that looks for podcasts in the dot gov domain.
In this particular case, I'm sure the aids.gov folks, far from hiding anything promoted their podcasts to their constituencies, but the effect for the rest of us was the same. We don't find stuff like this unless we're looking for it. Ideally, there should be some outlet - usa.gov, GPO, etc (I don't know) where new content like this would be pushed out to people the moment it is published.
The Federal Digital System (FDSys) seems like it will promise this sort of functionality for government documents published with GPO's knowledge. I'm looking forward to seeing how that promise holds up.
Continue reading
LOCKSS setup, made visual in 5 min
Many thanks to Karen over at Free Range Librarian, for pointing out this YouTube video of LOCKSS installation:
In this video, Angela Slaughter of Indiana University walks us through the steps of setting up a LOCKSS cache. Please watch this five minute video and see how easy it could be for your institution. Then hope on over to http://www.lockss.org, learn more and consider what LOCKSS could do for you!
Continue readingDigital Deposit: Lack of storage space is no excuse
This past weekend I was at my local Costco and not one, but two brands of 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) drives selling at around $300. I also saw a 500 GB (1/2 T) drive for $130. All of the drives were USB friendly meaning you could take one off the shelf and plug it into a USB port and have all that memory available to you.
What can you store in a Terabyte? According to an FBI article on digital forensics, plenty:
"a terabyte is equivalent to about 250 million pages of text, which would stack 10 miles high if printed on both sides of the page."
Surely that's enough space for even smaller libraries considering telling the Government Printing Office that they would like PDF ("access derivitives") delivered to them based on their profiles.
I admit, space isn't the only issue. But it's the objection I've heard most often and I honestly believe that technology has taken it away.
Continue readingHappy 100th to Oregon State Docs Program
FGI wishes to extend a belated Happy Anniversary to the Oregon Documents Depository Program, which turned 100 this month. To celebrate, the Oregon State Library has established a centennial anniversary website. Their introduction covers all the high points:
The State Library celebrates the Oregon Documents Depository Program Centennial!
The Oregon Documents Depository Program was founded in 1907 on a principle that still can be found in our state documents depository law today:
"It is a basic right for citizens to know about the activities of their government, to benefit from the information developed at public expense and to have permanent access to the information published by state agencies."
For 100 years, the State Library, depository libraries, and state agencies have made information about our state government available to citizens, and have preserved it for future generations.
This exhibit celebrates the Depository Program's centennial.
We hope you enjoy it and visit us often!
There are four sections to the exhibit displaying scanned documents either distributed by the depository program or about the program itself: Documents that changed Oregon; History of the Oregon Documents Program; New Oregon Documents Repository and Fun Stuff.
The Fun Stuff collection has a 1937 document called Are Young Drivers Good Drivers? Then as now, the government concluded no and used bar charts to prove its point.
This looks like a great way to celebrate state documents and our hats are off to Jey Wann and the rest of the Oregon Documents folks for sharing this.
Sadly, doing a centennial exibit on the Alaska State Documents program probably isn't in the cards for me. Our program was established in 1970, so I wouldn't be able to put on an exhibit till I'm a 105 and by then I hope to have moved on to other things. :-) But I could do a forty year anniversary in 2010.