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.
Mind the Gap with Gapminder
Did you know that in 2000, 20% of the world's population made less than a dollar a day? And that in that same year, 66% of Africa earned less than a dollar a day? These are the kinds of figures that Gapminder illustrates. Gapminder is a foundation that develops software for visualizing global development data. Gapminder projects create visualizations of data such as health, income, child mortality, income distribution, and other topics covered in reports from NGOS's like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), public agencies, and universities. Visualization is a powerful way to convey the meaning behind data and Gapminder does it well. Take a look at their 2005 Human Development Trends presentation, for example. Sure beats the set of pdfs.
Continue readingRESTORE act and NSA permanent eavesdropping stations
"NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World." by Ryan Singel Singel's article provides an intriguing history lesson on internet architecture and the US role as an international communications hub. Too bad it's not just a history lesson, but an explanation of current legislation making its way through Congress to give the NSA permanent eavesdropping capabilities on both foreign and domestic communication traffic. The RESTORE Act (.pdf) (RESTORE = "Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective") would extend the NSA's power indefinitely but would "include some safeguards against abuse" (IMHO, an audit trail described in Sec 7 and 8 of the bill does little to safeguard against abuse!). Ironically, President Bush has vowed to veto RESTORE because it doesn't extend retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies who cooperated in the NSA's domestic surveillance before it was legalized. Of course the telecoms are lobbying hard for this immunity clause -- AT&T is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly wiretapping the internet at the behest of the NSA. Need to protect the industrial hand that feeds you eh?
A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it. Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act Tuesday that allows the nation's spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else. But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the amount of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.Continue reading