Free Government Information (FGI) - Because Government information needs to be free

Scan This Book! An interview with the Open Content Alliance's Brewster Kahle, By Andrew Richard Albanese, Library Journal (8/15/2007) In the race to digitize the public domain, is the future of the library at stake?

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the non-profit Internet Archive. When asked about the Google book scanning project, Brewster notes the problem of having access only through one source and one interface -- a model that GPO is adopting for the FDLP.

The idea of making all books accessible online in new and different ways is all good news. But if you do this in a way that the materials that have been housed in libraries for centuries are made available only through one corporate interface, that is an Orwellian future.

Welcome OCLC Abstract Readers!

Welcome to any new visitor who may have gotten here as a result of the mid-August issue of OCLC Abstracts, which highlighted our Best Titles Ever/Oddly Titled Government Documents WorldCat list. By now you've probably visited our Best Titles Ever page and seen some of the documents not indexed on WorldCat.

We hope you'll stick around to check out issues pages because there are significant threats to government information in the electronic age that go well beyond crude censorship.

We also hope you'll visit our remixes/mashup page so you can see what people are currently doing with freely available US federal government information and get inspired to make your remixes.

And if you live in the United States, we'd really like you to check out our vision of the decentralized depository library system of the future and do what you can to promote that to your Congress members instead of the largely centralized model for electronic information proposed by the Government Printing Office.

For every visitor, if you like what you see here, download our browser toolbar and have access to all of FGI's many resources plus many other government information resources whereever you go on the Internet!

Google Books/Fed Docs: More on Julia and her project

Julia Tryon was kind enough to send us a fuller description of her Google Books research plan and a biography, which we are sharing with you today:

What this project is about:

At the request of my director, I am researching how much of government information is available online and in particular how much is available in Google Books. I have begun by checking out Google's info pages on Google Books and by looking at some of Google's partner's websites such as University of Michigan and Stanford University. I am also looking at Google Books' functionality and ease of use, which plan to compare with other full-text versions. I have no idea where all this will take me!

Biography:

I have been the Government Documents Librarian at the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College since 2000. I have been a reference librarian here for 19 years. I am currently the chair of the CRIARL (Consortium of Rhode Island Academic and Research Libraries) Government Documents Committee and the treasurer for GPLNE (Government Publications Librarians of New England).On a personal note, I live in the quaint village of Ashaway in Rhode Island, I am a rabid reader of tacky novels, and I am being held hostage by four cats and a Victorian house.

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We and I hope you are eagerly awaiting to her more dispatches from Julia's explorations!

Karen G. Schneider on LOCKSS

Karen explains LOCKSS software clearly and succinctly -- its technology, costs, benefits, and purpose. She compares LOCKSS and Portico, too.

Lots of Librarians Can Keep Stuff Safe, By Karen G. Schneider, Library Journal (8/15/2007)

[Libraries] have never before owned so little of the content they manage. LOCKSS offers one solution... [T]he use of LOCKSS for preserving local born-digital content -- with a free download, plus one morning's worth of time -- is certainly worth a spin around the block.

August 15, 2007 / Leave a comment

New Feature: Google Books/Fed Docs

FGI is pleased to announce a new occasional series that will examine how Google Books treats US Federal Documents. These posts will have titles that begin with "Google Books/Fed Docs".

We're very pleased to have a guest researcher putting up these posting. Please give a warm FGI welcome to Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College. Julia has started to gather statistics and other information about the tens of thousands of government documents that have been scanned by the Google Books projects. We posted her first govdoc-l message on this subject.

Julia has agreed to start blogging on this subject for FGI. Unlike our "Blogger of the Month" series, Julia will post whenever she finds something interesting at the intersection of US Federal Documents and Google Books until she feels that she's exhausted the subject.

Take it away Julia!