Stupid Gov’t PDF Tricks
Stephen Abrams of OPAC vendor SirsiDynix talks government documents and relates his pet peeves about how governments use PDFs to hide information. As Stephen is Canadian, I'm not sure what government he's talking about, but some of his complaints sound familar to me:
3. Worse, let's create a 10,000 page PDF and try to ask any citizen to download and print that! If your report is too short to make it too big, just append all your data into the appendices and make it HUGE.
5. Place your PDF on your website and don't link it to with an index, table of contents, press release or some other finding tool. Make sure there are no links for the seacrh engine crawlers to crawl! You have plausible deniabliity and can say with a straight face that it's available on the web!
6. And my favourite government opacity strategy? Only place a minimum of metadata on the PDF on the web. Say, just a number like 1237D-f but make sure it's not linked to any real number and just represents a non-sequential accession number for the web file. Then it will be nigh on impossible to find it.
His other tricks make a good read too, but then I'd be reproducing his entire posting. He ends his posting with thanks to librarians and catalogers. Stephen doesn't usually talk about docs, he's more of a Web 2.0/Library 2.0 sort of guy, but his Stephen's Lighthouse blog is always interesting reading.
Continue readingColbert: librarians listed as a hate group
Stephen Colbert interviews Markos Moulitsas of the DailyKos. Shockingly, librarians are the same as islamofascists and neonatal nazis :-)
(click image to play .WMV)
Continue readingInterview with Brewster Kahle
- 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.Continue reading
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!
Continue readingGoogle 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!
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