UFO Project Blue Book online
[UPDATE 1/23/11 updated the link to ResearchBuzz post] Research Buzz notes that "Footnote.com has announced that it has digitized the entire Project Blue Book, which is a collection of official records covering government investigations of UFOs, 1947-1969."
How about meta-data? "Footnote allows people to comment on and annotate interesting documents. So you can not only keyword search and browse the total collection, but also browse highlights. Scanned documents have a place to add comments about documents as well as annotations to the documents themselves."
- Footnote Making Project Blue Book Available, Research Buzz (August 10, 2007)
- Project Blue Book - UFO Investigations 1947-1969 Footnote.com (Source: The National Archives)
New “Government Watchers” search engine
A contributor to the Open House Project has announced the creation of a new Google Custom Search Engine that searches "about 55 sites whose focus could be loosely categorized as 'Government Watchers'" but says that it is still "in the 'pre-beta' stage of development."
Link to the CSE - http://tinyurl.com/2j4qmt
Link to the list of sites - http://tinyurl.com/37ys7o
LInk to a page about the CSE and ideas - http://222fbj.googlepages.com/cse.htm
GPO and OSU have likely hit on hands
Update 8/14/2007:
I was mistaken about the recruiting schedule. According to GPO, GPO and OSU are currently recruiting/adding new contributors from the federal depository library community. The goal is to have as many categories populated as possible for the public launch.
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Yesterday I viewed an OPAL Presentation on the beta version of the Oklahoma State University hosted tool Browse Topics. Browse Topics is a volunteer driven list of subject guides to federal information. It represents an area of genuine, broadbased collaboration between the Government Printing Office and Federal Depository Libraries.
The beta version was demoed by John Dowgiallo, Web Content Specialist at GPO. He said the new BT would go live in mid-October and I can't wait. You shouldn't either.
The new version will make it easier to discover and disseminate new federal information sources found by librarians. You'll be able to sign up for new additions by RSS feed; easily e-mail entries to others through a "recommend feature", easy broken link reporting and direct e-mail to guide authors.
The new Browse Topics is likely be more current because it will be much easier for volunteer contributers to contribute. Currently one has to update an entire page on one's own computer and mail that off to OSU who posts the new version. In the new system contributers can add/change/delete sites on their guides one at a time while online making corrections both easy and quick.
Want to help build this resource? Once the system goes live, GPO and OSU will be recruiting from federal depository library staffs to populate the new system. If you work in an FDL and are passionate about a particular subject, I urge you to apply. It is another way to work together and to show the value of librarian added information.
If you're not in a depository you could still help by waiting until the new Browse Topics goes live in mid-October and than mapping Browse Topics categories to appropriate pages on Wikipedia. That will inject some more authoritative content into Wikipedia and drive usage of Browse Topics. Not convinced? Tying appropriate entries into Wikipedia worked for UNT!
It seems clear that both the Government Printing Office and Oklahoma State University have put a huge effort into creating a user friendly/contributor friendly collaborative tool and FGI salutes them for their efforts.
Continue readingEstimates and observations about govdocs in Google Books
Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College posted some interesting information about the intersection of Federal Publications and Google Books to govdoc-l this week. She is quoted here with permisssion:
My director has asked me to discover what I may about the amount of documents available in Google's digital projects. I've been looking at Google, partners' websites, articles, blogs, etc. I have found a lot of chit-chat but very little substantive information. Maybe I am just not looking for it the right way or in the right places.
It seems that there is a blackout on reporting statistics for these projects. Google and most of the partners give no statistical data at all. Stanford did have a page with statistics that was buried on their project's website but the information had not been updated since 2004.
To figure out the statistics on my own, I have tried searching Google Books, Stanford, and University of Michigan; but there is no way to limit a search to government documents. On Google I was able to search by publisher and, using various abbreviations for GPO that are used in
the publisher field, I came up with 187,522 (GPO-141,600; Gov't-2322; Government Printing Office-43,600). The university catalogs did not allow me to search by publisher.
When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view. And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used. I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.
Have you done your own study/poking around/etc with Google Books and Federal Documents? Share your findings with us!
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BBC covers UK Ministry of Defence prohibition of blogs
Tonight (Friday August 10, 2007), the BBC show Newsnight will cover this topic:
GAGGING ORDER?
The Ministry of Defence has updated its guidelines which some say effectively "gags" soldiers and others in the armed forces. Tonight we'll be asking if this is a reasonable restriction or not. The latest guidelines specifically say soldiers cannot blog, email or post photographs or videos which relate to defence matters without specific permission. We know a lot about the problems they've faced in Iraq and Afghanistan through the anonymous postings of British and US soldiers - and I imagine the MOD doesn't like it. The clarification follows the row over the selling of interviews by two of the Royal Navy personnel held captive in Iran, and the report into media communications that followed. But with two more British soldiers killed yesterday and casualties mounting - will there be online mutiny in the ranks?..
See also the U.S. version of the same issue: Pentagon promotes itself on YouTube, but prohibits troops from using it and New limits on blogging by U.S. soldiers.
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