Estimates 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.
Continue readingOpen Document Standards
Open standards for document formats have been in the news recently.
- Massachusetts Falls to OOXML as ITD Punts, ConsortiumInfo.org August 01 2007
- Microsoft's Open Format Criticized In China. by Winter Casey, National Journal's Technology Daily InternationalRoundup, August 8, 2007 [subscription required].
A very useful report from JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee, an independent advisory body in the UK that provides leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support education and research) helps sort out the issues and says there is "an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats." This is important for government information specialists as well, whether in higher education or not.
- XML-based Office Document Standards (TSW0702) by Walter Ditch, JISC, August 2007.
The tacit acceptance of proprietary office file formats as a way of achieving interoperability is becoming less acceptable. Government agencies, in particular, are becoming increasingly conscious of the need to provide easy access to electronic documents to all stakeholders, while not requiring them to purchase a particular software product in order to view or edit these documents. The requirement to provide long term availability and archiving of documents is also encouraging a move away from proprietary file formats. JISC and the wider HE/FE community, as part of the public sector, will be required to address these issues with respect to how they deal with the publication of electronic documents, and the internal/external transference of document files.
The drive to move to open file formats has been ongoing for several years, but as Microsoft, the market leader in office document formats, has arguably been slow to move from its proprietary, binary file formats, the net effect, for most people, has been the continued use of proprietary, de facto standards. However, due to pressure to move towards more open document file formats, Microsoft has implemented a staged introduction of XML-based formats for its Office suite. With the release of Office 2007, the transition has been formalised, and existing users who upgrade to Office 2007 will, essentially, be upgrading to a form of XML.
However, this has not been without considerable controversy, and recent developments related to XML-based office document standards have reached a watershed. This TechWatch report explains these issues and some of the standards involved. It proposes that although the UK higher and further education sector has, for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards, it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelines for implementation at the level of everyday applications such as office document formats. As far as education is concerned, the use of modifiable office document formats has now reached a crucial stage. There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats.
The report itself is available in several formats including Open Office (OpenDocument) format. If you've never used it, you should try it! Check out this page on Wikiepedia for a list of tools for reading and using OpenDocument format. You can use stand alone applications on your Mac or PC, or web-based applications like Google Docs.
Continue readingCensorship in Michigan
According to National Journal's Technology Daily, "[Michigan] State Senate Republican leaders moved to restrict access to Blogging for Michigan, a liberal blog where their Democratic colleagues recently began contributing in a series of guest posts on a variety of issues. Access to the blog was restored after Democrats accused their rivals of limiting free speech."
According to the Michigan State University State News, "Other political Web sites, like the conservative-leaning blog, www.rightmichigan.com, and the liberal site, www.michiganliberal.com, weren't blocked. Matt Miner, Bishop's chief of staff, told MIRS, a Lansing political newsletter, www.michiganliberal.com doesn't 'say bad things about us,' according to The Associated Press."
This is a good example of the complexities of government information in the digital age. When governments start seeing the internet as a way of communicating with constituents and e-government becomes the the norm, are some avenues of communication legitimate and some not? Should anyone in government have the authority to cut off access to anything for any reason -- or is such control, by definition, censorship?
- Blog-Filtering Dispute Erupts In Michigan [subscription required] by Michael Martinez, National Journal's Technology Daily. State Roundup (August 9, 2007)
- Blogging Is Constituent Work by Christine, Blogging for Michigan, Wed Aug 08, 2007 at 19:52:36 PM EDT
- Senate loses liberal blog access, by Chris Christoff, Detroit Free Press August 7, 2007
- Blocking blog site shows political bias, Michigan State University State News
Freedom and Information: Assessing Publicly Available Data Regarding U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Security
Assessing Publicly Available Data From RAND website:
How much data regarding U.S. anti- and counterterrorism systems, countermeasures, and defenses is publicly available and how easily could it be found by individuals seeking to harm U.S. domestic interests? The authors developed a framework to guide assessments of the availability of such information for planning attacks on the U.S. air, rail, and sea transportation infrastructure, and applied the framework in an information-gathering exercise that used several attack scenarios. Overall, the framework was useful for assessing what kind of information would be easy or hard for potential attackers to find. For each of the attack scenarios, a team of “attackers†was unable to locate some of the information that a terrorist planner would need to gauge the likely success of a potential attack. The authors recommend that procedures for securing sensitive information be evaluated regularly and that information that can be obtained from easily accessible, off-site public information sources be included in vulnerability assessments.Continue reading