Secrecy News defends public domain from Army
According to Secrecy News, Army Documents Posted "Illegally," Army Says - "A U.S. Army official told the Federation of American Scientists that Army documents on the FAS web site had been published by FAS "illegally" and must be removed." Thankfully, Steven Aftergood has stood his ground and pointed out that public Army documents, like other government documents are in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted. Thus, the Army cannot dictate where they can and cannot be hosted. Government officials and others can review our background on copyright page, itself copied from a government document in the public domain. Hopefully this was just a misguided low-level official and not the start of yet another high-level effort to assert centralized control of government information. Thanks to Secrecy News for standing tall. Maybe we should all start posting PUBLIC military documents on our servers and notify the army publications directorate. Continue reading
Open Access to Government Research
Two new reports call for open access to government research. A short story about these reports of The Energy Department and the Centers for Disease Control is available:
- Two U.S. Government reports call for public access to agency-funded research, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, May 3, 2007
Leslie Harris on CRS Reports
Leslie Harris, Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and Technlogy, spoke eloquently today about CRS reports. You can read her comments here or watch and listen to her on the video of today's press conference about the release of the OpenHouse Project Report (minutes 19 to 26). Continue reading
Nebraska joins the State Library party on SL
The Nebraska Library Commission has announced a grand opening of their Second Life presence. To the best of my personal knowledge, Nebraska is the third State Library Agency to set up shop in Second Life, following Kansas and South Carolina. I did not see any reference to government information in Nebraska's announcement, but the Library is planning a rotating photo exhibit. Photo exhibits seemed to work well for Kansas and I wish this new effort well. The big party is May 11, 3-5pm Central Time. I won't make it then because I can't install the Second Life client at work, but I will try to visit the NLC building and get back to you. Continue reading
BPE 2007 – Shoestring Repositories
There were so many good presentations at Best Practices Exchange 2007, that is doesn't seem fair to single out any one of them as "really cool", but I can't think of another phrase for Robert Hulshof-Schmidt's Creating an Online Documents Repository on a Shoestring presentation. Robert is on the staff of the Oregon State Library and he described how his library used a new depository law, the mixed blessing of a statewide Content Management System and some nifty programming to create a system that automatically harvests agency publications, deposits them to a library web server and creates a URL for document catalogers. It's not entirely automated. Nothing can be in the current state of affairs, but it sounds like it minimizes the need for human review of a lot of files. Another nice feature of the Oregon system is that it automatically converts ingested documents into either HTML (if text based) or PDF (if binary based, like Word/Excel). So it looks like OSL is able to do some important potential preservation work at the point of ingestion. Oregon's document repository can be found at http://egov.oregon.gov/OSL/GRES/REPOS/. Continue reading