Another remix of speeches
Although this is not, strictly speaking, government information, it is about the presidential race and is an interesting complement to US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (more on that here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud). This is another good demonstration of how interesting things can be done with information that is easily re-usable.
- Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate, Pollster.com, April 27, 2007
Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important
Don Wood at Library 2.0 has a good, short post on Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important. He notes that "For libraries to flourish as centers for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users' right to privacy and freedom of inquiry." If libraries do not have copies of digital government information, users will be faced with retrieving that information from government-controlled web servers where there is no guarantee of privacy (Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?). If libraries want to flourish as centers of uninhibited access to information, they need to have copies of digital government information. [Editor's note 2/18/09: The link to Don Wood's blog appears to be dead. However, I found a copy in the Internet Archive. The link above has been changed to go to the archived copy of the page.] Continue reading
New Remix: Federal Register Searches by RSS
Thanks a bundle to Steven M. Cohen who Twittered about this new item we've added to our remixes page: Justia Regulation Tracker - This free service takes Federal Register data and provides the ability to create RSS feeds of search results. The search gives you more options than the GPO Advanced Federal Register Search because the Justia search gives you agency dropdown choices and the regulations abstracts appear on the results pages. Justia is led by former CEO and FindLaw co-founder Tim Stanley. They make their money from advanced web services to lawyers, but provide free basic legal info to the public. More information on Justia and this new service can be found at http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2007/04/feeding_the_rea.html. This is a perfect example of a service that couldn't be started if GPO implemented a two-tiered model of information access - Free but restricted access at Depository Libraries and fee access for vendors wishing to reuse government information. But how will GPO be able to sell government information if people who obtain this public domain information republish for free with better searching and alert tools than GPO? We don't think they can without restricting the no-fee information model in some way. So we at FGI think they shouldn't try. Finally, if this serendipity by Twitter intrigued you, drop by and friend me at http://www.twitter.com/dcornwall Continue reading
Major Podcast Directory Update
Now representing 27 states, our Government Podcasts directory has been updated with all the state and local government podcasts we could find. We also had help from librarian Amanda Stone. Please look over the revised directory and send us anything, especially state and local gov't podcasts that we missed. Remember our criteria: 1. It must have audio or video produced either by a state agency, local government or an elected official. 2. It must be hosted on a government server (.orgs/.edu that clearly id themselves as a gov't body ok). 3. The agency must put the CAST in podCAST by having an obvious way to subscribe to the podcast feed (RSS, iTunes, etc). Posting static audio files and expecting people to manually download files one by one won't cut it.) Thanks for checking this list for us! Continue reading
Two new LOCKSS news items
If you're trying to understand how LOCKSS works and why anyone would want their own copies of government data when GPO/Google/[Your Third Party Here] will keep it safe and free forever, check out these two recent news items from LOCKSS:
- LOCKSS Team featured by Library of Congress (04/24/07) Pioneers of Digital Preservation on the Library of Congress' web site features an overview of the LOCKSS program.
- Presentation at CNI (04/17/07) Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal talked at the CNI meeting in Phoenix, AZ. Vicky gave an overview of the status of the CLOCKSS program, and David talked on Can We Afford To Preserve Large Databases?.
Example: Insider Attack ◠Political interference (Hansen 2007): – 2006 Earth Science budget retroactively reduced 20% – ''One way to avoid bad news: stop the measurements!'' – Suppose the data itself turned out to be ''inconvenient'' ... ◠Remove it (e.g. EPA pollution database) ◠Alter it? ◠Independent replicas essential – Independently administered in different jurisdictions – Mutually audited so they're tamper evidentThe rest of the presentation is a good though slightly technical primer on performance requirements for digital preservation and the need for further research. Also has some scary things to say about RAID. More evidence that no ONE system, not even a Future Digital one, is enough to safeguard America's government information. No system is safe from its parent - particularly when that parent is so reluctant to fully fund information access and preservation. Continue reading