It's been a crazy week and I could've used a cup of coffee like this! Bill Moyers had a recent show on the net at risk. The hr-long video stream is quite well done and gives some very good historical context on the FCC, telecoms and the beginning of the internet. Read David Isenberg's review of Moyers' show. I highly recommend you take the hour to watch this. Lessig had a couple of good posts this week on 'net neutrality here and here. And speaking of FCC and 'net neutrality, Ed Felten has a highly readable explanation of the technical issues of net neutrality in the paper entitled, Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality (PDF) (and attached below). Felten knows what he's talking about. He's the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He and his colleagues, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, also recently published a report entitled, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine." Continue reading →

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Where does time go? My guest-blogging month is half over and it's been two weeks since my first posting. Staff transition issues here at NMSL have kept us all busy (we will have some interesting positions opening up soon, if anyone is interested), as well as day-to-day work and well, just life. But there's a lot of interesting stuff going on that I will try to do better at posting the rest of the month. Today, I'm going to start talking about NMSL's Digital Archive Project. It's been going on a while now and is fairly extensive, so I'm going to break the topic up into three or four segments over the next few days. I don't want to get bogged down in the step-by-step details of the process for this blog (if anyone is really interested in that, let me know), but you can get some details on the OCLC website. Having government publications and other information made available through the Internet is a great innovation. But we all know that one drawback is the problem of preservation of these resources. Websites come and go, are purposely taken down or just die for one reason or another. Even on websites that prevail over a period of time, specific pages may be dropped, either because an agency no longer wants the information to be freely available, or simply because it's old and is replaced by newer information. About four years ago, the New Mexico State Library (NMSL)had already been looking at this problem and trying to find solutions, particularly in light of its responsibilities in running the New Mexico state publications depository program. Marcia Smith, our state documents coordinator, was especially concerned about how to ensure the continuation and relevance of the state depository program into the electronic age. New Mexico state agencies had been publishing information on their websites for some time, but they were starting to publish born-digital, web-only versions of their annual reports and other publications. The prospect of developing an archiving system from scratch was too daunting and expensive for the staff and resources the library had. With some grant funding for start-up subscription costs and some reallocation of staff time to the project, NMSL purchased the OCLC Digital Archive product and began archiving publications in March of 2003. As of this posting, NMSL has created 2642 DA records that link to harvested digital content. Since each issue of a serial generates a separate record, that number represents a much smaller number of distinct titles. There are around 300 of the latter and you can see them by going to NMSL's SALSA catalog keyword search menu and searching "oclc digital archive." Although the project was originally conceived as a way to preserve information resources from New Mexico state government, we have from the beginning experimented with capturing U.S. federal material. We also wanted to publicize the project and see how we might go about collaborating with our state depository partners and others to extend the scope of our efforts to local government information and possibly even resources from NGOs. We have held several information and training sessions for interested libraries within New Mexico and a number of presentations at national conferences. In my next posting, I will talk about some of the specific sites and electronic publications we have captured. Continue reading →

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On October 17, 2006, the FDLP-L listserv announced the availability of a briefing paper to be used for discussion at the Fall 2006 Depository Library Council meeting. The paper is called Digital Distribution to Federal Depository Libraries (PDF). According to the FDLP posting, this document will be used in a discussion at DLC next Wednesday, October 25, 2006. We at FGI strongly encourage you to read the two page document before then. We would also like to commend Council and GPO for having this discussion and asking what seem to be good questions for a system of digital deposit. The bulk of briefing paper is a listing of general assumptions and questions for discussion in seven different areas. As you might imagine, we have have some thoughts both about the assumptions and the discussion questions. We have begun writing and collecting our thoughts at http://freegovinfo.info/node/680 . We're hoping to start a discussion here, so if you have comments of your own, or wish to challenge our assumptions, facts, biases, etc, please either use the comments form or send an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo dot info. When discussion appears to have drawn to a close, we will send our commentary plus your comments to GPO. As of this writing, we've finished the section on general assumptions. By Friday we hope to finish our responses to the discussion questions. But don't wait to join us. Go ahead and comment on any of the sections. If you are going to Council, share your thoughts in person as well. Update 10/17 7pm - The Access discussion questions have now been addressed. Feel free to comment on that or any other item. Continue reading →

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The Government Printing Office (GPO) document, Digital Distribution to Depository Libraries: Exploring the Issues (9/6/2006) asks these questions about Ownership:

7. Ownership a. Do digital publications distributed under the aegis of the FDLP remain the property of the U.S. Government, including back up and other copies maintained on library systems? b. What are the implications of an agency requesting the recall of an FDLP electronic title? c. If an agency does not want older issues to remain available on-line, how should this be handled?

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FGI Responses Q: a. Do digital publications distributed under the aegis of the FDLP remain the property of the U.S. Government, including back up and other copies maintained on library systems? 44 USC 1909 makes it clear that depository libraries are custodians of material received through the depository program. This would be just as true of digital files as it would be for print or microform materials. Any publications acquired through the FDLP and any library-controlled backup copies remain Federal property. Q: b. What are the implications of an agency requesting the recall of an FDLP electronic title? We believe that the implications of an agency requesting the recall of an FDLP electronic title are identical to that of requesting recall of a tangible title due to the ease of digitizing tangible titles. While an agency can withdraw a tangible title from FDLP collections, all it takes is one member of the public with a digital camera or copier-scanner to make a digital copy for the world to see. The main implication of withdrawals in an electronic environment is that in an environment of digital distribution, an agency would have to go through a public process, which seems appropriate for material that has already been released to the public domain. In a "link to federal servers system", documents could be quietly removed for any reason at all regardless of formal policy. And the individuals and groups who care about such materials might well have made digital copies anyway (i.e. Federation of American Scientists) Q: c. If an agency does not want older issues to remain available on-line, how should this be handled? They should go through the process outlined in ID 72: Withdrawal of Federal Information Products from GPO’s Information Dissemination (ID) Programs. Agencies can't simply dictate which tangible versions/issues of a given title stay on depository shelves and they should not gain such a privilege in electronic materials. They do have a right to expect that libraries will indicate superseded materials as such in their catalogs. Continue reading →

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