When putting a report online is NOT Access
For the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I decided to look up some reports that have been issued by the government in the past year. Along the way I came across some documents from the Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Among those documents was this report that has been written about in the media: Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared After searching the GPO Catalog, Open WorldCat, and Google, I have concluded that the report is only available online as a 105 MB pdf file. Even on a high-speed connection, it could take over an hour to download this file. Using the download estimation tool from HP and figuring 1024K to a Megabyte, download times for this file can vary from 5.3 hours on a 56K modem to 10.3 hours for a 28.8K modem, still used in parts of the country. With an hour download time even for a ISDN/DSL connection, this file is basically unviewable. If the report had been in HTML format, you could start reading before the file finished downloading, but with a pdf file you have to wait for a sizable portion of the file to load before being able to read the pdf. I can't think of anybody who would wait 15 minutes to be able to view the first part of a report. So, although the report is supposedly accessible because it was posted to the Internet, it is less accessible than if it had been distributed to depository libraries. If it had been, then a patron could request a copy of the table of contents or the executive summary of the report. As it is, it may as well be locked in a basement. Citizens deserve better. Continue reading
Column on Government Documents and the News
An earlier FGI post inspired me to write a column about efforts to link documents to the news about them. Take a look at The Government Domain: Government Documents and the News in the August issue of LLRX.com. (Actually, as I write this, the full August issue is not up yet--will be soon--but you can get to my column via the link I just provided.) I give FGI credit in the column so, if people read to the end of it, I may spread some FGI awareness. Continue reading
All the govt web’s a wiki?
I meant to blog about this last week, but things got hectic. Anyway, here's an interesting story regarding the Department of Homeland Security's recently redesigned and updated ready.gov site that was designed to disseminate disaster preparedness information. It turns out that the site is full of inaccuracies and incomplete information so the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) set their intern to analyzing the site. Emily Hesaltine created ReallyReady.org, modeled after Ready.gov, that addresses the inaccuracies and incomplete information on the DHS site. Read the analysis. Granted, this is only one govt Web site, but wouldn't it be cool if the public could analyze govt sites and give suggestions/make changes that made those sites more informative and accurate? Can you say wiki-gov-opedia? [Thanks BoingBoing] Continue reading
UPDATED – Ontario Documents Repository
A chance meeting with a tourist at my library led to a fruitful exchange of information and ideas with staff at the Ontario Legislative Library (OLL), which is developing an Ontario Documents Repository. Annemarie Toth-Waddell of OLL was kind enough to send me a presentation she made on the respository to the Canadian Library Association in June 2006. She gave me permission to post it her at FGI and I think you'll find it well worth browsing through. A few highlights to whet your appetite for the Powerpoint file:
- As of June 5, 2006, the Library has archived 10,915 monographs, 710 serial titles and 3,203 press releases.
- Only PDF files are stored in archive. Library will convert if not already in PDF.
- Access to repository is currently through catalog.
Monographs are stored on a dSpace server, but serial titles are stored on a dedicated server.- All documents are stored on library-controlled servers. Copies of monographs will eventually be stored on a dSpace server sponsored by the Ontario Council of University Libraries.
- OLA appears to view future as one of cross-jurisdictional repositories.
Delicious FGI
Below is FGI's delicious tag cloud and latest 10 posts (I've also put it in the lower right column). We started our delicious experiment a while back. If you use delicious, please consider sending us sites that you tag by adding the "for:freegovinfo" tag (here's more info on the "for:username" tag). Also, if you're using delicious and would like us to add you to the freegovinfo network email us at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. You can also participate in our IAdeposit delicious project where we tag fugitive documents and then upload them to the Internet Archive's US Documents collection.
For background on delicious, see Melissa Rethlefsen's article in Library Journal and check out the delicious-iana I'm collecting. Jump right in. The more the merrier!
And here are our ten latest del.icio.us bookmarks! Know of something we should have? Tag it on del.icio.us and use the for:freegovinfo tag! Continue reading