Govdocs: To boldly go where few have gone before
Although I don't believe in "virtual depositories" that do not locally store digital documents, I do believe there is a place for virtual government information services. In service to this belief, and to the believe that it isn't enough to put up well designed web pages, I have volunteered at the Second Life Public Library. In addition to doing two hours of reference a week, I am setting up their government documents department. If you already have a Second Life, please drop by the library and have a visit. And drop me a line. I am registered as Alaskan Nighbor. The govdocs department is kind of bare-bones at the moment, but it's growing. The rest of the library is well worth a visit too! If you work with govdocs and want to help -- PLEASE! If you haven't heard of Second Life yet, here are a few articles to get you up to speed:
- My Virtual Life - A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice (May 1, 2006 Businessweek)
- American Apparel's Virtual Clothes - The outfit has opened a virtual store in Second Life's online universe. Though items cost only $1, the company hopes to bolster real life sales (June 26, 2006, Business Week)
- BBC starts to rock online world (May 12, 2006, BBC News)
50-State “Blue Book” list has been updated
The 50 state listing of "state blue books" and similar resources I originally prepared for the 2005 Nevada Library Association conference has been updated. This would not have been possible without the generous response of the State-GILS mailing list. There are still blank spots on the table, which I hope some of you will help me fill. Thanks! Continue reading
Paper edition of The Public Papers of the Presidents endangered
According to an "Action Alert" (NARA NEEDS YOUR HELP, 30 Jun 2006) from the National Coalition For History, cuts in the budget of the National Archives will cause a lot of cutbacks including:
IF YOU EVER HAVE MADE USE OF A COMPILATION OF THE PUBLIC PAPERS OF A PRESIDENT -- BEGINNING NEXT YEAR THE VOLUMES WON'T BE PRODUCED ANY LONGER -- for years NARA has compiled the collected public papers of the president (speeches, transcripts of press events etc.) into hardback volumes. No more.Continue reading
Public Documents Finally Go Public
Power Trips Database Goes Live: Info on Sponsors, Destinations, Costs of 5 1/2 years of Congressional Travel Made Public, Center for Public Integrity, JUNE 28, 2006.
More than 25,000 public documents detailing the privately funded travel taken by members of Congress and their aides from January 2000 to June 2005, was made public today by the Center for Public Integrity. -- The House of Representatives' forms are kept in a sub- basement of the Cannon House Office Building, where the public copies are often hard to read, torn and misfiled. It is against House rules to digitally scan the documents. -- The Senate travel disclosure documents are stored in a computer system in the Hart Senate Office Building, but the records are not available online.But now... The database of these documents can be accessed at http://www.publicintegrity.org. Continue reading
Where is FDsys headed?
**Note: This posting was sent in by Paul Schaffer** The June 19 posting on GPO's FDSys blog by Magan Fleetwood deserves a close reading. Keep in mind, as you examine it, the evolution of digital "public comment" filings responding to Federal Register notices. Agencies were initially prodded to set up their own arrangements (EPA had a fine one) for submitting and perusing comments. Eventually many agencies felt obliged to abandon their individual software and accept the URL and field structure of www.regulations.gov. Presumably OMB played a role in that though I'm murky on the details. I think GPO's hope is that all executive branch webmasters will eventually be obliged to obtain an FDsys unique identifier for any web file intended to have official standing. Among the metadata repositories will be one containing preservation characteristics for every document in the system. (I'm not using quote marks here but I'm staying close to Fleetwood's nomenclature.) By my reading, GPO hopes FDsys will let it regain its former semi-monopoly of tranforming originating agencies' material into legally valid publications. GPO won't be supplying the ink and paper, as in the old days, but it will be providing the equivalent of an ISBN identifier. I am particularly intrigued with this sentence: "Discussions are also under way defining system rights and privileges, including what data may or may not be overwritten, the conditions for overwriting data or creating new records, what takes precedence, etc." I think what she's talking about is allowing (eventually requiring, via OMB?) agency webmasters to create and submit appropriate FDsys metadata at the time a significant document is about to be uploaded. If I'm surmising GPO's agenda correctly, I think it has strong potential for improving document transparency in the long run. However so many of the cards are face-down at this point that it's hard to assess the pluses and minuses. Continue reading