The Catalog of U.S. Government Publications and the state of the OPAC
Some serious questions about the role of libraries and the functionality -- or lack of functionality -- of library online public access catalogs (OPACs) are in the news lately. These questions fit in well with the recent release of the new Government Printing Office online Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). The announcement (Enhanced version of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP)/OPAC now available by John S. Dowgiallo, 9 Mar 2006) and subsequent discussion on the govdoc-l mailing list (see various entries in March and April 2006) focused largely on the acceptable functionality of an OPAC rather than the needs and expectations of users in the age of Google and other Internet search engines. A broader range of discussion of the place and functionality of OPACs can be found in the following recent articles:
- How OPACs Suck, Part 1: Relevance Rank (Or the Lack of It), by Karen G. Schneider, 03/13/2006, ALA TechSource.
- How OPACs Suck, Part 2: The Checklist of Shame by Karen G. Schneider, 04/03/2006. ALA TechSource.
- The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. Prepared for the Library of Congress by Karen Calhoun.
- A Critical Review [of the above report] (PDF) by Thomas Mann. April 3, 2006, Prepared for AFSCME 2910 The Library of Congress Professional Guild
- The Future of the Catalog, [comments on the above report and review] April 10, 2006, Catalogablog.
Censorship at the Department of Education?
Censorship at the Department of Education? by Scott Walter, April 13th, 2006. Association of College and Research Libraries, ACRLog. Walter reports "the possibility that the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences may have been involved in an attempt to squelch the publication of essays critical of one its recent innovations, the What Works Clearinghouse. Continue reading
Statistics Canada e-pubs free as of April 24, 2006
As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge.
(from the StatCan press release) The New Publishing Model has two components: * the free dissemination of all electronic publications on our website * priced publications released on paper. The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency's dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them.This notice was kindly forwarded to us here at FGI, and also posted on the Access to Government Information Interest Group (AGIIG) and Dlilist: Discussion forum for Data Liberation Initiative issues, both Canadian documents listservs. Continue reading
Social hack of Delicious
So you've probably noticed these little icons (
) floating around our site and perhaps wondered what they are. Those are delicious icons and appear whenever there's a word on the page within the FGI site that matches a delicious tag set up in one of our delicious accounts. You can see what we're tagging at the delicious FGI page.
We'd like to ask for your help. We're testing out a social hack of delicious by creating and using some common tags -- a controlled vocabulary if you will! If you'd like to help us out, start using the common tags listed below. That way, whenever someone tags a Web resource with, for example, "FGI:blogroll", it'll show up here and the whole FGI community can work together to collect Web sites and resources of interest. The other way you can help is by using the tag "for:freegovinfo" which will automatically send the link that you've tagged to our delicious account.
We're not sure yet what will be the outcome of this little test, but we're hoping that this little test will provide an outlet for a geographically dispersed group with common interests to collaboratively collect and describe the Websites that they come across in their daily Web meanderings and work.
Please comment on this post if you have questions or comments about this project or want to suggest further tags.
FGI:articles
FGI:blogroll
FGI:document
FGI:library
FGI:organizations
FGI:research
for:freegovinfo
Continue reading
DoS releases first Presidential report on Iraq
The Department of State has released the first Presidential report to the United States Congress pursuant to the United States Policy in Iraq Act, section 1227 (c) of the National Defense Authorization Act, Section 1227 (c). The report covers current military, diplomatic, political, and economic measures that have been undertaken to successfully complete the mission in Iraq. The report offers an assessment of the current situation in Iraq--paralleling the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq released by the White House in November 2005--and outlines goals and measures on the political, economic, and security progress. FGI makes this document available below as a service to help propogate instances of digital govt documents on the web. If there's a document that you think should be hosted off of a government Web server (whether it's a fugitive or in danger of dissappearing for some reason), please send us a link to the document to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. Continue reading