LIS Webcast: Government Information at the Crossroads
LIS Webcast: government information at the crossroads (February 7, 2006) Charley Seavey talks with Laurie Canepa of the State Library of New Mexico and Barbara Rehkopb of Washington University in St. Louis about the present and future of government information. This Webcast, hosted by the University of Missouri, Columbia's School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, is a nice service and opportunity to share information and ideas. I highly recommend listening to the interview. First off, congratulations to Laurie and the State Library of New Mexico for being honored as Depository of the Year and to Barbara and WASHU for celebrating their 100th anniversary as a federal depository library! There are a few things I'd like to highlight about Charley's interview with Laurie and Barbara. I was interested to learn about the New Mexico News Plus service, a blog and clipping service highlighting federal government information mentioned in the news of local and regional import -- see there ARE uses for blogs in libraries ;-) . I was also excited to hear that Laurie is feeding those digital documents (many of them fugitives) into their state library's OCLC-supported digital archive. All three agreed that this is of vital importance to the preservation of digital government information because they were skeptical of GPO's ability to preserve all documents for all time. I'd also like to mention a meme that worried me. All three agreed that, since many public libraries have internet access, they can and should consider themselves depository libraries. I think this rings true on the surface, but when looked at more deeply, denegrates the work that depository librarians have done for the last 150+ years. Access is important, yes, but collections, cataloging, reference and long-term preservation are the pillars on which depositories are built. Putting a "link to American Factfinder" on a library Web page does not a depository make. This statement and belief only makes it more difficult for docs librarians to convince their administrations of the continuing vital importance of documents and efforts to build local digital collections. And I'll end my missive with this quote from Dr. Seavy for you all to mull over:
[35:30] GPO needs to recast itself as an information access agency right now the legislation isn't going to let them do that. They need congressional action and the resources to do it. If every state is doing what Laurie is doing ... downloading and preserving on local servers stuff that is relevant to that state/region, then in a way we've got alot of redundancy there we've got alot of, a big safety net. I fear that if we put it all in one federal basket somewhere, then some day some fool is going to decide well we don't need this stuff anymore; the money ran out or whatever and boom all that history goes away. I'd really rather see alot more local responsibility in taking care of and preserving the digital information that's out there. I think GPO and Superintendent of Documents has got a role, but I'm a long way from convinced that everybody should depend on the feds to do it. I just don't think it's going to happen.(hmmm, seems I've heard this idea before somewhere ;-) ) Continue reading
Net Neutrality Not An Optional Feature of Internet
Net Neutrality Not An Optional Feature of Internet The Senate Commerce Committee, co-chaired by Senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), is currently holding hearings on Net Neutrality (video and transcripts) with a long list of heavy hitters scheduled to appear on both sides of this important issue. Daniel Berninger, a senior writer at Business 2.0 Magazine has a great editorial that succinctly and passionately describes just why net neutrality is absolutely essential for the internet and why the telcos are being extremely shortsighted and will end up destroying the very infrastructure they helped to set up. And this isn't some tree-falls-in-the-woods type of discussion. It has direct, dire, and long-reaching consequences on libraries and internet users. Without net neutrality, free access to digital govt information (not to mention the entire internet!) will be a thing of the past. Consider:
The telco and cable companies have in mind creating another type of customer not a class of service. They want suppliers to pay for the right of transit. It amounts to airlines charging Time Warner for the right of readers to take Time magazine on an airplane. It means charging Ford tolls in addition to drivers for the right of Ford cars to use highways.and:
Beware of the monopolist that wants the “market†to decide. If there actually existed a healthy market for Internet access, users would certainly switch away from service providers tinkering with performance based on kickbacks from content companies. The toll collecting ambitions of the telco’s and cable co’s hinge on the absence of market forces. The fights against municipal wireless initiatives and lobbying budgets that exceed R&D budgets arise to defeat any leakage of market power. Network neutrality forces a virtuous cycle where winning requires making offers faster and cheaper. This dynamic accounts for growth in the info tech industry as platform improvements expand the range of possible applications.Continue reading
Big Tele’s plans to subvert the Internet
The Nation's Jeff Chester writes a dire piece about plans by cable and telephone companies where
all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.Consider the following scenarios:
Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds.**********
Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue.At the heart of this thing, is the further erosion of government regulation of phone and cable lines aka broadband. Big Tele is rabidly lobbying to "to operate their Internet services as fully "private" networks." I wonder if it can really get this bad? I don't know. It's a complex issue with many players and layers. I guess if there was ever a time when myriad disastrous elements would have to allign with precision to make it so, that would be now. Continue reading
Unwriting Wikipedia
So Wikipedia has been in the news - big time - lately. There was the Seigenthaler stink, in which bogus information was inserted into the Wikipedia entry of John Seigenthaler Sr., former assistant to former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, alleging Seigenthaler's role in the assasination of both Kennedy's. The spurious allegation made its way into supposedly authoritative sites like Answers.com and Reference.com. In response, Seigenthaler wrote a vitriolic editorial in USA Today damning Wikipedia and the practice of wiki as a legitimate venue for public record. In the aftermath of Seigenthaler and other stories of erroneous Wikipedia content, Nature comes out with an expert-led, peer-reviewed investigative story that lauds Wikipedia as near on par with Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy of its science content. Where Britannica exceeded Wikipedia, the differences were not great. So I bring all this up as context to the delicate and critical position that the publicly-recorded record holds and why the latest story on Wikipedia - its infiltration by congressional staffers - is alarming. According to the Lowell Sun:
The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned. The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.This wholesale wikiwiping is more than vanity cosmetics or a malicious hack - as intolerable as such transgressions are - it is the publicly-recorded record of our public servants unwriting itself. Continue reading
(VA) peer assistance for economics assignments
The student assistant who for 2 1/2 years helped me process government documents began to help her classmates with econ homework assignments by referring them to government publications such as Economic Indicators and the Economic Report of the President. Sometimes it is easier for the students to accept assistance from a peer; it was great to see her use what she had learned in our department. Maryke Barber Government Documents Coordinator Wyndham Robertson Library, Hollins University Virginia Continue reading