ResourceShelf on Washington Post votes database
ResourceShelf has a good overview of the Washington Post votes database in its Resource of the Week (Thursday, December 15, 2005) column by Steven M. Cohen. He says:
This is an impressive ready reference tool that should be bookmarked. Editor's Note: In case you're wondering, this database should be searchable soon.For more remixes of government information, see our remix page. Continue reading
Chinese government uses various tactics to control news
Beijing censors news of fatal protest by Howard W. French, San Francisco Chronicle via New York Times, Dec. 14, 2005. This recent story about chinese government restricting keywords in google search results should alarm the library community and give yet another reason for libraries to locally collect, preserve and distribute government information.
In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,Chinese officials have used different techniques to prevent news of the deaths from spreading. The tactics include barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region and banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google.Continue reading
FBI watching interlibrary loan requests?
"Agents' Visit Chills UMass Dartmouth Senior." By Aaron Nicodemus. The Standard-Times [UPDATE 12/24/2005: This story is a hoax. The student confessed that he had made up the story. What's disturbing here is that it was so believable in this time of domestic spying, USAPA, and paranoia reminiscent of the 1950s red scare. jrj] [UPDATE 12/20/2005: There is debate on whether or not this story is a hoax. Boingboing.net is tracking the story.] This one is making the rounds of several library listservs, but has not been picked up by any major media that I can tell. Evidently, the FBI visited a UMass Dartmouth student after he requested Mao Tse-Tung's book, "The Little Red Book" via interlibrary loan. The story does not say whether the FBI agents were acting under USAPA powers or perhaps via the NSA's new domestic spying program authorized by President Bush. (Note: this NYT article may require registration. If so, try Bugmenot for anonymous user names/passwords) Continue reading
Washington State Library stores and serves state e-docs
Over the past two weeks, I have been profiling libraries that have been taking up the challenge of storing and serving electronic government documents to their users. My intention is to show that this can be done without breaking their institution's bank. Today I offer the last profile in this current series, the Washington State Library. The Washington State Library (WSL) currently stores 1,500 state documents taking up 1.57GB of storage space. Using an existing computer in the library, they have 321GB of storage space left. At the current average document size, the Washington State Library could store more than 300,000 additional documents. WSL believes that time spent processing digital documents is similar to what they have to spend on print and has a similar workflow. Source: Personal Communication, Judy Pitchford, December 16, 2005 This profile is the last of five. The other four were:
Thousands of CRS reports stored and served by University of North Texas Library
The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries has accepted the challenge of locally stored digital materials in part by keeping an archive of 8,000 reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). These reports currently take up 12GB of a 250GB hard drive. At the average CRS document size, UNT has room for more than 152,000 more CRS reports. UNT has used a modified form of the free, open source Keystone Digital Library system to allow their collection to be searchable and browseable from their CRS home page at http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/. Most of the funds for the original setup of the CRS archive came from a 2002 NewsBank/Readex/GODORT/ALA Catharine J. Reynolds Research Grant Award of $2,000. Considerable staff time was spend on the Keystone software and there is ongoing staff time used in identifying, capturing, scanning, and assigning subjects to the reports. Many of the same things that would be required for tangible reports. Continue reading