GAO has RSS feed
The Government Accountability Office now has an RSS feed. See their web site feeds page for links and information. Continue reading
Alaska State Library stores and serves state e-docs
As Federal Depository Librarians mull over the idea of digital deposit and discuss that with their administrations, consider the Alaska State Library's recent experience in storing and serving Alaska State Documents: Starting with documents cataloged in July 2005 (FY 2006), the Alaska State Library stores local copies of cataloged electronic state publications on our web server. As of 12/7/2005, we had 279 titles in 463 files taking up 1.16GB worth of storage space. We still have 48GB available on our current web server, so at the average AK e-document size of 3.7MB, we could handle another 13,000 plus documents before we'd need to buy a new hard drive. Because we used space on an existing server, we had no upfront costs. Documents stored on the server are accessible through our catalog and through our monthly shipping lists. A robots.txt file keeps our stored documents from being directly accessed by the major search engines. This is done to ensure that user understands they are not looking at an agency copy. Search engines do access the monthly shipping lists, so people will be able to find an agency document even if it is dropped of the agency's server. But the user will be shown that they are looking at a library-archived copy. Continue reading
A gambit of digital preservation problems
Digital government information, like its private sector counterpart comes in many formats. I recently came across an article: Smith, MacKenzie. Eternal bits: How can we preserve digital files and save our collective memory? IEEE Spectrum, July 2005. (9 pages) that provides a nice overview of the many kinds of digital materials that need preserving and the relative challenges of preserving such material:
Like most difficult challenges, data preservation is really a mix of the simple and the complex challenges. At one end of the preservation continuum is a simple item, like an ASCII text document. Preserve the data by keeping the file on current media and provide some way to view it and you're pretty much done. We'll call this the "save the bits" approach. At the other end lie the harder cases, like these: A compiled software program written in a custom-built programming language for which neither the language documentation nor the compiler has survived. Continue reading
MN Library stores electronic state documents
As the depository community mulls the possibility of accepting deposit of digital materials from the Government Printing Office, I thought it would be helpful to highlight several libraries which are ALREADY collecting, describing, storing, and providing access to electronic government documents. Although most of these examples concern state documents, their storage and service requirements are directly applicable to federal digital deposit. For clarity, I will highlight one library per post. Today’s library is the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. They currently store 1,452 electronic state document items taking up 4GB of storage space, for an average document size of 0.35MB. Their documents server has a 115GB hard drive, so they potentially have room for another 37,000 documents of average size. The hardware for their system cost about $2000. Unlike the Alaska State Library, MN used an LSTA grant to develop a management system for their electronic documents. The grant provided $19,200 for software development. Now that the system has been built, the Legislative Reference Library says it is “our hope that this system could be emulated and adapted by other libraries considering similar archives of electronic files.†So other libraries adopting the MN system likely will not have to spend $19K reinventing the wheel. If I’m mistaken, I hope someone from MN will correct me. Continue reading
New Remix from the Washington Post
We've added this to the remixes page. Votes Database, Washington Post. This site lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991. The data comes from several sources: the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Women in Congress site and the Women in the Senate page, THOMAS, and the Web sites of the Senate, the Clerk of the House of Representatives Continue reading