A Risky Gamble With Google, By Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/2/2005, Section: The Chronicle Review, Volume 52, Issue 15, Page B7. [subscription required]. Also available without subscription here.

Siva clearly identifies the problems of relying on Google as a replacement for libraries: it "offers us at least three reasons to worry: privacy, privatization, and property."

This particular project, I fear, opens up more problems than it solves. It will certainly fail to live up to its utopian promise. And it dangerously elevates Google's role and responsibility as the steward — with no accountability — of our information ecosystem. That's why I, an avowed open-source, open-access advocate, have serious reservations about it.... We need services like that provided by Google Library. But they should be "Library Library" projects. Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency.

Siva is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library.

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While Adobe publishes the specification for PDF (portable document format) documents, allowing others to write software that creates and reads PDF documents, there is concern that the specification in not truly open. The first two links below give information about the PDF/A long-term preservation format. The third item is a short note about why the published Adobe standard is not truly open.

• PDF/Archive Committee Scope: Responsible for specifying PDF tags for the archival storage of electronic documents.
• PDF/A, PDF for Long-term Preservation (NDIIPP)
• Adobe omissions in the PDF specification

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Science.gov is a gateway to authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results. It searches across 30 databases and 1,800 Web sites. and 47 million pages in real time. The Science.gov Alliance is composed of 17 organizations within 12 federal science agencies and the Government Printing Office.

• Introducing Science.gov 3.0 and a more precise search! (Science.gov introduction page)
• Science.gov goes 3.0, By Joab Jackson, Government Computer News, 11/21/05.

  Version 3 ... incorporates bibliographic information into its searches. The feature, dubbed "MetaRank," ranks the relevance of data to the search term by using title, author, date, abstract and other keyword identifiers.

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GPO considers CIO Council request to create XML template By Rob Thormeyer, Government Compuer News, 11/23/05.

The Government Printing Office is mulling a request from the CIO Council to develop a standard Extensible Markup Language vocabulary that all agencies can use to disseminate information online.

"We're still considering" the CIO Council's request. "It's not a question of whether it's the right thing to do, but it's a matter of whether we can do a good job with it because of everything else we're doing."

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How good is broadband access in the United States? Two reports give us some perspective. The Wall Street Journal article says that access costs about $20 per megabit in the U.S., compared to $1.80 per megabit in France. It notes that, while the White House and the FCC say they want universal, affordable broadband by 2007, "the policy is being left in the hands of the cable and phone companies that control at least 93% of the country's broadband market." The ITU Digital Access Index (DAI) "distinguishes itself from other indices by including a number of new variables, such as education and affordability. It also covers a total of 178 economies, which makes it the first truly global ICT ranking." Apart from Canada, ranked 10th, the top ten economies are exclusively Asian and European. The United States ranks 11th.

• For U.S. Consumers, Broadband Service Is Slow and Expensive by Jesse Drucker, Wall Street Journal, Nov 16, 2005. (Eastern edition) pg. B.1. [subscription required]
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