16 Government podcasts from the President on down
With the addition of podcasts from President Bush, Mayor Anthony Williams of Washington DC, and the US Air Force, FGI's Directory of government podcasts has hit 16 entries. Do you know of a government podcast not on this list? Let FGI know by sending the URL or RSS feed of the podcast to dnlcornwall@alaska.net! Continue reading
Bloggin’ the govt domain
Peggy Garvin at LRRX.com writes an interesting article about three free web services that leverage blogs and blogging software to deliver information on federal government issues. She mentions PubSub Government, Plogress.com, and GovTrack.us. Of the three, I would guess that plogress and govtrack will be the most useful to govt information librarians. Plogress provides notices culled from THOMAS data on the roll call votes cast and legislation sponsored by each member of Congress. GovTrack keeps up with “Hot Legislation in the Blogosphere" by searching blog entries that link to a congressional bill in Thomas, sort by "popularity" (measured by the number of blogs linking to the bill. Here are three examples of "blogs" that offer interesting and useful information to librarians as they go about their daily work. Continue reading
FDSys Blog Discussion on “Policy Neutral”
There's a discussion going on at the FDSys blog that is very relevant to Jim's posting on the Copyright Office and IE. Continue reading
What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information
The proposal by the Copyright Office (Aug. 4 in the Federal Register) that would make it "necessary to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser in order to preregister a work" is more than just a bad policy. It is an excellent example of future problems of e-government implementation and the potential for problems with long term availability of government information through GPO.
A new article (Copyright Office draws heat for proposed IE-only rule By Joab Jackson, Government Computer News, 08/17/05.) quotes the Copyright Office's reasons for the new rule:
The office says its browser choice is limited by the commercial software package it will be using to manage the registration system, as well as the time needed to test other browsers.
There was, and is, no intent to endorse a particular vendor. The office's goal is to make the system available to everyone, and therefore to enable frequently used browsers," said Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyright.
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A positive, not a neutral, policy!
August 21, 2005 / Leave a comment
The UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation has a manifesto on Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data and they are collecting signatures to demonstrate broad support for open access to geodata policies.
The manifesto is an excellent example of a statement that takes an active, positive approach to information dissemination, rather than the policy-neutral approach that GPO is using in its planning.The manifesto notes that "75-80% of the information generated by government has a spatial component" and says, in part: "Ultimately, all state-collected information should be openly available, in a structured machine-readable format." and "All government-collected geodata should be open, that is, available for free distribution and re-use..."
Thanks to Open Access News!
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