Tracking identity of visitors to government Web sites
HP aims to help governments check IDs By Alorie Gilbert, News.Com, May 26 16:16:00 PDT 2005.
This short news item describes a new product from Hewlett-Packard that "helps governments check the digital identity of citizens." It can be used "to authenticate visitors to government Web sites, to control access to services and manage citizens' online identity."
This suggests an important question to me: Will GPO use such technologies or will it protect the privacy of users and guarantee full access to to government information by refusing to use such technologies?
Continue readingFree, fully functional access can increase sales!
As GPO looks for a way to find a new business model that allows it "bring revenues in the door" (as Mr. James says) and at the same time provide "free and ready public access" to electronic documents (as the GPO Strategic Plan says), it might do well to look at this:
South African lessons: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). (Lessig Blog, May 27, 2005). In this blog posting, Lawrence Lessig notes the experience of the HSRC in changing their publishing model. They started "to give away all their research books for free online, and offer a high quality print-on-demand service for anyone who wants the paper version. The result: 'the sales turnover of the publishing department has risen by 300%.'" The posting has links to more information.
The clear lessons from this seem to be a) that it is possible to make money by selling paper and ink and b) that giving away digital versions can even increase sales.
Continue readingQuick Path to Legacy Digitization via Google Print?
Could the Google Print project be a fast track to digitizing the so-called legacy collection of Government Information? That's a thought that occurred to me while reading Joy Weese Moll's excellent summary of a Google Print presentation at the ACRL conference in the May 2005 issue of Walt Crawford's Cites and Insights. Ms. Moll quotes John Price Wilkin from the University of Michigan library on how Google Print works for them: John Price Wilkin, from the University of Michigan, began his presentation by stating, “Google has been a fantastic partner.†He confirmed that Google is using nondestructive methods of digitizing and that UM retains both the physical book and a digital copy, a preservation surrogate, of each book. Wilkin believes the primary responsibility of the library is to be the long term curator of the physical and digital material. The University gets a digital copy, identified by barcode. The scan is 600 dpi for print and 300 dpi for color/grayscale. The library specified the naming convention. The files have Optical Character Recognition. The quality is at least as good as what the University of Michigan had been doing for years on their digitization projects. Continue reading
Congress Considers PATRIOT Expansion Behind Closed Doors
The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering behind doors not only to renew the USA PATRIOT act -- including the infamous section 215 -- but to also expand the FBI's power to demand private records of people who aren't suspected of any crime - *without* a judge's approval. Say No to New PATRIOT I think the reality that USAPA will be continued and expanded confirms that the government documents community needs to challenge and fight against any future government controlled/ centralized government information system as the sole repository of all digital government information. Just imagine if the FBI knocks GPO door asking user information! They will already have it, or the ability to mine it without asking libraries or users' permission. Continue reading
New versions of JAL FDLP article now available
May 27, 2005 / Leave a comment
The article, "Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program" by James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo, previously available as a pre-print here, is now available in new versions.
- In print: Journal of Academic Librarianship, (May 2005), Vol.31, No.3, pp198-208.
- Official online version: doi:10.1016/j. acalib.2005.02.006
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