OPEN Gov’t Act: Bipartisan Bill Strengthens Open Government
Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the OPEN Government Act (S. 394) to reinforce openness in the federal government. The bill requires agencies to pay legal costs when they face with a lawsuit over improperly withheld records. The purpose of the bill is to make agencies more accountable for fulfilling public requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The bill was introduced on Feb. 16 and a Judiciary Committee hearing was held March 15. The companion bill in the House, H.R. 867, now has 6 cosponsors. The OPEN Government Act of 2005: A Summary Continue reading
An Arizona model for web access and preservation
When I was in Baltimore last week, I learned about the An Arizona model for web access and preservation written by Richard Pearce-Moses. The document is still under development and is currently 52 pages long but still well worth reading. Arizona is one of several states (including Alaska) trying to harvest state publications from agency web sites and store them on library servers. I think this paper does a great job of explaining the challenges involved. For instance, although they are collecting electronic documents, they don't fool themselves into thinking that preservation is accomplished:
This model does not address long-term problems of keeping bitstreams alive or software obsolescence. Preservation, for the purposes of this model, means capturing documents so that they are within the control of the repository in hopes that, when those long-term problems are solved, there is current content that can be migrated into the future.Continue reading
American Chemical Society vs NIH’s PubChem
According to the Open Access News:
"The American Chemical Society is calling on Congress to shut down the NIH's PubChem, a freely accessible database on small organic molecules. PubChem is an important component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Initiative, which is a key element of the NIH "road map" for medical research. ACS claims that PubChem competes with Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). In reality, PubChem and the Chemical Abstracts Service databases are complementary, not duplicative."Patrice McDermott has written an excellant overview of the issues. How many of these excellant services are going to be lost or sold off to the private sector before people catch on? PubScience, Eric, now PubChem. Agricola? National Weather Service? OUR government information systems are being sold off or shut down because of bogus competition claims. And this isn't a recent phenomena. See The Scientist, November 20, 2002. Continue reading
Report from Australia: Vanishing Government Information
Report from Australia: Vanishing Government Information History will vanish into the ether, by Toss Gascoigne, Australian IT, MAY 11, 2005. This is an edited version of an address to the seminar, "Digital Amnesia: The Challenges of Government Online" organized by the Australian Library and Information Association at the National Library of Australia on April 21. Toss Gascoigne, executive director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, notes that "Tracking down government reports is a growing problem for researchers in Australia. Originally published on the web, many reports have become unavailable or difficult to find." Gascoigne reports many examples of documents gone missing and examines the reasons. Of interest to us here in the U.S. is the finding of relatively trivial circumstances that cause documents to go missing. Many of the documents were still available, but such simple things as redesigning or streamlining a website caused the documents, though still available somewhere, to become "almost impossible" to find. Changes in staff and management and making "way for new versions or new publications" was a reason for publications being permanently removed from web sites. Staff would remove publications when a particular publication seemed to "no longer attract much traffic." One person reported that he presumed that "a desire to take a different policy direction" would naturally result in removing a report from an earlier time. Continue reading
Where oh where did that govt document go?
May 18, 2005 / 1 Comment on Where oh where did that govt document go?
Has anyone got a digital copy of the Overseas Base Closing Commission report that was released a couple of weeks ago? It seems the Secretary of Defense didn't like it so he had it pulled from the Internet. I'd be willing to trade for the May 3, 2005 GAO Report on Military Base Closures. Heck, I'll give you the report up front! If you have a digital copy, please send it to admin at FreeGovInfo dot info. Continue reading →
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