Attn: Spring DLC Attendees – We want your notes for new feature
We at freegovinfo.info want to help GPO have a faster and more complete picture of public DLC meetings and other GPO sessions at library association events.
So, we're initiating "Grassroots Proceedings," where we are asking you, the documents communities to contribute your notes and impressions of PUBLIC FDLP-related events. If you're fortunate enough to have private lunches with the Public Printer or the SuDoc, please DO NOT send us those notes. This isn't a game of "gotcha journalism." We only want to better publicize public sessions to avoid situations like the Midwinter flap where GPO's plans went unclarified for months. The more information the government information community has, the better partners we can be with GPO.
You can contribute in two ways. You can either send your notes and impressions to dnlcornwall@alaska.net and let us know whether we can use your name and institution when we post the notes to our "Grassroots Proceedings" page. Or once the "Grassroots Proceedings" page is set up, you will be able to directly contribute comments. Continue reading
Digital Preservation Costs – Migration vs. Emulation
The current issue of RLG DigiNews discusses two possible approaches to preserving digital objects: migration and emulation in terms of costs over the life of the objects.
Migration is moving electronic files from one application to another - say from WordPerfect to the latest edition of word. Emulation is designing software and sometimes hardware that will mimic a desired operating system - say a Macintosh with SoftWindows. Both approaches have merit, and both have problems. Some of the problems arise from proprietary formats protected by trade secrets. If you can't describe the specifications of a WordPerfect file exactly, you'll have trouble rendering it in Word or future word processors (the pink-strikethrough effect).
Another thing that the two approaches have is ongoing costs, discussed in the RLG Diginews article. You can put a box of microfilm in storage for 40 years and have it come out readable with no further investment. But if you did the same thing with WordStar disks even 15 years ago, you are out of luck today.
Any preservation initiative for government information must take the CHRONIC lack of funding resources of federal information agencies. That's why we at FGI believe in a distributed electronic future and not the mostly centralized model currently favored by the government. It's also why many in the documents community, myself included believe in a multiformat model (i.e. print, electronic, microfilm) as well. Continue reading
Legislative Tracking for the Common Citizen
http://www.govtrack.us/ is a creative use of freely available government information resources to create something new and potentially valuable, but still free.
If you are interested in the actions of your Representative or Senator, this is the place for you. http://www.govtrack.us/ will send you e-mail alerts or RSS feeds on new votes, floor statements, and new bills a Member of Congress has sponsored. You can also see who contributes to their campaigns.
Bill tracking by e-mail is available also, something you can't get from THOMAS. You can get alerts by individual bills or legislative subject. Be aware that the bill tracking features will lag behind what is available to those that can pay. Josh Tauberer, creator of govtrack.us is up front about this, "Updates are delayed by several days because the U.S. Government Printing Office often takes several days to post the full information for government bills. GovTrack is generally two days behind in all information." Continue reading
GPO’s Public-Private Partnership good for libraries or citizens?
GPO is looking for private partnership in its publishing services. GPO states that "The goal is to propose, design, and execute a new model for a publications sales and distribution operation on revenue sharing basis." more... It seems like it is explicitly 'print and tangible' which means part of the question should be, why are they agressively promoting sales of these while cutting back on depository distribution??? It seems to verify our charges in the paper that trying to sell information conflicts with free distribution -- even in the print world, now! GPO is offering to provide for "the use of its repository of press optimized pdf files for POD production of publications." They never offered them to depostories, did they? Here are some questions that come to mind: Does anyone know anything about gpo's use of ONIX records? Is this a new thing? Is this parallel to or different from MARC? Don't we pay for marc, but bookstores get onix free? Continue reading
More on GPO’s “public-private partnership RFI”
April 16, 2005 / 2 Comments on More on GPO’s “public-private partnership RFI”
The questions I have about the current RFI relate less to how GPO and FDLP and the bookstores and sales program worked and interacted in the past and more to how new partnerships and plans might affect free, fully-functional, permanent access to government information in the future. I am concerned that GPO's business strategies and its new "Strategic Vision" will affect free public access to digital publications as well as to paper-and-ink documents. In terms of paper-and-ink documents, it is possible that a robust, successful paper-and-ink sales program would benefit FDLP by getting more publications into the FDLP distribution stream. On the other hand, it is possible that successful sales will lead to the removal from FDLP of publications that can earn a profit as they migrate into the private sector. And, as Scott Matheson pointed out here recently, it is also possible that less profitable documents would not be ordered for the sales program, and if not very popular, not ordered for depository distribution. Continue reading →
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