Dorobek Insider has some additional background on the making of change.gov. 2 things of interest: 1) change.gov's use of Google moderator, a 3rd party app, which falls under google's privacy policy rather than the federal government requirements under the Privacy Act of 1974; and 2) both sides of the political debate seem to be trying to figure out how and why GSA set up change.gov, including submitting FOIA requests.

Team Obama’s Change.gov — abuzz about how it was created — and how difficult change in government is

[thanks for the heads-up Peggy Garvin!]

The Government Accountability Office recently identified Preparing for Public Health Emergencies as one of 13 urgent issues facing the next President and Congress. Today on Guide of the Week, we'll talk about some librarian produced guides from the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki that can help inform citizens, Congress and President-Elect Obama on this issue.

There appear to be two librarian produced guides that touch on public health emergencies:

• Government Documents on Health (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last updated 3/10/2008
• Chemical and Biological Disarmament (Grace York, University of Michigan, 2000) Last updated 1/9/2005

Bert's guide is to documents about health in general, but he points to resources like Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports, Public Health Reports, the Senate Homeland Security & Govt. Affairs Committee and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which all deal with public health emergencies. There is also the usual Chapman catalog instructions on how to seach for government health policy and reports.

Although Grace's guide is titled "Chemical and Biological Disarmament", the government's response to a mass epidemic would be similar whether or not the disease was man made. Some of the resources Grace includes that policymakers might find helpful are:

• PubMed
• Reading List for Princeton Biodefense R&D Workshops and Seminars
• Rand Corporation bioterrorism page
• World Health Organization

On an unrelated note, Grace's guide has a graphic illustration of boolean logic using Russians and Soviets that I think you'll find very helpful in sharing with the uninitiated.

There is more in both guides. I hope you'll read both and then share both if you find them useful.

I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised by what didn't show up on the ALA GODORT Exchange Wiki. There was nothing about bird flu (pandemic influenza) or specifically about bioterrorism. I know some librarians somewhere must have produced SOMETHING on these topics and I encourage you to post your guides to the Handout Exchange.

Next week I'll be dealing with librarian produced guides relating to "Food Safety" So if you have any guides relating to that topic, please try and post them to the Handout Exchange this week.

SEC Approves Interactive Data for Financial Reporting by Public Companies, Mutual Funds, Securities and Exchange Commission, Press Release 2008-300, Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2008.

The SEC plans to phase out the EDGAR system and replace it with its Interactive Data Electronic Applications (IDEA) database. The IDEA system is based on eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), one of a number of XML markup languages which are used to encode documents and serialize data.

The Press Release says that, "With interactive data, all of the facts in a financial statement are labeled with unique computer-readable 'tags,' which function like bar codes to make financial information more searchable on the Internet and more readable by spreadsheets and other software. Investors will be able to instantly find specific facts disclosed by companies and mutual funds, and compare that information with details about other companies and mutual funds to help them make investment decisions."

See also:

SEC To Replace EDGAR With 'IDEA'

Test Drive Interactive Data!. SEC's Interactive Financial Report Viewer! The Viewer allows you to interact with XBRL filings made as part of the SEC's Voluntary Filing Program.

A report by the Federal Web Managers Council provides some useful suggestions about how to make government information more useful.

• Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government A White Paper Written for the 2008 – 2009 Presidential Transition Team by the Federal Web Managers Council, November 2008.

Among their findings and suggestions:

There are approximately 24,000 U.S. Government websites now online (but no one knows the exact number).

Only a minority of agencies have developed strong web policies and management controls. Some have hundreds of "legacy" websites with outdated or irrelevant content.

We have too much content to categorize, search, and manage effectively, and there is no comprehensive system for removing or archiving old or underused content.

Agencies should be required and funded to conduct regular content reviews, to ensure their online content is accurate, relevant, mission-related, and written in plain language. They should have a process for archiving content that is no longer in frequent use and no longer required on the website.

The report solicits comments, so I wrote the following to one of the co-chairs, Sheila Campbell:

Ms. Campbell,

Thank you for your thoughtful report. I hope these comments help.

Here is an interesting series of interrelated posts in which there is a discussion a proposal that twitter should allow search filtering. Whether you twitter or not, whether this was a good idea or not, the ideas are interesting and pertain to government information as well.

Here we find reference to 3 kinds of power:

1. the ability to force you to do what you don’t want to do; 
2. the ability to stop you doing something that you want to do; and 
3. the ability to shape the way you think.

Number 2 has an obvious analogy to the no-distribution FDLP because without distribution of the raw information it is difficult for libraries -- or anyone else -- to do interesting things like build full text indexes and specialized collections that combine government and non-government information or build mash-ups. But Number 3 is just as suggestive, because the interfaces that GPO and other government agencies provide give them the power to shape what questions we can ask and what answers we get.

I'm not proposing a conspiracy of thought control, I am just saying that no one agency can provide all the possible views and interfaces and functionality that the richness of government information deserves.

GPO continues to insist that making information "publicly accessible [at an] Internet site" (SUPERINTENDENT OF DOCUMENTS POLICY STATEMENT 301) is adequate in the digital age. Distributing the raw data would do so much more and allow so much more extensive and better use of the data. Why not allow that? Is it about "power"...?

• Bloggers Lose The Plot Over Twitter Search, by Michael Arrington, December 27, 2008
• Concepts of ‘authority’ in a networked world, by John Naughton, December 28th, 2008.
• The future that won’t be distributed, by Doc Searls, Dec. 30, 2008

Happy new year to all of you. Whether you are on vacation and peeking at the news, or reading this as you just get back to work, here is something interesting and fun to see:

Martin Wattenberg. Data visualization. Media art. Collective intelligence.

Wattenberg is a computer scientist and new media artist. He is the founding manager of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, which researches new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration.

Check out his many projects (e.g., Name Voyager, the Baby Name Wizard with data from the Social Security Administration, or history flow, visualizing the editing history of Wikipedia pages, or Many-Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis).

This is another good example of what interesting things can be done when we have complete access to information. When the raw data are free, we can do so much more than the single views of data provided by government agencies.

Read more about Wattenberg here:

He creates ways of seeing information, by Billy Baker, Boston Globe, December 29, 2008.

If you have a question for President-Elect Obama on the subjects of transparency or government information, the next few days are your chance to ask him directly. Or support your favorite open-government organization.

Change.gov has opened Round Two of Open for Questions where registered users get to ask questions and/or rate the questions of others. The first round only lasted a few days and so might this round.

So get moving! And if you see good questions or ask some of your own on government information policy, please leave a comment so like-minded people can follow you.

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011, An IDC White Paper - sponsored by EMC, John F. Gantz, Project Director, March 2008.

This report estimates the dimensions of the digital information explosion. With figures like 281 billion gigabytes (the size of the "digital universe" in 2007, which is a million times the amount of digital data hosted by the Library of Congress in 2008 -- see Berman, Francine. Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age. Commun. ACM 51, no. 12 (2008): 50-56) and estimates like "By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006" the report has sobering implications for digital preservation. In fact, it notes that:

As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

GPO has a new version of its Comparison of Legislative Resources on GPO Access and Selected Government and Non-Government Web Sites (October 2008). It has separate files with tables showing the 34 GPO Access legislative
resources studied and the scope of each of eight Web sites examined. (Scope of GPO Access and Government Web Sites and Scope of GPO Access and Non-Government Web Sites.

The study compares legislative information available on GPO Access to House.gov, Senate.gov, THOMAS, Lexis-Nexis Congressional, Westlaw, CQ.com, and HeinOnline.

The study finds that GPO Access contains a unique mix of online legislative resources not duplicated in total at other sites. ("No Government or Non- Government Web site, other than GPO Access, contains Economic Indicators, Independent Counsel Investigations, State of the Union, United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), and the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual.")

But, "In terms of scope of the legislative resources it provides, GPO Access is behind the other Web sites evaluated. Many of the other sites either contain historical content on their service or link to external sites with historical information, whereas GPO Access possesses current information that generally begins in the mid-1990s."

The last study (2003) and previous studies are still available at http://fedbbs.access.gpo.gov/library/compare/.