The first article in a weekly series, exclusively in The Hill, exploring the recommendations of the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, which advocates online transparency in Congress is now available.

• Give bloggers Capitol access, by Robert B. Bluey, The Hill, April 30, 2007.

Bluey is director of the Center for Media & Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation and maintains a blog at RobertBluey.com. He authored the "Citizen Journalism Access" chapter for the Open House Project. The full report is scheduled for release on May 8.

The OpenHouse Project (a project of the Sunlight Foundation) is discussing ways to "open up the House." It will suggest changes "where the internet and Congressional procedures come together" to identify areas where Congress can open up and allow all of us to have more information and access." It is a temporary working group designed to make recommendations to Congress on how to begin making the House of Representatives more open and facilitate communications.

Forthcoming Op-Eds will address: Legislation Database, Preserving Congressional Information, Congressional Committees, CRS Reports, Member Web-Use Restrictions, House Clerk's Office, and Coordinating Web Standards.

Four U.S. States Partner with Google to Improve Public Access to Government Web Sites  

"Google and four U.S. states have partnered to improve the amount of data Google indexes from their Web sites and makes available to users of its search engine."

"The search giant helps four states get online data indexed and helps create custom search engines for government Web sites."

Here are some different perspectives on the work Google is doing with state governments:

• Google courts government sector webmasters Infoworld April 30, 2007
• Google pushes U.S. states to open public records CNN.com / AP April 30, 2007
• Google Helps States Surface Government Information by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land Apr. 30, 2007
• Googling state government documents By Elinor Mills CNET News.com April 29, 2007

Although this is not, strictly speaking, government information, it is about the presidential race and is an interesting complement to US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (more on that here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud).

This is another good demonstration of how interesting things can be done with information that is easily re-usable.

• Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate, Pollster.com, April 27, 2007

As a contrast, one can not remix documents like SUPERINTENDENT OF DOCUMENTS POLICY STATEMENT 301, because it is an image of text, not text.

Don Wood at Library 2.0 has a good, short post on Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important.

He notes that "For libraries to flourish as centers for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users' right to privacy and freedom of inquiry."

If libraries do not have copies of digital government information, users will be faced with retrieving that information from government-controlled web servers where there is no guarantee of privacy (Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?). If libraries want to flourish as centers of uninhibited access to information, they need to have copies of digital government information.

Thanks a bundle to Steven M. Cohen who Twittered about this new item we've added to our remixes page:

Justia Regulation Tracker - This free service takes Federal Register data and provides the ability to create RSS feeds of search results. The search gives you more options than the GPO Advanced Federal Register Search because the Justia search gives you agency dropdown choices and the regulations abstracts appear on the results pages. Justia is led by former CEO and FindLaw co-founder Tim Stanley. They make their money from advanced web services to lawyers, but provide free basic legal info to the public.

More information on Justia and this new service can be found at http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2007/04/feeding_the_rea.html.

This is a perfect example of a service that couldn't be started if GPO implemented a two-tiered model of information access - Free but restricted access at Depository Libraries and fee access for vendors wishing to reuse government information.

But how will GPO be able to sell government information if people who obtain this public domain information republish for free with better searching and alert tools than GPO? We don't think they can without restricting the no-fee information model in some way. So we at FGI think they shouldn't try.

Finally, if this serendipity by Twitter intrigued you, drop by and friend me at http://www.twitter.com/dcornwall

Now representing 27 states, our Government Podcasts directory has been updated with all the state and local government podcasts we could find. We also had help from librarian Amanda Stone.

Please look over the revised directory and send us anything, especially state and local gov't podcasts that we missed.

Remember our criteria:

1. It must have audio or video produced either by a state agency, local government or an elected official.

2. It must be hosted on a government server (.orgs/.edu that clearly id themselves as a gov't body ok).

3. The agency must put the CAST in podCAST by having an obvious way to subscribe to the podcast feed (RSS, iTunes, etc). Posting static audio files and expecting people to manually download files one by one won't cut it.)

Thanks for checking this list for us!

If you're trying to understand how LOCKSS works and why anyone would want their own copies of government data when GPO/Google/[Your Third Party Here] will keep it safe and free forever, check out these two recent news items from LOCKSS:

• LOCKSS Team featured by Library of Congress (04/24/07) Pioneers of Digital Preservation on the Library of Congress' web site features an overview of the LOCKSS program.
• Presentation at CNI (04/17/07) Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal talked at the CNI meeting in Phoenix, AZ. Vicky gave an overview of the status of the CLOCKSS program, and David talked on Can We Afford To Preserve Large Databases?.

The LC page not only demonstrates that LOCKSS can be a trusted and TESTED partner in digital preservation, but also explains an excellent plain English explanation of how the system works.

David Rosenthal's CNI powerpoint touches on the non-technology reasons why information solely in the hands of the government is at risk, especially his slide 18:

Example: Insider Attack

● Political interference (Hansen 2007):
– 2006 Earth Science budget retroactively reduced 20%
– ''One way to avoid bad news: stop the measurements!''
– Suppose the data itself turned out to be ''inconvenient'' ...

● Remove it (e.g. EPA pollution database)
● Alter it?

● Independent replicas essential
– Independently administered in different jurisdictions
– Mutually audited so they're tamper evident

The rest of the presentation is a good though slightly technical primer on performance requirements for digital preservation and the need for further research. Also has some scary things to say about RAID.

More evidence that no ONE system, not even a Future Digital one, is enough to safeguard America's government information. No system is safe from its parent - particularly when that parent is so reluctant to fully fund information access and preservation.

Google glitch loses user data, By Dan Goodin, The Register 26th April 2007.

Google users found that "settings and data they've amassed over months have suddenly gone missing from their personalized homepage."

Although this story doesn't directly pertain to government information it has a lesson for us.

While the loss of individual preferences is hard on the individual, it is not the same as losing public information that we want accessible forever.

We hope that Google will be able to restore these user preferences, but the lesson here should not escape us:

Over the years, the many free services offered by Google and its competitors have become indispensable to many of us, but they also bring to mind the old adage that we get what we pay for. And Google's personalized homepage isn't the only such service to show signs of untrustworthiness....

As libraries (and government agencies) increasingly rely on Google to provide essential access to government information (e.g., Google to index government deep web? and Google begins to offer full-text scanned government documents and Agencies are working with Google to boost rankings and increase traffic and Cabbage Statistics, a microcosm of our selection decisions?), we should all be asking ourselves if this is an adequate infrastructure for permanent access. Every time we think "I don't have to [index, catalog, fill-in-the-blank-service] because Google will..." we should ask ourselves what we'll do if Google doesn't, or fails, or changes it's services.

If we do more (e.g., Cabbage statistics and google bombs), we will at least be able to use our own systems and Google and its competitors and its successors.

An even more important question is, do we know what google does and how it does it? What do they index and how do they rank? What gets ranked high and what gets ranked low? How deeply do they index a given web site? Are these the same decisions that we would make? Have they changed what they do since last week? Are they the right decisions for our users? Does there need to be an alternative that we control and can explain to our users and thus better help them?

A recent thread on the govdoc-l mailing list is about digital deposit. See Digital Deposit by Janet Fischer, 26 Apr 2007 and digital deposit by James [R.] Jacobs, 27 Apr 2007.

Thanks to Janet for bringing this up and to James for the helpful links to technical information on digital deposit.

I'd just like to add two thoughts:

1. I believe that it is best to think about digital deposit in much the same way we think about paper deposit: every library will be different.

We shouldn't be looking for a one size fits all solution in the digital world anymore than we expect any two depositories to be identical. The technical requirements that any given library comes up with will depend on the level of service and collection profile that the library chooses.

We should be thinking of services and collections first and technology second. We should not be trying to shoehorn our service and collection decisions into an abstract technological solution. Nor should we assume that every digital depository will have to meet the same requirements that an OCLC, CDL, NARA, or FDSys will meet.

I can, for example, easily imagine a small depository with a slow or intermittent Internet connection and little or no online services selecting a few essential titles and putting them on a stand-alone public PC so that users can easily use those titles when in the library even if the network is down or slow or the originating site unreachable. And, at another extreme, I can see a large library, which already has some digital collections online and accessible over the web, adding government information to its collection and integrating government and non-government sources together so that its users do not have to go to two different interfaces or sites to find the information they need.

You can probably easily expand these simple examples too your own situation and see where digital deposit will fit into your existing collections and services -- or collections and services you are planning.

2. I think it is equally important to emphasize to library management and to your technical support people that there are different technologies for implementing any given collection and service plan. Again, I believe that we should not be looking for a one-size-fits-all technological solution -- even for similar collection and service plans. For example, one library might choose to use LOCKSS to implement online collections, another might use its institutional repository software (e.g., DSpace, EPrints, Greenstone, etc.), another might use content management software, and another might integrated documents into its existing webspace by uploading them to the same server that hosts its existing html documents. The point is that there are different technical ways to implement the same collection and service plans.

I hope this helps and others will contribute to this thread. If you have specific suggestion or solutions that you anticipate using, please share your stories!

Another Day, Another Hold On Finance Bill, By Matthew Mosk, Washington Post, Friday, April 27, 2007; A21.

The infamous unnamed senator (or senators) has for more than a week blocked passage of legislation that would require Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically.

Electronic filings would make the names of campaign donors readily available -- it's how members of the House and presidential candidates have been doing it for years.

As you know, FGI has been paying renewed attention to government podcasts. After moderate searching on some people's favorite search engine, I have concluded that the 25 states listed below have no state government podcasts:

Alabama - AL - www.alabama.gov - Nothing found 4/26/2007
Alaska - AK Nothing found 4/26/2007
Arizona - AZ Nothing found 4/26/2007
Colorado - CO Nothing as of 4/26/2007
Hawaii - HI Nothing Found 4/26
Idaho - ID Nothing found 4/26
Iowa - IA Nothing found 4/26
Louisiana - LA Nothing found 4/26
Maine - ME Nothing found 4/26
Maryland - MD Nothing found 4/26
Massachusetts - MA Nothing found 4/26
Montana - MT Nothing found 4/26
New Hampshire - NH Nothing found 4/26
New Jersey - NJ Nothing found 4/26
New Mexico - NM Nothing found 4/26
North Dakota - ND Nothing found 4/26
Oklahoma - OK Nothing found 4/26
Pennsylvania - PA Nothing found 4/26
Rhode Island - RI Nothing found 4/26 - but ri.gov looks like they're getting ready to podcast in near future.
South Carolina - SC Nothing found 4/26
South Dakota - SD Nothing found 4/26
Vermont - VT Nothing found 4/26
West Virginia - WV Nothing found 4/26
Wyoming - WY Nothing found 4/26

Am I right? I am defining a government podcast as follows:

1. It must have audio or video produced either by a state agency, local government or an elected official.
2. It must be hosted on a government server (.orgs/.edu that clearly id themselves as a gov't body ok).
3. The agency must put the CAST in podCAST by having an obvious way to subscribe to the podcast feed (RSS, iTunes, etc). Posting static audio files and expecting people to manually download files one by one won't cut it.)

If you know of a podcast in the 25 states listed above that meets the three conditions above, would you please let me know in comments or in an e-mail to dnlcornwall AT alaska.net? Thanks!

So far my search has turned up more than a dozen state/local podcasts that I'll soon by adding to our Government Podcasts page.

As a teaser, check out the OH DNR Ohio Outdoor Notebook Radio Spots at http://www.dnr.ohio.gov/notebook/default.htm, one of the few podcasts I know that will give you the lowdown on Sassafras tea!

UPDATE 4/27/2007 - Thanks to Amanda Stone of the South Carolina State Library for pointing the locally produced podcasts of the South Carolina Educational Television Commission, commonly known as ETV. See our government podcasts page for details.

The recent govdoc-l posts regarding cabbage statistics, selection and google piqued our collective FGI interest (thanks Chuck, Carlos and Amy!). I thought it might be interesting to share our thoughts and connect these threads together.

After reading the above govdoc-l posts, Daniel, Jim and I had a spirited discussion about the Congressional Record, databases, and google. We explored whether or not google indexes the CR (turns out that at least for cabbages, google gets to at least some of the "correct" data), all of that un-indexed information stuck in govt databases, and the fact that anyone who uses google will miss out on govt info in the "dark web."

What really resonated in the original thread was that Chuck was willing to deselect that item because cabbage is not of interest to Illinoisans (sorry Chuck, but I'm glad Carlos pointed out that that decision would be short-sighted). But also, we found it interesting that the google searches all hit on a site at Cornell rather than a gpoaccess purl, and even the purl pointed to the Cornell site. And this leads to the main gist of our internal discussion.

Rather than shrugging our collective shoulders at the ubiquity of google, we should be using google's indexing strategy and people's search inclinations to our advantage (google docs bombing if you will). The article that Amy referenced ("Agencies are working with Google to boost rankings and increase traffic" by Trudy Walsh) discussed how govt agencies were starting to do just that (if inadvertantly!).

We need to create our own govt info sites, remix govt info, open up our catalogs -- or better yet use tools like scriblio, a not-yet-released Wordpress plugin that converts marcXML to blog posts (check out the Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth, NH for a look at scriblio nee WPopac). And once we have govt info in as many indexable places as possible, we (meaning docs librarians but also librarians in general) need to make sure that all those index points lead the info-curious back to our analog collections. In other words, we need to leverage the google logorithm and users search proclivities, to position ourselves in the online environment.

Here's a real world example (apologies for tooting the FGI horn :-) ). The Wall Street Journal contacted us this week wanting to know about government podcasts (Daniel's audio interview will be up in a few days!). We found it odd that WSJ would want to talk with us until we did a few searches and realized why. If you do a Google search on the words "government podcasts," FGI's the first hit, above that for usa.gov. FGI is 2nd on Yahoo, just below usa.gov. We're #1 on ask.com. We didn't do anything special, we just described a subject area that happened to be of interest to the WSJ. And this is what libraries can and should be doing.

Shinjoung and I saw Rick and Megan Prelinger talk two nights ago. For those of you who don't know, Rick is a film archivist and is on the board of the Internet Archive, Megan's an independent scholar and bird rescuer; the two of them have built their own amazing library! A couple of things that stuck in my mind about their talk was when they described the library as an "analog-digital landscape of ideas" and an "information ecology."

I think that's what we need to be building. That's what archives do with digital finding aids, and that's what we need to do with the rest of the library. WE know that only an extremely miniscule portion of knowledge/information will ever be digitized, and only a small portion of that will be accessible via google (I *hate* snippets!), but the general public doesn't know that. We also know, as Carlos said, “You just never know when that piece of information will be useful to anybody.”

I'll end with a link to David Weinberger's blog where he quotes (with permission) an email from Bobbi Carlton about a conversation she had recently with Bernie Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library:

“Bernie Margolis was ... talking about how people think the Web is going to put libraries out of business. He says that the more hits on the BPL website, the more visitors come to the library. The more people learn about the library, the more they come in. The BPL sees a direct correlation between web traffic and foot traffic but that is because the library is more than a repository of things and information - it is a resource as well."

Census approaches field test with fingers crossed

The State of Homeland Security 2007: An Annual Report Card on the Department of Homeland Security

Today, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA.), Chairman of the Oversight and Govt Reform Committee, approved of a subpoena for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice regarding the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger and the Republican National Committee (RNC) to provide answers to basic questions about the use of RNC e-mail accounts by White House officials. Things are really getting interesting now!

"The Administration’s claim that Iraq could pose a nuclear threat was at the center of its case for war. Indeed this assertion was key to the decisions of many Members of Congress, including myself, to support the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. It therefore raised enormously serious questions when Congress and the public learned that there were flaws, not just minor ones but serious flaws, with the intelligence underpinning the Administration’s nuclear case.”

and...

Why would a federal agency trash its libraries?, by Jeff Ruch, High Country News, April 9, 2007.

Then, after it had already begun closing libraries, EPA discovered that copyright limitations prevented it from digitizing materials not written by EPA staff. As a result, hundreds of reports from the agency's contractors, as well as academic and corporate researchers, will remain in hard copy, but housed in one of three "repositories."

At times, EPA's actions have taken on an Orwellian cast, as thousands of documents and whole collections were hastily dispersed to anyone willing to accept them. The three repositories of documents have grown into giant information dumps whose contents will remain un-cataloged for years to come, and in Chicago, the largest regional library, furnishings -- shelves, desks and cabinets worth some $40,000 -- were sold for $327.

We've updated our Spring 2007 DLC conference page with audio and a rough transcript from the LOCKSS panel. We regret that our reporter missed the first 20 minutes. The session began at 1330 and our audio and transcript start at 1351.

We figure LOCKSS is so important that missing some of it was better than not posting. If you were at the panel, please fill us in about the first 20 minutes.

Intrepid FGI Reporter James Staub got in about 20 minutes late to this session and the audio and the rough transcript reflect that. Non-anonymous corrections are welcome.

Rough Transcript:

200704151330 FDLP/DLC : LOCKSS

cowell@stanford.edu
[I came in late]

Scott Matheson
1351 LOCKSS is easy to install
1354 Social solution to a social problem
1357 Although publishers provide authoritative changes that propagate through a LOCKSS group, there's still a cache of original material.
1400 Technical description of what happens: “patron gets content”
1401 closed stacks analogy
1408 Q how do you reconcile old computers and massive needs for storage space? DOE collection is 3 terabytes
1411 Q security – viruses?
1413 Comment – large collection publishers should themselves be LOCKSS Alliance partners
1414 Space really hasn't been an issue so far.
1415 What a failure looks like – SM displays a failure at permanent.access.gov that was averted by LOCKSS
1420 Q Why did GPO choose to republish?

Patricia Kenly, Georgia Tech
1423
workshop this summer
1429 our Associate Director has called LOCKSS our preservation strategy for digital information
1429 open source is good
patricia.kenly@library.gatech.edu

1430 Q can we digitize, gather, republish, and LOCKSS older government information to make it available?
EC: yes
SM: your IT people understand redundancy
EC: LOCKSS team is looking more at front-end crawling, and having discussions with Archive-It

My name is Angie Cope and I am a Senior Academic Librarian at the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries. I have an M.L.I.S. from UW - Milwaukee ; an M.S. in Resource Planning and a B.S. in Geography both from Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU).

In my current position, I am principally a catalog librarian - cataloging maps, atlases and geospatial data. My secondary responsibilities include collection development. I also assist with outreach, reference, web page maintenance and other projects around my library. For more information on my library, visit me here: AGS Library

I also moderate a popular map librarian discussion list called Maps-L. The list maintain an subscribership of around 1,000 people from around the world. The topics discussed include anything related to map librarianship. Often the list is a bit of an announcement board but frequently serves as a great place to pose questions to colleagues. Issues relating to cataloging, air photos, scanning policies, government map index availability or interpreting unusual map codes are examples of what has been discussed in the past. For more information on Maps-L, take a look here: Maps-L Info

I'm looking forward to guest blogging in May of 2007 and being a part of FGI.

Strategic Plan, Website Released to Combat Identity Theft

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (BETA)

"This site allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)."

MyMoney.gov

Here's a site from the U.S. Financial Literacy and Educational Commission. It contains detailed information on a variety of money-related topics such as:
- Budgeting & Taxes
- Credit
- Financial Planning
- Home Ownership
- Paying for Education
- Privacy, Fraud &
Scams
- Retirement Planning
- Saving & Investing
- Starting a Small
Business

USDA exposes citizen data

These data breaches at various government entities have been happening so frequently that they don't even seem all that shocking anymore. But, of course, exposure of American citizens' data is serious business, especially when it's related to those citizens' receipt of federal aid.

Since I'm not a hacker, I have to wonder: how did the private information of so many people became available to the public via the open Web? What measures are in place, or are lacking, in terms of protecting this information at the federal level? The USDA owes us an explanation.

According to an article in in Linux.com (Microsoft's 'Men in Black' kill Florida open standards legislation By: Robin Miller et al. Linux.com, April 17, 2007), legislation in the state of Florida that would have required the state to develop "a plan and a business case" for using open file formats in documents the state creates was removed from the legislation after Microsoft lobbyists complained about it. Within 24 hours of the amendment being added three Microsoft-paid lobbyists started pressuring members of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations (COGO) to remove the words they didn't like from Senate bill 1974.

David Berlind has pointed out (Linux.com: Microsoft issues campaign funding ultimatum to open standards legislation backers, ZDnet.com, April 18th, 2007) that the Linux.com article relies on a lot of anonymous sources and, in a quick check of Google News and LexisNexis this morning, I didn't find any other sources verifying the story, yet.

Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that Microsoft and others who have lots of money invested in proprietary document formats would oppose legislation requiring open formats. Matt Asay (Microsoft tries to maintain its monopoly...are you surprised?, Inforworld, April 18, 2007) quotes the Linux.com article and notes:

Microsoft has tens of billions of dollars to protect.... Microsoft will do everything in its power to block open source and open standards. It has, in a very real sense, a fiduciary duty to try to kill it.

We at FGI are strong advocates of open formats for government information because we believe that open formats provide a better opportunity for open exchange, reuse, and preservation of public information. University of Florida political science student Gavin Baker, one of the authors of the Linux.com article, has a useful presentation online (Sustaining the Information Society: New (and Old) Conflicts in the Knowledge Economy, by Gavin Baker, Presented at Campus & Community Sustainability University of Florida Oct. 25-26, 2006) that makes the point quite well. The Linux.com article says of the presentation:

...use of open data formats isn't just about short-term financial savings, but is also about long-term preservation of knowledge; ... proprietary data formats come and go at a dizzying rate, but with open, standardized ones we have a chance to read today's saved information in 50 or 500 years, even if Microsoft or Corel or (fill in popular word processor vendor) is long gone, along with its patented or otherwise "protected" data formats.