Free Culture and the Digital Library
These are the notes I used for the presentation I gave at the Free Culture and the Digital Library conference and are based on the paper, Government Information in the Digital Era: Free Culture or Controlled Substance? by Karrie Peterson (NCSU Libraries, North Carolina State University) and James A. Jacobs (Data Services, University of California San Diego).

As part of their activities in the last ALA annual meeting, the GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force (SLDTF) approved the creation of a fifty-state registry of state government produced databases on the new GODORT wiki. SLDTF believes that there will be great value to librarians and end users alike in having the "invisible web" of state produced databases together in one place.

You can find the home page for this project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. Right now, only Alaska has a developed page which you can find at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Alaska as an example for what SLDTF hopes the other state pages will look like.

Once this registry is complete, it will have a number of uses, not the least of which will be showing that documents librarians are tech savvy people who know where the information is buried even when Google can't find it.

BUT, they need your help to make this happen. There are four ways you can help with this project:

1) Go to the wiki and start adding any databases you are familar with. Just click on the "edit" tab. Registering with the GODORT wiki is recommended but not required.
2) Agree to be a "documents specialist" for a particular state and post your contact information so people who are not comfortable with editing wikis can e-mail updates to you.
3) Recruit state agency department webmasters, other state employees or other subject specialists to contribute to the database listing.
4) As you become aware of a new state (or local) government database, e-mail Daniel Cornwall, project coordinator (dan DOT cornwall AT Alaska DOT gov) or the documents specialist for that state if you are not comfortable with editing a wiki.

To me, this seems like a perfect collaboration project for the documents community. You WILL benefit from learning where your state's databases are and posting them to this annotated registry. The rest of us will benefit from having similar databases available from the fifty states and learning about your state's unique content.

So, help ALA GODORT and yourselves by contributing to this project!

If you adopt a state's page, would you leave a comment here so people can see how the registry is coming along?

Insanely Useful Websites from the Sunlight Foundation.

Web sites presenting different kinds of political, civic, and legislative information are distributed throughout the internet. While broad Web searches can be effective, they can also be time consuming and lead to sites of questionable reliability. With the debut of Sunlight's Insanely Useful Web sites page (on the second tab of the main Sunlight Foundation page) we're developing a collection of value-added government information databases on the Web.
political Web-resources, by Paul Blumenthal and John Wonderlich

How is the web and Web 2.0 changing politics and political discourse? Hear from lots of folks in this collection of interviews:

Interviews with Bloggers, , Politicos, and Netizens on Politics 2.0, Mother Jones June 20, 2007.

And a dissenting opinion:

Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype. And PressThink asks whether the printing press progressives at Mother Jones have any kind of grip.

Interviews at the Mother Jones site with:

Morra Aarons Contributing editor of BlogHer.com), David All (GOP Tech Consultant), Jerome Armstrong (MyDD.com), Floyd Brown Citizens United), John Byrne (Editor and founder of Rawstory.com), Michael Cornfield (Democracy Online Project), Howard Dean (DNC Chair), Colin Delany (Epolitics.com), Phil de Vellis (Creator of the "Hillary 1984" video, former strategist for Blue State Digital), Esther Dyson (Original Digerati), Bob Garfield (Advertising Age, On the Media), Julie Barko Germany (Institute For Politics, Democracy & The Internet), Jane Hamsher (Blogger, Firedoglake.com), Henry Jenkins (M.I.T. Professor), Nicholas Lemann (Columbia Journalism School Dean) , Lawrence Lessig (Culture-Sharing Guru), Peter Leyden (New Politics Institute Director), Nicco Mele (Echoditto President), Grover Norquist (Americans For Tax Reform President), Eli Pariser (Director of MoveOn), Chris Rabb (Afro-Netizen.com), Andrew Rasiej (Techpresident.com), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit.com), Kevin Rose (Digg founder), Micah Sifry (Personal Democracy Forum Cofounder), Ben Smith (Politico.com), Joe Trippi, Dean 2004 Campaign Manager, Michael Turk (Bush 2004 E-Campaign Director), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder), Bill Wasik (Creator of Flash Mobs), David Weinberger (Dean 2004 Internet Advise).

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) needs public support and is exploring ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to do so. "There are more than 500 groups on Facebook that are associated with NASA, but not officially...."

• Next NASA mission: Twitter and Facebook, by Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, Jun 27, 2007.

"Now NASA is trying to reach out to the technology industry to help market itself to a generation of kids growing up online and who seem less inclined to study science or math."

A big part of the agency's sales pitch to third-party partners is access to enormous sets of data from various sources, including the Hubble Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope, which resides a million miles from Earth. Google, for example, has teamed with NASA, which provides it data from Mars for the Google Earth mapping tool.

Mike Linksvayer, chief technology officer of the nonprofit Creative Commons, suggested that scientists and other planetary societies use its alternative license for copyrights to disseminate photos and other works so that more of the public has access to it. People can access NASA photos and videos that are posted to the Web because all government works are in the public domain.

"I encourage NASA to open up its data via APIs so that it can be used in mashups," Linksvayer said.

Examples

• AMES Research Center blog
• NASA Deputy Administrator's Blog (at spaceref.com)
• CosmosCode (CosmosCode will be like a SourceForge for space software... allowing third parties to contribute open-source code to NASA projects...)

The Open House Project (OHP) has started a new thread called CRS Tuesdays. It's not quite Mardi Gras, but throw in a little gumbo, and this thread is just as fun :-)

This week, OHP has posted PDFs of the following:

• Iraq: Post-Saddam Governance and Security (updated June 20, 2007)
• Post-War Iraq: Foreign Contributions to Training, Peacekeeping, and Reconstruction
• Foreign Science and Engineering Presence in U.S. Institutions and the Labor Force
• Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE): A Comparison of Selected Legislation in the 110th Congress
• And in honor of the 10 year anniversary of Internet free speech, there's Internet Search Engines: Copyright’s “Fair Use” in Reproduction and Public Display Rights

And as an aside, the OHP is really doing good work. Their site is worth a daily, or at least weekly, visit. We've added them to the FGI aggregator In Other News so make sure you visit. Just in the last week, they've posted about CRS reports, Politics is Architecture, George Miller taps Web2.0, and House Leg Branch Appropriations Review. Good stuff indeed!

During this past spring, I had the pleasure to teach a Government Information Sources course at San Jose State University.  The course was taught solely online via BlackBoard, which is a great tool for many basic class maintenance tasks, such as grading and posting assignments, however because it is proprietary, BlackBoard creates a silo of course data that doesn't readily support open and participatory modes of communication that are associated with Web2.0.  Subsequently, I decided to use BlackBoard for the basic functions (grading & assignments) and use Web 2.0 tools to support course interaction, communication, and content creation.  What follows is a review of the tools I used in the course and how the class used them. I've also included the links to the resources.

Social Bookmarking

Connotea is an excellent tagging tool because it does some things other social bookmarking tools don't. First, it supports SFX & openurls, which means it integrates with your library's link resolver.  It also has a group feature that allows collecting, browsing and viewing multiple users' library of tagged bookmarks at once.  Lastly, each user or group can create a wiki (called a 'community page') that is attached to the user or group's  bookmarks.   Other major social bookmarking tools don't have these features and, collectively, they are definitely a big sell for someone teaching a course.

In class, I used the Connotea wiki extensively as the class syllabus and weekly course notes.  I also tagged course materials with a unique week tag ( e.g. libr221-wk1) so students could filter on each week's materials easily. Additionally, as part of a class assignment, each student was required to bookmark and annotate a number of government information resources based on certain criteria.  Since Connotea provides a RSS feed for each account, a feed for each student could be set up in  my Google Reader account, so I could easily monitor (and grade) their tagging.

• Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/
• Course Group on Connotea (libr221): http://www.connotea.org/group/libr221
• Course wiki on Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/wiki/Group:libr221

Mapping

MapBuilder is a cool mapping too that uses both Google & Yahoo maps APIs. Users can create and share a map, add locations to the map, and annotate those locations with textual descriptions or images.  As part of the first assignment, students were asked to map their location along with their local FDLP libraries.  Google maps now offers a similar product called 'My maps', which offers many of the same features. 

• MapBuilder: http://www.mapbuilder.net/ 
• Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/ (Google MyMaps now offers most of the functionality of MapBuilder minus the collaborative piece.)

Video

I created a course introduction with a very inexpensive webcam and added it to my YouTube account. Additionally, I used Camtasia to create screen casts of government information resources or lectures and shared these with the class by uploading them to my web site.  I found this to be a very easy and effective means of one-way communication with the class.

For augmenting existing course material or for finding interesting 'retro' education resources, the Prelinger Archive, a public domain collection of over 60,000 ephemera videos (government & corporate PSA from the 50s, etc.), is a great teaching resource. I tried to select material that corresponded with the class topic, but sometimes chose material for just levity value. For a sampling of the
titles I used in the course, check out  The Powers of Congress, Japanese Relocation, and  Meet Your Federal Government.  When time permitted, I would actually download the videos from the Internet Archive and then upload them back into YouTube. The benefit of getting it in YouTube was to take advantage of their superior video compression and the provided code that nicely embeds the videos in a course web page.

• My YouTube account: http://www.youtube.com/user/jt14den
• Prelinger Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Google Apps

Google Groups, a mail list service, provides a nice web interface and archive to the basic listserv. I created a google group for the class primarily because the email and discussion features in BlackBoard have big usability issues. A nice added feature in Google Groups is that it allows you to add web pages to the group, which is great for adding course information or a syllabus.

Google Documents and Spreadsheets is a browser based productivity suite that also allows for document sharing and collaboration.  In the course, we used this site primarily for the final class paper.  I let students submit their papers in whatever format they wanted (all students chose Word). I then uploaded, graded and shared my comments with them in Google Docs.  This allowed me to provide in-line comments and feed back on their papers in a convenient way. 

• Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/
• Google Documents & Spreadsheets: http://docs.google.com
  

Feed Aggregator

I used Planet Venus  to aggregate multiple blogs or feeds into one interface. In our class instance of Planet Venus -- called GovInfo Planet -- we pulled in other govinfo blogs (FGI, DocuTicker, etc.) and related news along with our own course blog entries and Connotea lagging.  This is a nice approach if you want to aggregate a number of information sources for a course. It also supports filters.

• Planet Venus: http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ (requires server
  installation)
• GovInfo Planet: http://www.romanuslonginus.com/venus/govinfo/

IM

Meebo is a popular free web-based multi-protocol chat service. It also provides nice chat widgets that can be embedded into a web page.  for the course, I embedded a meebome chat widget into the SJSU faculty page and on the course syllabus page in BlackBoard.  This allows access for those students who don't have an IM account on one of the services.

• Meebo: http://wwwl.meebo.com/
• Info on meebome chat widget: http://www.meebome.com/learnmore.html

Easy Forms and Polls

Wufoo makes it very easy to produce and distribute webforms. I used it to poll the class a several times during the semester. It is very convenient since you can embed the form in a web page (or blog entry) and have the results pop into Wufoo.

• Wufoo: http://wufoo.com/

Social Software

Fantasy Congress takes the very popular Fantasy Football game and applies it to politics.  Users can select teams of members of congress and join a 'league'.  The application also allows users to trade members.  In my course, I required students to select a team and join the course league. The great aspect of this application is that it pulls in information on current legislation.  Users can rate bills and explore educational information about how Congress works.  However, this application didn't really take off with the class (or the teacher).  I think it is because there is a big difference between trying to assess and select the 'best athlete" from selecting politicians.  For one, I bet most people know their representatives and a few big names, but beyond that most members of congress are unknown.  Secondly, there is a bit of a cringe factor applying the sports analogy to politics.  Maybe it comes
too close to the truth about perceived cynical aspects of politics. 

• Fantasy Congress: http://www.fantasycongress.com/
  

-- Tim Dennis

The National Security Archives at George Washington University is making the CIA "family jewels" documents available as PDFs. "The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.
The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into five smaller files for easier download."

• The CIA's Family Jewels. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, Posted - June 21, 2007, Updated - June 26, 2007, 1 p.m.

The documents are also available at the CIA website, but I have not been able to find them available except in a one-page-at-a-time image viewer application. There is a link on the CIA FOIA homepage, or you can find the same link by searching "family jewels" or the document number "0001451843."

For an example of press coverage of the documents, see CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds "Assassination Plots, Domestic Spying Cited", By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus Washington Post, June 27, 2007; Page A01.

Taking on the challenges of academic publishing in the age of Web 3.0, Michael Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for the National Academies, describes what he calls "Authority 3.0".

• The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, [subscription required] by Michael Jensen, The Chronicle of Higher Education "The Chronicle Review" Volume 53, Issue 41, Page B6 (June 15, 2007). Also available for a few days without subscripion

What he describes is very relevant to government information. He says that the old models we've used in the past to regulate, authenticate, and authorize information don't work in a world of digital information abundance. Publishers (and I would include government agencies in this assessment) need to work with "repositories" and allow the public "to interact with material."

I also don't know whether many, or most, scholarly publishers will be able to adapt to the challenge. But I think that those who completely lock their material behind subscription walls risk marginalizing themselves over the long term. They simply won't be counted in the new authority measures. They need to cooperate with some of the new search sites and online repositories, share their data with outside computing systems. They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

As GPO pushes forward with it's Digital Future System and as the well connected (Internet-wise) Congress moves away from print and towards an exclusively online government information world, they might want to consider this new report published by the Communications Workers of America:

Speed Matters: A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States
http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/sm_report.pdf

According to this report:

The median download speed for the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 61 mbps, or 30 times faster than the U.S. The U.S. also trails South Korea at 45 mbps, Finland at 21 mbps, Sweden at 18 mbps, and Canada at 7.6 mbps. The median upload speed from the Speedmatters.org test was just 371 kilobits per second (kbps), far too slow for patient monitoring or too transmit large files such as medical records.

Most people who went to Speedmatters.org to take the speed test used either a DSL connection or cable modem. Very few people with dial-up took the test because it took too long. According to surveys, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of Americans still connect to the Internet with a dial-up connection. So the median speeds in this report are actually higher than if dial-up Internet users had chosen to participate in the survey. In other words, even these dismal statistics paint a rosier picture than the reality.

The report was compiled by people visiting a speed test site and providing their zip codes, so it isn't truly a random sample. Still makes for interesting reading for broadband advocates.

And it should make interesting reading for policymakers who desire to eliminate print. And for people interested in constructing a geographically distributed system of electronic federal publications which could be more easily accessed over urban networks than all users dragging every publication from Washington.

As episode 3 of the FGI podcast starts to go into production, we've opened a new poll asking your opinion about the two podcasts we've completed so far. The first episode was very scripted and the second episode more free form. Did you like either, both, neither? Let us know.

And if you're in a commenting mood, please leave a comment here or on the poll page letting us know how we can improve the podcast.

If you haven't heard our podcast yet, please go to our podcast page and check them out.

"A new portal, WorldWideScience.org, opened today to people interested in international scientific sources, many of which had been unavailable through commercial search engines such as Google.com.

"The portal was developed by the Energy Department and the British Library, along with science and technology organizations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. It employs federated search technology..."

DOE builds portal to global science data, By Trudy Walsh, GCN, 6/22/07.

Image hosting by Flickr

Here is my long-delayed field report on the Second Life Branch of the Nebraska Library Commission.

In short, I'm impressed. The thing I'm most impressed by is that the Nebraska Library Commission offers clear reasons about why they are in Second Life and what they hope to accomplish. They state this on a notecard available in the lobby:

Why we are in Second Life:

1. To network and develop professional relationships with other librarians from around the country and around the world.

2. To explore whether and how libraries might use 3-D virtual worlds to reach out to new users.

3. To gain first-hand knowledge of library activities in Second Life that we can bring back and share with interested Nebraska librarians.

Might not be compelling reasons to all, but I'm glad to see that they can explain why they're devoting resources to this in a nice soundbite.

All areas of the library appear to be represented, including Government Documents. While there is no formal display of documents that I could find, there was a notecard about Nebraska related questions that included a link to the Nebraska Documents Depository program. In addition there there several Nebraska related maps around the first floor.

The second floor is devoted to a display of photos from the Nebraska Memories database developed by multiple institutions in Nebraska. Here is a picture I took of part of the display:

Notecards describing the photos are available, as is a link directly to the photo's Nebraska Memories page where people can see more details and search for related items. It has a nice museum feel to it and as I've mentioned in previous posting on Second Life, I think musueum type displays are going to be natural for virtual worlds like Second Life.

One last nice touch by the NLC staff is a card in the lobby titled "What to do in Second Life" which features staff picks about places to go and things to do in the virtual environment. It has a mix of education and entertainment. I plan to visit several of the places listed on the card, including returning to Washtown, a Firefly inspired enviornment complete with a replica of Serenity. I went there today, but Second Life crashed on me before I could look around much. More proof that the 3D world is coming, but isn't quite here yet in the sense that the web is.

UNT Government Documents Librarian Starr Hoffman is at ALA and posting selected session notes on her wiki. She posted notes on a digital natives session that also explored how college students and other students are reacting to libraries in social media spaces such as MySpace and Facebook.

The answer? It depends. Some like, some don't. But check out the notes and see what people are doing. Then think about where you could be shining the light of full public access to government information.

Starr's notes on the GODORT Update has some interesting examples showing how government information access is mostly a political issue rather a technological one. Read her notes and then decide whether we are better served by a single Future Digital System housed in an agency susceptible to political/fiscal pressure or by having FDSys be one piece of a geographically distributed, locally built, globally accessed depository library system of the future.

We've created an Open WorldCat List for the available items on our Best. Titles. Ever. page at http://freegovinfo.info/best.

I say "available items" because not all government documents have been cataloged into OCLC WorldCat, the world's largest database of bibliographic records.

And because the WorldCat records have subject headings, you can jump from odd sounding titles to more sober sounding publications in many subjects. Something you won't be able to do in the future if the Government Printing Office ignores copy cataloging goes it alone with brief records.

From SFGate.com:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Thursday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. more...

Free Range Librarian Karen G. Schneider sets at a kitchen table with her cat and a basket of eggs and gives a great, simple explanation of how LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) works, why your library needs to be a part of it and why it won't be hard. All in six minutes. Watch and learn.

If you pick this as a lunchtime listen, you'll still have 54 minutes of your lunch hour to take care of other errands or read why privacy, access and preservation of government information need a geographically distributed depository library system of the future to be a reality.

Panelist notes politics of putting agency information online, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, June 19, 2007 PM edition. (reprinted in GovExec and available without subscription)

Patrice McDermott, executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, chose to participate in a Tuesday workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Web Science Research Initiative because she wants to convince techies that the government's underutilization of the Internet has a lot to do with politics.

...She said that at the workshop, attendees told her that government agencies just need to make their databases available on the Internet, and others in the online community will reformat the contents so the information is compatible with new technologies. "Others will create the [topical] tags" that allow the content to be integrated into advanced Web technologies, they said.

McDermott's reply: The policy is already there to do that. "It's been there for years. It's just not being enforced. It takes leadership from the White House."

Ever notice how bad news and ideas tend to get released on Fridays? Such is the case with GPO's Creation of Brief Bibliographic Records Overview, released in a Friday morning FDLP-L listserv announcement.

I've read through the five page briefing document twice and looked at the 12 bib records that GPO stated were typical of the 50 chosen for the pilot project. I believe that it is a flawed proposal that ignores the actual and potential contributions of the 1200+ depository library network. Despite its obvious good intentions of getting more information out the community, I don't think the current proposal would do this.

Here are some first thoughts on the paper and I hope that you will share others:

1) GPO seems to be ignoring existing cataloging to create their brief records. They took a sample of 50 records and cataloged them without looking outside GPO or possible copy cataloging in OCLC.

Of the 12 records the e-mail asks us to look at, I judge nine, or 75% of the records to already have adequate cataloging in WorldCat. Please see my Open WorldCat list at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/dcornwall/lists/5666 for a demonstration of this fact. In a number of cases, GPO seems to have created separate records for paper and online formats. If they want to streamline their cataloging process, it seems to me that one record with a note of tangible and online availability would be a better start.

2) GPO must change its mind about not OCLC batch-loading materials not being distributed to depositories. There are many items which while not deposited to libraries are still of interest. Loading them into WorldCat will expose them to the open Web and allow for better visibility for government information.

3) Brief records without some kind of subject descriptors will be almost unfindable in the future unless one is lucky enough to remember the agency name or if the title accurately reflects the
subject one is interested in. Also, it makes it next to impossible to build good literature reviews of government research and/or activities. Full text searching has been shown to be inadequate in a number of ways. We need subject descriptors.

4) While GPO is stating that records for materials destined for deposit into the FDLP will be upgraded "later", there is nothing in the GPO's funding history to indicate that money for better cataloging will be available in the future. Or in the history of many libraries that created "temp bib records" to "find things now."

5) Related to ignoring copy cataloging is a missed opportunity by GPO - share the cataloging load with the depository community, at least in part. Not all depositories have a cataloger, but many
do. Many institutions, like universities and State Libraries, have an intense hunger for docs in their subject specialties or geographic areas. Let libraries sign up for an agency or State and start feeding them title pages or electronic versions if they're available. Or just tag gov web docs on del.icio.us or other social tagging services and let whatever libraries or people assign subject descriptors to them who feel led to. Together we could rid GPO of its backlog while providing enough metadata to ensure future findability.

Read the proposal. Look at the sample records, decide whether I'm overreacting. Or help construct a response to what seems like a bad idea that once again passes up an opportunity for real partnership in favor of a flawed go-it-alone "solution."

And if GPO staff think that I've mischaracterized the project, I'd encourage them to post an official response here where people can see what we both say side by side and make up their own minds. And in the likely event I haven't mischaracterized the project, I hope that GPO will come to the community and embrace the wealth of cataloging/metadata that already exists and plan with us how to take care of the materials not already found in WorldCat.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) "now has an online map that graphically displays individual contributions to 2008 Presidential candidates, organized by zip code. Users may also look at and compare contributions to specific candidates, all candidates, or all candidates from a political party. Republican presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks during a town hall meeting, Friday, June 8, 2007, in Pella, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) The new system also allows users to export campaign finance data to an Excel spreadsheet."

• FEC Helps Bloggers Track Campaign Cash, by Amanda Carpenter, Townhall.com, June 12, 2007.

The online map was modeled after graphics the New York Times' website used to present contribution data after the first round of 2008 presidential finance reports were filed in April. The New York Times version allowed users to expand and contract bubbles, according to the size of campaign donations, over geographic areas. To build a similar map, Palmer said it would have cost the FEC $800,000. Instead, Palmer said "We'd thought we'd save the taxpayers some money" and went without the expandable bubbles. He said their map costs around $12,000 to build.

Palmer also told reporters that the FEC hopes to have a similar mapping system for House and Senate candidates this fall. If all goes well, they’ll launch “seventeen categories you can drill down to a very detailed level” to see who is funding all federal candidates, Palmer said.

Ancestry.com is making available "more than 90 million U.S. war records from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 through the Vietnam War's end in 1975. The collection includes the names and gravestone details of 3.5 million deceased U.S. soldiers, including 2,000 who died in Iraq." Users can pay $155.40 a year for unlimited access.

• Dot-com to unveil 4 centuries of military records, by Donna Borak, Associated Press, Sunday, May 27, 2007.

The records came from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and include "37 million images, draft registration cards from both world wars, military yearbooks, prisoner-of-war records from four wars, unit rosters from the Marine Corps from 1893 through 1958, and Civil War pension records, among others." Ancestry.com spent $3 million to digitize the military records.

Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

"In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would be up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything."

NYT: "The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency's director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday."

• C.I.A. to Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds by Scott Shane, New York Times, June 22, 2007.

The National Security Archive separately obtained and posted a "six-page summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975."

• The CIA's Family Jewels, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, June 21, 2007.
  Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s "Skeletons" File, Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975, With White House Memcons on Damage Control

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.

I've posted about this earlier at my home blog, but I thought it was worth a revisit and fuller entry because it did not get the attention it deserved. The Sunlight Foundation, the group that has fostered Congresspedia , the Open House Project, & OpenCongress.org, held a government "mashup" competition in April. In May, the winner, Uninfluence , was announced and won $2000. What follows is a list of the winner and the top 5 finalists. The 'project descriptions' are copied from the Sunlight project page. Additional entries can also be found there.

Winner

Uninfluence
Developed by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec.
Project Description: Uninfluence, is an interactive information visualization of state level political contribution data.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/unfluence/unfluence.html
Mashup: http://unfluence.primate.net/index.html

The Finalists

CityCon (First Runner Up)
Project Description: CityCon allows you to find detailed information about any member of the current 110th U.S. Congress.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/citycon/CityCon%20FInal.html
Mashup: http://www.tetonpost.com/citycon

OpenHearings Live (Second Runner Up)
Project Description: A mini-site of schedules for current and future Senate committee hearings. Includes links to live audio and video of hearings in progress, anRSS feed of live hearings, iCalendar schedules for all committees and hearings, and the ability to import the "Live Hearing" view into your personalized Google homepage.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/openhearingslive/OpenHearings.or...
Mashup: http://openhearings.org/live

EchoDitto's Congressional Similarity Visualizer
Project Description: Java applet that lets users explore which legislators vote most similarly to one another. (Detailed explanation on the site provides background on the statistical analysis the visualization represents.)
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/Echoditto3/Echoditto3.html
Mashup: http://labs.echoditto.com/projects/sunlight/

Second Life Congressional Info
Project Description: A mashup of the Sunlight APIs with Second Life, creating an interactive info center (kiosk) at the virtual Capitol Hill - a pro-bono educational area - in Second Life. Visitors can (and do!) access the information in a venue where they can discuss the information in the context of politics, policy and place.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/secondlife4/Second%20Life4.html
Writeup: http://clearnightsky.com/node/288

State-Machine
Project Description: Data Visualization showing the relationship between members of Congress and political access committees. (Watchingscreencast and reading description highly recommended.)
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/statemachine/State%20Machine%20-...
Mashup: http://state-machine.org/

-- Tim Dennis

Update 6/24/2007 - The incredible efficient folks at usa.gov have added the Future Digital System blog to their blog directory, which I hope will expose GPO's efforts to more citizens and allow for a broader range of input than just contractors and docs librarians.

Now for the original post:
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The federal portal USA.gov has started a new page of government agency blogs at http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml. The list currently stands at ten active blogs, although I know they are missing at least one because they don't have GPO's FDSys Blog at http://fdsys.blogspot.com. I have reported this oversight to USA.gov and hopefully one of our GPO readers will contact USA.gov directly.

The blogs are from a range of agencies and I was a little surprised to find that a majority allow for "blog-standard" commenting. A seventh blog, Pushing Back from the Office of National Drug Control Policy surprised me by at least accepting comments on blog entries, but these seem to be mailed to ONDCP staff and never seen by the public.

Rather than rant against the agencies that run blogs without public feedback, let's celebrate the agencies that understand that Web 2.0 is about interaction:

• Eye Level - Smithsonian American Art Museum
• GLOBE Program – Blog for the chief scientist of Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program.
• Health Marketing Musings from Jay M. Bernhardt, PhD, MPH - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Library of Congress Blog
• Pandemic Flu Leadership Conference - Time limited blog but very active with dozens of comments to every entry.
• Peace Corps Blog - Very unstandard looking page that doesn't really seem to have been active for awhile, but USA.gov lists it as active and it does allow comments.

So let's applaud the agencies who understand and hope the rest will follow. While FGI might highlight a government blog or two in postings, we do not intend to start our directory. If you know of blogs not on the USA.gov list, please tell them.