Studs Terkel, one of the greatest American characters of the last 100 years, passed away today. The Chicago Tribune obituary is a moving tribute. John Stewart called Studs the "premier chronicler of American life." He gave voice to working people and he will be missed. I could spend hours listening to his stories and even longer reading his books. Please check them out! We'll miss you Studs!!

This week at University of Illinois has been very profitable. I'm attending a talk by Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada. His talk is entitled "Digital History: Revolution or Revelation?" Let's see what he has to say! Here's the talk announcement.

The U.S. Department of State has a channel on YouTube (youtube.com/statevideo and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has announced a new service they are calling "Briefing 2.0" in which you can post a video to YouTube asking the State Department a question. McCormack says:

The idea is that you would be able to ask questions of me directly by posting video on YouTube.... This should be a lot of fun. I know it's going to be fun for me. I get to hear from the press corps every single day and give them answers. This is an opportunity for me to hear directly from you and for you to hear directly from me with answers to your questions, whatever happens to be on your mind. So give it a try.

The Washington Post covers the story and the first few questions here: What's the Opposite of 'Mainstream'?, By Al Kamen, Washington Post, October 31, 2008; A17.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Kevin Taglang!

This is being webcast right now (Oct 30, 2008, 12:30 PM EST)

http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/tech_smackdown

Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Reed Hundt Debate the Candidates' Tech Agendas
"Join us as two top presidential campaign advisers debate these specific issues and describe the candidates' respective visions for maximizing technological innovation and access."

Due to a last-minute scheduling conflict, Douglas Holtz-Eakin is unable to participate in today's event, and the McCain campaign will not be sending an alternate spokesperson. The event will proceed as scheduled with Reed Hundt representing the Obama campaign.

Hi all. I'm visiting the University of IL at Urbana Champaign. Lucky for me Naomi Klein is speaking tonight. I'll do my best to keep up with her. If you've not heard Naomi speak, I highly recommend it. Here's her recent interview with Dr Helen Caldicott.

There is a great blog post over at the Center for Democracy & Technology's Policy Beta Blog:

"Innovation, the Open Internet, and the Next President".

It gives an overview of what our new President should do (or not do!) in regards to encouraging innovation and openness of the internet. Some points include:

One of the new president’s first tasks will be to select top officials for executive branch positions. The FCC, the FTC, DoJ, NTIA, and the new Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (created by recently passed legislation) all will have a hand in policies with potentially significant impact on the Internet...

The president also should avoid new copyright policies that fail to protect emerging forms of free expression in the digital realm...

If the next president wants to encourage innovation, preserving the open character of the broadband Internet should be a top priority, right up there with the commonly cited goal of continuing to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure.

I would also add that our new President needs to support digital preservation technologies and standards, as well as digital authentication of documents online.

Here is another post on a similar vein: "Next President Has 'Open' Opportunity".

The Center for Democracy & Technology also has a page entitled "The Internet in Transition" with a blueprint for keeping the internet open, innovative, and free.

In my first post, I wrote about making information useful for ordinary people. It's been a pleasure and an honor to guest blog here for the past month, and as the month of October is nearly gone, I figure it seems fitting to come back to this subject as my reign as "Blogger of the Month" comes to an end.

Large numbers in particular are difficult to comprehend and the world of government information is full of them: earmarks range from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars, Barack Obama's fundraising totals have eclipsed six-hundred million dollars, and the $700 billion dollar bailout package had pundits scrambling to describe things that cost $700 billion. The difficulty of explaining just how big some of these numbers are was seen to an absurd end when CNN presented a calculation as to how many McDonald's apple pies could be purchased for each US citizen with such a sum.

One of the most useful ways of putting information in context that I've seen involving government information or anything else are the sparklines at watchdog.net:

These graphics show the statistics of each lawmaker in context, as well as the general shape of the distribution of Congress as a whole. Knowing that a congressperson requested $147 million in earmarks may sound like a lot, but seeing that it puts them outside of the top 100 may provide some useful and much needed context to these numbers. The shape of the line also shows if there is a smooth trend or a sharp jump with a small handful of lawmakers raising or spending drastically more than others.

Hopefully more and more presentations of government information will follow the lead of the terrific watchdog.net and attempt to surround information with relative context so that government information isn't simply available, but understandable.

www.EconomicRecovery.gov is a resource for the American people to find help to keep their homes, find jobs and protect their savings. It is a multi-agency site supported by the White House, Treasury, Commerce, USDA, Labor, HUD, SBA, and the FDIC. The url redirects to http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/EconomicNews/index.htm?er=true and I found that the site seemed busy and loaded slowly...

We are only one week away from Election Day, and with record turnout expected, there are no doubt still a number of people that have no idea where their polling place is or exactly what will be on their ballot.

Campaigns and PACs pay large sums of money to vendors that sell information on district boundaries, and even the US House of Representatives uses a commercial vendor to provide the data that powers their "Who is my Representative?" service. There is no reason why this information should be this difficult to obtain.

Google recently announced a project to help voters find their polling locations that makes use of data that a group called the Voting Information Project has asked all states to provide.

The Voting Information Project encourages Boards of Elections to standardize and share their voting information including what is on the ballot, where the polling locations are, and the boundaries for all the various jurisdictions. So far only a handful of states (Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Ohio) as well as Los Angeles County have published the requested information.

Voting information is some of the most important information to help the average citizen participate in our democracy, and the Voting Information Project is doing important work to ensure that this information is as open and widespread as possible. The states already participating should be applauded and the remaining states should be sure that by the time the next election season rolls around, they too are participating fully in the Voting Information Project.

For more information on the efforts of the Voting Information Project: visit their website.

Harvest time, By William Jackson, GCN, 10/27/08.

A nice article about the end-of-administration web harvest.

See also: Library Partnership Saves Government Sites.

ProPublica is keeping a running list of banks that are getting money from the Treasury Department bailout:

• Bailout Banks Grows to 26, by Paul Kiel, ProPublica - October 27, 2008

Which banks are getting the Treasury Department’s billions? As we noted earlier today, a slew of regional banks have signed up for the government’s capital injection program, but the government is not saying which banks are getting taxpayer money.

Based on news reports and press releases, we’ve cobbled together a partial list, totaling 26 banks at an overall investment of approximately $160 billion.

Your opinions are needed! Head on over to USA.gov's Gov Gab Blog and read their latest post on Government and Social Media. They want you to take this survey and let them know what you like in regards to social media (web 2.0) and the government. USA.gov is working on a "strategy to use social media tools to better engage in conversation with the public and to deliver information and services the way you want to get it". So give them feedback and spread the word!

"In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in response to the hanging-chad debacle of Florida's 2000 presidential elections. The act's main thrust was to provide money to states to replace outdated punch-card- and lever-based voting systems with optical-scan or touchscreen models. The act largely accomplished that goal, filling the coffers of closed source voting system manufacturers. In doing so, the act may have inadvertently placed the country in a worse situation...."

"Current U.S. policy ensures that e-voting remains in the hands of very few proprietary vendors.... But the key to securing e-voting resides in making its systems open source."

• Open source: How e-voting should be done, by Paul Venezia, IDG News Service, InfoWorld, October 27, 2008.

Now that a new administration will be coming into office soon, it is more important than ever to encourage our Government to make Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports publicly accessible online. Here at FGI, the topic of CRS Reports has been written about often, but I was inspired to create this blog post and take action after seeing Starr Hoffman’s DLC conference presentation last week (click on "Search Document" and enter "Starr Hoffman". Her PowerPoint, "Encouraging An Informed Citizenry" will come up as a PDF to download).

Starr is responsible for maintaining University of North Texas's Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports Archive. In her presentation, she gives tips for writing to Congressmen and lists some past legislative efforts (Bills that never passed both houses of Congress) to make CRS Reports publicly accessible. I have gathered some other Bills, as well as all the contact information for the sponsoring Congressmen and have included them in my Delicious.com "CRS" tag as well as in this list:

1998 H.R. 3131, S. 1578
1999 H.R. 654, S. 393
2000 H.R. 4582
2001 S. Res. 21
2003 H.R. 3630, S. Res. 54
2007 H.R. 2545, S. Res. 401

Senator John McCain
Introduced S. 1578, S. 393, S.Res. 21, S. Res. 54, & co-sponsored S. Res. 401
Senator Mike Enzi
Co-sponsored S. 393
Senator Leahy
Co-sponsored S. 393, S. Res. 21, S. Res. 54, and S. Res. 401.
Senator Tom Coburn
H.R. 4582 co-sponsor when he was in the House.
Senator Jim DeMint
Introduced H.R. 4582 when he was in the House.
Senator Joe Lieberman
Introduced S. Res. 401 and co-sponsored S. Res. 21 and S. Res. 54
Senator Tom Harkin
Co-sponsored S. Res. 54 and S. Res. 401
Senator Susan M. Collins
Co-sponsored S. Res. 401
Senator John Cornyn
Co-sponsored S. Res. 401

Congressman David Price
Co-sponsor for H.R. 3131, H.R. 654, H.R. 3630, and H.R. 2545
Congressman Christopher Shays
Introduced H.R. 3131, H.R. 654, H.R. 3630, and H.R. 2545
Congressman John Campbell
Co-sponsored H.R. 654
Congressman Tom Tancredo
Co-sponsored H.R. 4582
Congressman Jay Inslee
Co-sponsored H.R. 3630 and H.R. 2545

And you can find and contact your local Senator and your Representatives too.

James A. Jacobs did a Google search this past June for "Received through the CRS Web" OR "CRS Report for Congress" combined with site:house.gov and then again for site:senate.gov and got around 600 hits with each. For example, here are some domains he found that you can search within for CRS Reports or to search for those in Congress who may support public access to CRS Reports: bartlett.house.gov, holt.house.gov, radanovich.house.gov, weldon.house.gov, bennelson.senate.gov, carper.senate.gov, lugar.senate.gov, murray.senate.gov, etc.

For more information on CRS Report legislation efforts, visit this site which contains a "Campaign for Online Access" section.

Spread the word about this post and good luck in writing to your Congressmen! If you have other ideas, please share them in the comments.

OMB sponsors online discussion of privacy issues, By Nancy Ferris, FCW, October 23, 2008.

The Office of Management and Budget has asked the National Academy of Public Administration to hold a public discussion this month of health care privacy issues through an interactive Web site.

The “National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy” will take place the week of Oct. 27 at www.thenationaldialogue.org.

The site is also using Twitter (use tag #nationaldialogue) and Youtube (see: http://www.youtube.com/user/natldialogue).

"A panel of academy fellows will review the postings and produce a report in December with recommendations for the new administration."

Rebecca Blakeley is head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader.

Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Feel free to visit her department's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou.

In case I haven't made it clear by now, the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) Handout Exchange Wiki has guides for all levels of government information. For instance this week's guide:

Indiana Government and Politics (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 2008)

is dedicated to the US State of Indiana, which has emerged as a battleground state in the 2008 Presidential Election. So what has Bert Chapman found out about Indiana resources? Here is a sampling of the materials he has listed:

• Here Is Your Indiana Government HSSE REF 353.9772 In2c
• Election Report: State of Indiana HSSE REF 324.772 In22a
• West's Indiana Law Encylopedia HSSE REF 347.03 W52
• Indiana Campaign Finance Database
• AJR Newslink Indiana Newspapers

This is actually one of the shorter guides I've highlighted so far, but there is more, so go check out the rest of the guide. Then check to see what else is available, either by browsing the guide or using the guide's custom search engine. And if you're a docs librarian, please post your handout!

Here's a handy little google tool to help you find out where to vote. Go to the 2008 US Voter Info google map, put in your address and voila! you have your voting station and can easily get driving/walking directions. the sidebar also includes information on voter registration, contact information for local voting officials and a link to the Google 2008 election site to track what's happening on election day. This map tool was developed by state and local election officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Los Angeles County and the Voting Information Project in conjunction with the League of Women Voters.

[shout out to the UC Berkeley Library govblog from whom I got the tip!]

There is a lot of talk about making data accessible via APIs, but there is also a lot of confusion about what this means, how to do it, and why it is beneficial when the average citizen cannot make heads or tails of an API.

API stands for "Application Programming Interface" but typically what we are discussing when we talk about APIs around data is a way to access data in a machine readable format. A machine readable format is something that is more or less understandable by a computer program, so that it may be used to present data in new and interesting ways.

The house.gov website has a listing of all representatives by state but a computer program has no way of knowing how to understand this listing. A more useful listing might look like an excel (or CSV) file that listed each congressperson's name in the first column, state in the second, and so on.

This is the fundamental advantage of an API, it makes data available in a way that a computer program can understand so that more complicated things can be done by such a program. (eg. draw a map with states colored according to their representatives' party affiliations)

A side effect of this computer readable format is that it is possible to ask more useful and specific questions of the data. When you go to the above house.gov site it is possible to get a listing of all Representatives, but it is impossible to say "show me all representatives that are Democrats from North Carolina" or "show me all representatives named John." With an API this kind of query is typically very simple, as an example in the Sunlight Labs API this could be done by going to a URL like http://services.sunlightfoundation.com/api/legislators.get?state=NC&part....

It is the availability of these APIs that have allowed all sorts of interesting sites that combine data from multiple sources known as "mashups." One of the earliest and most popular examples was a site called HousingMaps that combines Craigslist housing data with Google maps.

A handful of APIs exist to help make government data more accessible, through which it is now possible to make mashups using government data.

A rich sampling of them includes:

• Sunlight Labs API
• Capitol Words API
• FollowTheMoney API
• GovTrack.us API
• MapLight.org API
• NYTimes Campaign Finance API
• OpenSecrets API
• Project Vote Smart API
• Watchdog.net API

All of these can be used to pull the information available from these sites and do new and interesting things with it and even combine it with data from other sites to provide a more in-depth view than any single site or dataset can hope to offer.

Why are Docs From the Bailout Being Redacted?, by Ben Protess , ProPublica - October 22, 2008.

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Secrecy News!

This paper, while examining issues around open access to digital information from museums and cultural heritage institutions, touches on issues that are relevant to government information:

• Crofts, Nicholas. Digital assets and digital burdens: obstacles to the dream of universal access. (PDF. 14pp. [you may need to change the file name to open it in your PDF reader]). In The Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage. Athens, Greece, September 2008, Proceedings of The annual conference of the International Documentation Committee of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC). (program)

Crofts, of the Museés d'art et d'histoire, Switzerland, argues that one of the biggest obstacles to universal access is the commercial interests and desire by museums to "brand" their "assets."

To put it bluntly, universal access may be in conflict, or at least may be perceived to be in conflict, with an institution's commercial interests....

In the current economic climate there is strong pressure on museums of all sorts, both public and private, to maximise their performance - to turn a profit or, at least, to cut costs - and to demonstrate their relevance in terms of number of visitors. A museum's collections are its major "asset". Access to the collection and derived products can be commercialised directly or, in a not-for-profit organisation, leveraged so as to shine by whatever performance criteria are in place. In this context, allowing free unrestricted access to these assets may be seen simply as undermining the institution's potential or, more cannily, as a form of advertising....

Incorporated into a common search engine, digital assets tend to become fungible and anonymous, just part of an immense result set, or worse still, they may become identified with the search engine itself....

Copyright notices and other restrictions on institutional websites generally prevent or at least discourage reuse.

This reminds me of GPO and other government agencies that are forced through legislation, skimpy budgets, and OMB regulations to attempt to commercialize their "assets" -- what we might call "charging the public for information it has already paid for."

Different agencies attack these problems differently. I was particularly reminded of the PACER courts information project, when I read this in Crofts' paper:

...for many institutions, the accounting costs associated with charging for use of images far exceeds any revenue....

While making cultural material freely available is part of their mission, and therefore a goal that they are obliged to support, it may still come into conflict with other factors, notably commercial interests

Stephen Schultze examined the profits being made by the PACER project in his recent seminar at the Berkman Center (see Lunchtime Listen: Open Access to Government Documents).

FDLP librarians have seen this approach tried over and over again. When GPO first launched GPO Access it charged for access while at the same time providing free access inside FDLP libraries. Libraries responded by creating gateways that provided free access to GPO Access. GPO eventually cooperated with this grass-roots effort (GPO Access Gateways Project) and finally dropped its effort to charge for access to GPO Access. More recently, we have seen agencies using licensing restrictions to restrict access (GPO details onerous restrictions on digital materials) and agencies cooperating with the private sector to commodify their resources (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent). And, with the PACER project, we see a return to the old model of limiting free access to certain facilities (Pilot Project: Free Access to Federal Court Records at 16 Libraries).

When legislative bodies skimp on the budgets for public dissemination of public information and create regulations that favor the private sector over the public sector for dissemination (rather than relying on both equally), they create obstacles to access. When agencies seek to commercialize their information and control access to it, they set up barriers to access. These obstacles are not in the interest of the the government or the people.

I would like to think that such efforts are doomed to failure the way charging for GPO Access failed. But when agencies use licenses to prevent free access and when libraries fail to take the initiative to demand free access and cooperate with projects that limit free access, it is difficult to imagine how free access will survive.

This draft was obtained by the Los Angeles Times from the Iraqi government side and translated from Arabic into English.

• Latest draft of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement, Los Angeles Times, October 13th 2008.

Recently John McCain was in the news for advocating Fair Use for his campaign videos on YouTube (Update: McCain protests YouTube's removal of his campaign videos, Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, October 15, 2008). It is an interesting story and now Lawrence Lessig puts it all in perspective for us:

• Copyright and Politics Don’t Mix, by Lawrence Lessig, Op-Ed, The New York Times, October 21, 2008.

While the issue at hand deals with political speech, the same problems and issues apply to government information.

Lessig says that the "explosion in citizen-generated political speech has been met with a troubling response: the increasing use of copyright laws as tools for censorship." His solution is to change the copyright law:

It would be far better if copyright law were narrowed to those contexts in which it serves its essential creative function -- encouraging innovation and ensuring that artists get paid for their work -- and left alone the battles of what criticisms candidates for office, and their supporters, are allowed to make.

While a lot of government information is free of copyright, or is supposed to be, strict interpretation and aggressive use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has led to restrictions on access to government information. Perhaps the most visible example is in Google Books, which blocks full text access to its scans of government publications because they "might" be covered by copyright. (See, for example, Oversight of U.S. Government Intelligence Functions: Hearings Before the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, Second Session, Published by U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1976.)

But copyright is only part of the problem that limits access to what should be free, open, re-usable, government information. Even if we get reasonable changes to the Copyright law, we will need more. Governments will have want to make their content freely usable. They will have to apply aggressive open-access policies to their own content. This will mean avoiding technological locks (DRM), eschewing contractual and licensing restrictions on content, actively promoting and using open formats for digital materials, and actively labeling content as open and freely usable and re-usable.

Hi all. I just landed in Washington D.C. and gearing up for Depository Library Council meeting for the next three days. I'm trying out this new tool called CoverItLive that will allow me to live blog the conference (if you want to help, let me know and I'll add you as a panelist!!). Please check back here as the window below will *hopefully* be in real time. This also depends on wireless access. Check out the meeting agenda and leave me a comment if there's anything from which you really want a report. Wish me luck!

This week, instead of highlighting a specific guide, I'd like to highlight the fact that the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki now has a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) that covers 611 sites linked to from the Handout Exchange.

You can find the CSE at the bone crunchingly long URL of:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004167096080728781323%3Aglzqvfjgqky.

If I were you, I'd just bookmark it now. There is also a link to the CSE from the front page of the guide.

It's not perfect because Google itself is not perfect, but it can be a good way to do cross disciplinary searches of guides or to find professionally selected information on countries. Here are some searches for you to try by clicking:

• Iran
• terrorism
• banking
• secrecy
• Cold War

Try some searches of your own. Give us some feedback in comments.