Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers
Submitted by jrjacobs on Tue, 2008-04-22 15:42.
Erik Ringmar, professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, wants others to join him in putting restricted government documents on the web.
I say this is awesome! There's certainly precedent for this kind of activism: Jared Benedict liberated a bunch of USGS maps and just last week, I uploaded the Iraqi Perspectives Report to the Internet Archive. Anyone else out there set free a government document? Leave us a comment.
So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me).
I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market capitalism.
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I should probably know this, but I don't. I have a bunch of government documents that I've been keeping in my issuu account, in order to post, embed, and read them online.
http://issuu.com/johnwonderlich
Most of them are born digital, and many are committee documents that will end up in the Center for Legislative Archives in NARA. For the occasional one that I scan myself (see spub 102-20, for example), should I upload them to other community based repositories as well?
s-pub 102-20: http://issuu.com/johnwonderlich/docs/documentation-of-congress_1992
Are there guidelines for non-institutional metadata standards (dublin core?), or for how to scan at "archival quality"--whatever that might mean?
-John Wonderlich
Digitization standards and upload ideas
Hi John. That's great that you're thinking of releasing some documents! I think 300+ dots/inch (DPI) is the general rule of thumb. Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) has tons of information including preservation metadata and digitization standards. IA allows for public uploads, but not directly to their federal documents collection. If you send them to freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com, I'll make sure they get uploaded. Don't forget to give me as much description as you can (title, agency, date, author, key words, abstract...).
But this brings up a broader topic of discussion that we FGIers were having a few days ago in regards to the Iraqi Perspectives Report which I uploaded last week. We were trying to figure out a procedure for doing this. We haven't worked out all the kinks yet, but we were thinking that there would need to be a form to easily upload documents to the IA collection (we haven't yet talked with IA staff about this yet). Once documents were up on the IA, then LOCKSS partners could add that collection to their caches (yay FDLP distributed collections!!). The path we're thinking of is 1) get IA/Lockss working 2) get some individual fdlp libraries/librarians involved 3) get endorsements from godort, ala, rlg, ... 4) get a couple of agencies (EIA! NARA!) to contribute directly 5) get gpo to contribute. Voila, distributed digital collection, long-term preservation and access to digital government information!
Ok, so that's long-term. In the meantime, if you've got a US document(s) in digital format, send them to freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com. I'll make sure they get uploaded to the Internet Archive's documents collection. If you work for a library, make sure you subscribe to the collection's RSS feed so you can catalog those documents (or add a link to them in their bibliographic records).
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