Today we welcomed a new state agency podcast to our government podcasts directory:

Outdoor Oklahoma - This is a video podcast of a weekly TV show produced by the Department of Wildlife Conservation. It appears to be archived on iTunes.

We're always on the lookout for new podcasts by government agencies. If you know of that isn't in our directory, let us know. Remember, to be a podcast, there must be a way to subscribe to the program. A pointer to a list of audio/video files that someone must visit to determine new content is *not* a podcast.

My Google Alert for podcasts works in strange ways. Today, for example, it sent me a podcast episode by Sen. Barack Obama done in 2006. Why it's flagging it now, I don't know.

But it's an interesting episode that addresses a major FGI interest, net neutrality. You can find the episode at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/. I think he sums up the issues well:

"It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.

But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.

Everyone who cannot pony up the cash will be relegated to the slow lanes."

 If you're aware of other candidate statements on Net Neutrality, feel free to post links to them in comments. Interestingly, Sen. Obama's last podcast seems to have been on April 12, 2007. See all of his topics at http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/. If you're aware of him podcasting somewhere else, let us know by leaving a comment.

A reader recently left a comment on our Government Podcasts Directory informing us about the Spotlight on Science podcast from the Smithsonian Institution. This led us to the Smithsonian Institute podcast portal at http://www.si.edu/podcasts/. According to the 2007-2008 US Government Manual, the Smithsonian Institution is a quasi-official agency of the US Government and so fits our critera of a federal agency.

The podcast portal page has a wide variety of podcasted programs, including:

• The Folkways Collection
• Freer and Sackler Galleries Curatorial Conversations
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries Podcast
• National Museum of the American Indian Podcasts
• African Art Museum Podcasts

Interestingly, the Spotlight on Science that we were originally pointed to isn't listed on the portal page. That may be because its last podcast appears to have been from April 2007.

If you know of a federal, state or local government podcast that isn't listed in our directory at http://freegovinfo.info/node/174, please leave a comment on the directory page, or here, or send an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo.info.

The newest entrant to our government podcasts directory is the AIDS.gov podcast from the federal department of Health and Human Services. The podcasts are short videos (3-5 min) that focus on news and conversations about AIDS.  Despite the fact that these podcasts have been going out since February 2007, we seemed to have scooped our friends at usa.gov because I didn't notice it on their Health Podcasts page as of October 16, 2007.

This is a decent example that publishing on the web isn't the same as either distributing a document or proactively informing the public or press. Posting something to the web without further efforts means the content lays there until stumbled upon -- in this case by my Google Alert that looks for podcasts in the dot gov domain.

In this particular case, I'm sure the aids.gov folks, far from hiding anything promoted their podcasts to their constituencies, but the effect for the rest of us was the same. We don't find stuff like this unless we're looking for it. Ideally, there should be some outlet - usa.gov, GPO, etc (I don't know) where new content like this would be pushed out to people the moment it is published.

The Federal Digital System (FDSys) seems like it will promise this sort of functionality for government documents published with GPO's knowledge. I'm looking forward to seeing how that promise holds up.

 

 

Weekly Recall Review is a 3-5 minute summary of product recalls and other consumer safety news from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. According to the podcast website, the 8/31/2007 show included "highlights back-to-school safety, including clothing with drawstrings, art supplies, playground equipment, portable soocer goals, and helmets"

This podcast joins its siblings on our government podcasts page. Have a listen and if you're a podcaster, consider dropping in part or all of one of these public domain podcasts into your own podcasts.

FGI Podcast #3 is now available. Our 45 minute show included the following segments:

Sunlight Foundation Interview
Sunlight Foundation
Open House Project

Scott Matheson's LOCKSS presentation
Spring 2007 Depository Library Council Proceedings
Scott's LOCKSS Slides

Podcast Sampler
Ohio Outdoor Notebook Radio Spots - Ohio's Little Brown Bats (July 12, 2007)

Music
Outro - Broadband Connection downloaded from the Internet Archive's Open Source Audio collection and created by Sinister Dexter. Used under Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

Our theme music and bumpers came from Set Me Free by DJ Topshelf and downloaded from Podsafe Audio.

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What did you think about today's show? Let us know! We have three ways you can give us feedback or make suggestions for future shows:

- Make a comment on the show blog at http://freegovinfo.info/blog/154
- Send a text comment to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info
- Record an audio comment up to 5MB and e-mail it to danielcornwall AT gmail DOT com.

Text messages will be read on the air and audio comments will be played unless you ask us not to.

We'd love to have some listener feedback to make our show better and to have more content. So if you like, love or hate anything about our podcast, do let us know.

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.

Show notes for FGI podcast #2

Note: We still have things to learn about podcasting. This time it is audio leveling. The sound does go up and down a bit but hopefully won't be too distracting. If you have tips about equalizing volume levels in Audacity, please send them our way in one of the comment options listed below:
Today's 40 minute show had the following segments:

• FGI Roundtable - Jim A Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo and Daniel Cornwall discuss what led them to work with Free Government Information and what we see as the big issues facing the government information community.
• Elizabeth Cowell discusses the GPO LOCKSS pilot project at the Spring 2007 Depository Library Conference.
• Podcast Sampler - we take a quick listen to Profile America, a podcast from the US Census bureau intended to be played by broadcasters. Check out other government podcasts.
• Outro music - Scary Guy by Maria Daines used by permission. According to the story behind the song, this song was inspired by the global Scary Guy project.

In response to a request made on bibliocasting-L, we recorded a three minute promo for the FGI podcast. I explain how we create the podcast and what we hope to do with it.

Show Notes:

I mentioned the following in our podcast:

• Bibliocasting mailing list
• Audacity
• Ourmedia
• Feedburner
• PodSafe Audio
• Creative Commons

Music

• Our theme music came from Set Me Free by DJ Topshelf and downloaded from Podsafe Audio.
• The background music was "Hobbit & Lord of the Rings" by the Brobdingnagian Bards

A lot of information packed into a small space, so please consider listening. And stay tuned for our June podcast.

We've transitioned the "source blog" for our podcasts from Blogger to FGI. You'll be able to listen to all episodes and get show notes from http://freegovinfo.info/blog/154.

We'll also have a link to this source on our FGI podcast page.

If you've already subscribed to our feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/FgiPodcast, you should see no changes. There is no need to resubscribe, based on our testing.

We've had one user report that can't get our first podcast to load. We haven't had any problems ourselves, but if you have, would you let us know in comments or in an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info?

Thanks!

Based in part on user feedback and in part on our own drive to experiment, Free Government Information has started it's very own podcast.

While we acknowledge we have more to learn about audio engineering, we think you will find it worth your time.

Our first podcast is just under 20 minutes and has the following features:

• Segment 1: What is Free Government Information?
• Segment 2: Government Information in the News
• Segment 3: Government Podcast Sample - This Week at NASA
• Segment 4: Outro music - Rise by The Rev. Din from the Internet Archive Open Source Audio Collection

Theme music and segment bumpers from Set Me Free by DJ TopShelf and downloaded from PodSafe Audio.

If this sounds interesting to you, check out our new library page with links to show notes, archives, subscription options and the ability to listen to our podcast without leaving our site.

Feedback is welcome, hope to hear from you soon.

If you are looking for podcasts produced by government agencies, try our government podcasts directory.

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The Volunteers at Free Government Information launched a podcast on May 15, 2007. This audio podcast will carry commentary, government information news, interviews, samples of federal and state podcasts, independent, Creative Commons music and more.

Visit the podcast archive with show notes at http://freegovinfo.info/blog/154
Subscribe to the podcast with your favorite podcatcher by visiting http://feeds.feedburner.com/FgiPodcast

Or listen right now using this handy, flash-based podcasting widget:

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Have comments on what you've heard? Pick one of these ways to comment:

1. Send a text comment to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info
2. Make a comment on our show blog
3. Record an audio comment up to 3 minutes long and e-mail to danielcornwall AT gmail DOT com.
4. Comment right on this page, but be sure to mention which episode you are commenting on.

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."

We have updated our Spring 2007 Depository Library Council Conference page with audio recorded by FGI Volunteer James Staub. James, hard worker that he is, also contributed some rough transcripts.

As with our prior conference audio offerings, we suggest you play the sessions through headphones. Because we have to take along a portable audio recorder and can't always sit near the speakers, the audio quality suffers. But the bits I've heard are still listenable.

But we have something NEW to offer as well. For the first time anywhere, DLC recordings are being offered as a true podcast. We're not talking about posting a zipped folder of audio files weeks after Council closes. We're talking about content being automatically delivered to your iPod, other portable MP3 player, or desktop computer. All you have to do is to subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes or your favorite podcatcher software.

So, if you are a podcast listener, plug in http://feeds.feedburner.com/FgiPodcast into that podcatcher and start listening.

How much did it cost us to set up a podcasting feed? Zero.

We set up a free blog on Blogger, plugged it into Feed Burner to create something that podcatchers could latch onto and use free storage sites like OurMedia, etc to host the files.

It's true that the audio quality of the recordings is far from perfect. But that isn't the fault of podcasting it. GPO or a third party COULD podcast their higher quality audio in the same way and bear no expenses beyond the recording they are already doing.

Since we created a feed to distribute the DLC audio that James Staub worked so hard at getting for us, you can count on seeing an FGI podcast in the relatively near future. The audio quality will be much higher because we'll control the audio equipment.

If you have suggestions for what should be in a FGI podcast, let us know either by commenting or sending a message to admin AT freegovinfo.info.