In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents.

The article:

Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12

Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that!

As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright.

The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents.

E-mail public documents get erased, disappear, by Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008.

A 50-state survey by the Associated Press of government e-mail retention earlier this year found a wide variety of laws and practices, with the vast majority of states officially treating e-mail like printed documents. But most of the states with e-mail laws allow officials to choose which ones to turn over in Freedom of Information requests and to decide on their own when e-mail records are deleted.

CBS reported that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security has a website that listed groups they consider possible terrorists. However, after the agency received complaints from people, some Web pages were removed from the list.

The original list of the groups that the agency considered possible terrorists were:

• Environmentalists
• Anti-Genetics (those opposed to genetically-altered crops)
• Animal Rights
• Anti-Abortion
• Anti-Nuclear
• Anti-War
• Pro-Gay Right

This is a classic example of the abuse that can occur when a politically motivated governmental body controls information without any sort of vetting process. I am wondering if any library or individuals were able to capture the removed websites. Or will this be a permanently lost document? I did a quick, not thorough search in the WayBack Machine but no luck.

Update 5/29/2007

Thanks to Valerie for pointing out this page has been saved by a library/archives agency.

According to Library Journal, Google announced last week that it had formed "partnerships" with four states, Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, to offer index and search capabilities for public information in state government databases. Google's Public Sector program seeks to make government information, much of it in the dark web of databases, more accessible through their SiteMaps protocol. A Sitemap is "an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently" (Wikipedia). I'm all for making govt information at all levels more findable to search engines, and SiteMap is an interesting way for Web masters to do that -- sort of a MARC record for crawlers.

Another way to do that is for libraries to write/blog about their collections, their documents, the questions they answer and the resources they use to answer those questions. Libraries can also use web services like del.icio.us to collect and describe the Web sites that they use on a daily basis (see our tag cloud for an example). (On a side note, has anyone seen 50 matches, a search engine that only crawls web sites that were bookmarked or voted for by people, in sites like del.icio.us, digg and reddit?)

These will in effect release the information that libraries traditionally hold in closed systems and databases, make our collections (both digital AND physical!) more findable and vet the Web for our users. Got other ideas for "info-catharsis"? Let us know in the comments.