SLA Government Information Division

US Congress Committee Sites: Best & Worst

The U.S. congressional committee websites, both House and Senate, have always been an uneven lot. Some have regularly improved, while others seem to be stuck in the 1990's. Content varies quite a bit from one committee site to another.

Now the National Journal reports on the results of an expert panel review of committee websites in the November 25th article Congress' Best (and Worst) Committee Web Sites. See the article's table of reviewer scores and comments to see which one was judged to make "nice use of photos, videos and Google Earth" and which one elicited the snarky "I think I made a Web site like this once... in 1997."

Australia on Accessible Electronic Media

The Australian government has released a new discussion report, Access to Electronic Media for the Hearing and Vision Impaired: Approaches for Consideration, by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. The report is available in PDF, RTF, and audio (mp3) formats.

The discussion report proposes approaches to accessibility based on input from the media industries and from the hearing/vision-impaired community, and it invites further comments on the approaches.

Report topics include captioning and audio description, television broadcasting, DVDs and cinema films, the internet, and advertising content. Both government and commercial content are considered.

Guide to Revised Google Book Search Settlement

The American Library Association (ALA) and Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have posted a guide to the currently proposed Google Book Search settlement. The publication, A Guide for the Perplexed Part III: The Amended Settlement Agreement [PDF] is available on the ALA website.

Previous DGI post: Revised Google Books Search Settlement Filed

Free Download: 'State of the eUnion'

A new book, State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards [PDF], is available for free download at the editors' 21Gov.net website. The editors are two Danish consultants, John Gøtze and Christian Bering Pedersen.

State of the eUnion consists of essays from a variety of Gov 2.0 thinkers and doers. The essays cover topics such as structured crowdsourcing, government 2.0 history, open government data, and democracy 2.0.

The book is being published in hardcopy by AuthorHouse and will be sold on Amazon.

Open Science at Web-Scale: New Report

A new report from the UK-based JISC describes issues raised by data-intensive open science with the goal of promoting further discussion on the topic. The report, Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential [PDF], features a section on public engagement in science ("citizen science") and several pages on the role of libraries in data management.

From the report's conclusion:

Finally, it is hoped that this Report will stimulate and contribute to community discussion in the UK, but also fuel the open science debate on the global stage. The potential impact of data-intensive open science on research practice and research outcomes is both substantive and far-reaching. The issues raised here will require fuller articulation and investigation. The economic implications will require detailed analysis and the societal benefits should be reviewed and evaluated. However for now, it is sufficient to draw together a number of associated themes (possibly for the first time), to stimulate and foster wider debate and to challenge the community to fully explore the transformational potential of open science at Web-scale.

FederalReporting.gov Mandate Pushes Better Local Reporting Tech

Nextgov.com provides insight into New York State government efforts to improve its reporting system in order to comply with federal stimulus funds requirements. From the article, Better reporting technology an unexpected byproduct of stimulus:

Technology that states have deployed to report how they spent federal stimulus funds is likely to permanently change information exchange across the public and private sector, despite controversy over figures on the number of jobs created and saved, said New York officials, academics and federal leaders.

"Data is always problematic; it always can be improved," said Deborah Cunningham, coordinator for educational management services at the New York State Education Department. "This is the first time that I'm aware that the whole country reported at the same time in a 10-day period..."

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on data quality in stimulus fund reporting in their 19 November 2009 report Recovery Act: Recipient Reported Jobs Data Provide Some Insight into Use of Recovery Act Funding, but Data Quality and Reporting Issues Need Attention [PDF].

SLA on UK's Digital Economy Bill

The SLA Public Policy Connections blog has a new post about information policy developing in Britain, UK's Digital Economy Bill Criticized by Those Favoring Balanced Copyright Reform. From the blog:

Lord Peter Mandelson, the United Kingdom's first Secretary of State, has introduced a Digital Economy Bill that would give him (and future politicians) the power to rewrite Britain's core copyright legislation with little Parliamentary debate, using fast-track secondary legislation.

The bill is part of the government's Digital Britain initiative to advance the nation's competitiveness in digital communications and new technologies.

White House Creates USG Twitter List

This month, Twitter.com announced the new list feature that allows twitter users to organize their fellow tweeters into useful groupings, such as 'librarians' or 'rock stars'. Today, the White House announced their own U.S. federal government Twitter list aggregating tweets from "Cabinet Secretaries, Agencies and Departments." Twitter users can follow the list at @whitehouse/usg. Read about it in the WH blog post, Making a List, Checking it Twice.

Video More Accessible with New YouTube Captioning

On her excellent blog, Gwynne on dotgov, Gynne Kostin comments on the relevance of YouTube's new captioning abilities for government webmasters wishing to offer accessible content. She concludes:

This is great news for people who are deaf or hearing impaired. This is great news for government agencies that struggle with the cost and expertise required to make video accessible to everyone. This is great news because government can't be transparent for most of the people--open government is only meaningful when it's available to all.

Read her full post: YouTube Captioning Makes Video More Accessible For All, 21 November 2009.

The "auto-cap" feature is available only in a limited test release at this time. See the full Google blog post for details: Automatic captions in YouTube, 19 November 2009.

Google Scholar Adds Some US Case Law

On 17 November 2009, the Official Google Blog announced that a set of U.S. judicial opinions has been added to the Google Scholar database. From the blog post, Finding the laws that govern us:

You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

The legal research site LLRX.com has posted an aricle on the topic: Bridging the Digital Divide: A New Vendor in Town? Google Scholar Now Includes Case Law, by John J. DiGilio, 18 November 2009. DiGilio discusses the value and the limitations of the current Google Scholar case law set.

In related news, the folks behind the AltLaw "free legal search engine" website announced on 19 November 2009 that "we will continue to maintain the web site and search service for a few months, but we will not be adding new features or new content. AltLaw.org, in its current form, will shut down in early 2010." From the announcement:

Everything we have done or planned to do with AltLaw, Google has does better. What else would you expect? Search is their core business; they have hundreds of brilliant engineers, a vast computing infrastructure, and billions of dollars invested in it.

While we could see this as the 800-pound gorilla stomping on our pet project, the truth is that we -- a small academic group within Columbia Law School -- were never really equipped to handle the challenges of building and maintaining a state-of-the-art search engine. When we started out, three years ago, our goal was to make primary legal research freely available to the public. In that, we have succeeded: primary legal research is freely available to the public, not only from Google, but from several start-ups and non-profits.

Google's blog announcement acknowledged AltLaw, among others:

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others.