SLA Government Information Division

DGI Member Makes Top Women in Government & Tech List

Congratulations to SLA Government Information Division member Sarah Bourne, Mass.Gov Chief Technology Strategist! Sarah appears in the new GovFresh Women in Government and Technology list.

Program: Hurricane Katrina and Libraries

The SLA Government Information Division (DGI) is the lead sponsor for this 2010 annual conference session:

Hurricane Katrina and Libraries: Recovering from America's Worst Natural Disaster
2:00 P.M. - 3:30 P.M.
Convention Center, Room 221

Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, causing an estimated $81.2 billion worth of damage in August of 2005. Libraries in the Gulf Coast region were by no means immune from that damage, as many were severely impacted by both this storm and Hurricane Rita, which followed a month later. Speakers from the U.S. Minerals Management Service Library in New Orleans, the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, and the University of Central Arkansas will discuss the effect that Katrina and Rita had on their libraries and other libraries in the Gulf Region, the lingering aftermath of these storms, and examine how their libraries and other libraries in the region went about the task of recovery.

Speakers: Lisl Zach, Drexel University (Moderator), Steven Pomes, MMS; Michelynn McKnight, Louisiana State University; Bruce Raeburn, Tulane University; Joyce Shaw, Gulf Coast Research Laboratory Library.

Lead Division: DGI; Co-hosting Division: DED; DMAH
DGI Gold Sponsor: LexisNexis

Please join us!

The Scholarly Kitchen on Open Government Data

The Scholarly Kitchen blogger Alix Vance has posted interesting commentary on the current "open government" data push. The entire 25 May 2010 post, Data.gov: Selling the Government and Democratization of Information, is worth a read. Here is a brief excerpt:

Professionals will find or create the means to build utilities from these emerging global repositories of government data that will:

• Enable comparisons of data that has historically been unavailable, siloed, and non-standardized
• Deliver tools that surface previously hidden relationships between data points and suggest relational meanings
• Aid users develop[ing] new hypotheses and research entry points

The article also comments on how government release of free, bulk data may affect publishers.

(The Scholarly Kitchen blog is hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing.)

Facebook Community Pages Create Issues for Government Pages

The new Community Pages feature announced 19 April 2010 by Facebook is troubling government agencies. Most of the content for these community pages is currently being scraped from Wikipedia, automatically creating a page that is not the agency's carefully constructed official Facebook presence. Nancy Scola explains the problem in her 26 May blog post Facebook's Manifest Destiny Runs Into Open Government:

Community pages are auto-generated by Facebook wherever a user might mention in their profile that they're a fan of something, or worked at some place, or had an interest in some field. The trouble was that in some case, people had already set up their own huts in those spots -- including government agencies and politicians.

 Scola describes Facebook's losing attempt to assuage government concerns.

New media strategist Adriel Hampton also comments on the topic in his 17 May 2010 blog post Facebook Hijacks U.S. Government Pages.

Health Data Initiative Launches June 2nd

The U.S. Health and Human Services Administration (HHS) is set to announce a new community health data initiative on 2 June 2010, in cooperation with the nonprofit Institute of Medicine (IOM). IOM describes the initiative as "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." The effort will leverage community health data available from HHS under the White House Open Government Initiative.

The initiative launch event will be webcast live at http://videocast.nih.gov on 2 June beginning at 9:00 a.m. ET. HHS has posted the event agenda.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes the relevant HHS data sets available on a Community Health Data Initiative Interim Work Page. 

ChallengePost Picked for U.S. Government Contest Platform

Wired reports on the selection of ChallengePost by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) as the platform for contests to inspire citizen input and innovation in government challenges. From the article, U.S. Challenges Citizens to Solve Its (Our) Problems:

Every department of government will have access to the custom-built ChallengePost platform and a set of best practices for issuing challenges to the public, which will then discuss and hopefully solve a myriad of tangible problems, large and small, facing the country.

From the GSA press release, GSA Provides Innovation Challenges Platform:

Available for use by agencies in July, GSA’s platform powered by ChallengePost will allow agencies to post problems and invite the public to suggest, discuss, and judge solutions. ChallengePost was selected from a pool of eight applicants due to the quality of their offer to meet the government's requirements, their experience running challenges, and the ease of use of their products. ChallengePost’s platform is currently being used for AppsforHealthyKids.com, a competition sponsored by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her nationwide campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.

In addition to the online challenge platform, GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies will further reduce barriers to public use of challenges and prizes by sharing best practices, developing training and guidelines for issuing challenges, and creating a contract vehicle to make it easier for agencies to access the best challenge products and services to identify and execute challenges. 

Dessy is New FLICC/Fedlink Director

The Library of Congress announced in a 26 May 2010 press release that Blane K. Dessy has been selected as the new executive director of the Library's FLICC/FEDLINK office. Congratulations to Blaine, a great member of the DC-area government library community!

From the press release:

"Blane Dessy brings a wealth of solid leadership experience at the local, state, and federal level," said Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services. "He has worked collaboratively with a wide variety of libraries and governing bodies, and we are delighted that he is joining the Library of Congress."

Dessy is currently the director of the U.S. Department of Justice Library Staff, a position he has held since 2000. In directing the law libraries that serve the department’s senior management offices and litigating divisions, Dessy has instituted a number of innovative service improvements, including a robust virtual library, a new integrated library system, a digitization program, and special programming to reach underserved constituents.

The Administrative Conference of the U.S. Is Back

The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a small agency eliminated by Congress in 1995, is getting a second life. ACUS made recommendations on improving federal administrative law procedures. The primary argument is favor of restoring it is that, through its recommendations, the ACUS saved the federal government more money than it spent.

ACUS has been reauthorized and refunded. Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Scalia testified in favor of the agency at a 20 May 2010 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee and Administrative Law, and administrative law professor Paul R. Verkuil was recently confirmed as Chair of the Conference. The agency is still being formed and does not have a website yet. 

The BLT: Blog of Legal Times reports on the Second Coming of the Administrative Conference. The ADR Law blog provides additional information in The Administrative Conference of the United States Returns.

Special thanks to Legal Informatics blog for these informative posts:

• eRulemaking and the Administrative Conference of the United States
• Administrative Conference of the United States: Selected Resources

FDA Transparency Task Force -- Update

This is an update to our earlier post: FDA Transparency Task Force Wants Your Input.

The FDA task force today made it easier to review and comment on their 21 draft proposals [PDF] concerning public disclosure. The changes to the site also allow you to rank the proposals.

In addition to instructions in our previous post, you can:

• Go to the Draft Proposals by Topic Area page.
• In the left column, click on the topic of interest, such as 'adverse event reports' or 'import procedures'.
• Under each numbered draft proposal, click on 'Read the reasoning for this proposal and comment.'
• Indicate the priority you would assign this proposal and enter comments into the box.

FDA Transparency Task Force Wants Your Input

Update: FDA Transparency Task Force -- Update

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a Transparency Task Force that is developing proposals to make the agency's operations more transparent, useful, and understandable to the public, while protecting personal information and corporate trade secrets. The Task Force is currently in Phase II, examining public disclosure policies.

If you would like to see more information from FDA become available online, or would like to see currently available information made more useful, you will want to review and comment on the draft public disclosure proposals. Review the 21 draft proposals [PDF] concerning adverse event reports, investigational applications, recall terminations, and other FDA information.

The Task Force will take public comments on this topic until 20 July 2010. FDA released its request for comments in today's Federal Register, 75 Fed.Reg. 28622-28623 (21 May 2010). Instructions for commenting appear in the ADDRESSES section of the request. Further instructions are under the heading "III. Request for Comments". All comments are to reference the docket number, FDA–2009–N–0247, and the ordinal number assigned to the proposal in the draft proposal document.

Also see: New England Journal of Medicine Article, Perspective: Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [PDF]