SLA Government Information Division

Health Indicators Warehouse Open for Business

HHS recently launched its new Health Indicators Warehouse at http://healthindicators.gov, creating a single point of access to data sets from more than 170 U.S. federal government sources. Researchers, technology developers, and policymakers can now download and analyze data on 1200 health indicators.

Availability of the data is expected to trigger a new wave of innovation and application development. Use of the data is being encouraged, for example, via entries in the Health 2.0 Developers Challenge partnership.

Indicators include population-level data (such as life expectancy, mortality, and disease incidence), data on determinants of health (such as behaviors and environmental factors), and data on the health care system (such as access, cost, quality, and use). The data come from a variety of programs, such as Healthy People 2020, County Health Rankings, the Community Health Status Indicators initiative, and Medicare.

Users can find indicators by topic, geographic location of source data, the government initiative that generated the data, or by general keyword searching. Tabs allow browsing the indicators by category with filters for drill-down. For a given data set, an overview explains the scope of the data and the methodology behind its development. Data source profiles identify the purpose of each research initiative, its study methodologies, and the periods for which data are available.

The interface allows users to interact with the data (depending on the nature of specific data sets) and view information in in map or chart form. Programmers can access the data using SOAP or REST web services.

FAQs are available, as well as detailed how-to information in the Health Indicators Warehouse User's Guide.

The announcement of the site by HHS Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and comments from leaders in health and government information applaud the potentials ahead for leveraging government-generated health data to make the most of the investment in it.

FederalRegister.gov: What do people want?

The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) reports on the first five months of FederalRegister.gov ("FR 2.0") website use in the blog post FederalRegister.gov Progress Report, 7 February 2011. Some highlights from the initial five months:

• There were 818,361 total visits;15,000 were mobile device visits.
• Visits came from 214 countries.
• The top five articles viewed were: Coverage of Diseases Associated with Herbicides (Agent Orange); Genetic Non-discrimination; Medicare Physician Fee Schedule; General Schedule Locality Pay Areas; and Regulation Z, Truth in Lending.
• "RSS feeds are popular, but users have also requested 'old school' email subscriptions. A user-configurable email subscription feature will be added in late February or early March 2011."

The OFR blogger, Michael White, also observes:

The most searched for articles relate closely to recent actions that also appeared in the popular media...For us, the perfect circle of public information would be for users to read articles in the public news media, have that media include links to the underlying regulatory and policy documents in FR 2.0 (we have short links for every document), get alerts on issues of continuing interest,  send comments to the official Regulations.gov dockets,  and more easily view other public comments from our central point of access.

Related SLA/DGI post: Archives Launches New Federal Register Blog, 5 February 2011.

 

Spending Proposals: FY2011 Remainder and FY2012

This week will see the introduction of two important government spending proposals.

The White House is due to release the President's fiscal year 2012 (October 2011-October 2012) budget proposal on the morning of Monday, February 14th. The budget documents will be available on the White House Office of Management and Budget website (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb or http://www.budget.gov) and on the Government Printing Office FDsys.gov website.(FDsys.gov also has the texts of the President's budget proposal back to FY1996.)

In addition to providing free access on FDsys.gov, GPO is selling print editions and a CD-ROM version (includes many tables in spreadsheet format) via the online bookstore budget section. GPO has posted a budget documents fact sheet [PDF] about the four-volume FY2012 release.

The second important proposal of the week comes from the House of Representatives, where appropriations bills originate. Congress has not passed full appropriations for the current fiscal year, FY2011. Instead, the government has been funded by a series of short-term continuing resolutions*. Federal government operations are currently funded to March 4, 2011. House leadership plans to move forward this week with a bill, H.R. 1, funding the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. The full text of H.R. 1 with supplementary information is available now on the House Rules Committee website. Additional information is provided in the House Appropriations Committee's February 10th press release.

*For more information on continuing resolutions, see the Congressional Research Service report Continuing Resolutions: Latest Action and Brief Overview of Recent Practices.

Tip: THOMAS.gov tracks appropriations bills and continuing resolutions in the Status of Appropriations Legislation Chart.

 

February 15 Webcast: Your Input on PTDL Program Requested

An invitation to SLA/DGI from Christine Kitchens, Manager of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program (PTDLP):

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is planning a public roundtable for February 15, 2011 from 1:30-3:00pm est. This will be hosted by the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, David Kappos, in order to obtain input from organizations and individuals on current use of the Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries (PTDLs) and how to more effectively use the PTDLs in the future. I wanted to bring this roundtable to your attention and extend an invitation to you or any members of the DGI, SLA to participate via webcast or in person. I have provided a link to our webpage that provides more detailed information: http://www.uspto.gov/patents/announce/index.jsp  Additional details regarding this round table will also be available in the Federal Register on February 8, 2011. [now online: Roundtable and Request for Comments  --pg]

The link to enter the webcast is: https://uspto.connectsolutions.com/ptdlp021511/

To briefly summarize:
What: USPTO Patent and Trademark Depository Library Public Roundtable hosted by Directory Kappos.
When: February 15, 2011 from 1:30-3:00est.
Where: USPTO Madison Auditorium, Alexandria, Virginia.
Purpose: To solicit input on current use of the Patent and Trademark Depository Library (PTDLs) and how to more effectively use the PTDLs in the future.
Ways to participate: Webcast: https://uspto.connectsolutions.com/ptdlp021511/ In Person: contact Chris Kitchens to register.

You may send written suggestions or comments in advance and up to March 17 to PTDL_comments@uspto.gov (note underline between “PTDL” and “comments”).
 
Best Regards,
Chris
 
Christine Kitchens, Manager
Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program(PTDLP)
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

ScienceCinema: DOE Multimedia Search

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a new search engine for videos from the national laboratories and other DOE research facilities. ScienceCinema (http://www.osti.gov/sciencecinema/) searches the audio in these research and development lectures and presentations and links directly to the video files. As decribed in the DOE press release (8 February 2010):

ScienceCinema uses innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology from Microsoft Research to allow users to quickly find video files produced by the DOE National Laboratories and other DOE research facilities. When users search for specific scientific words and phrases of interest to them, precise snippets of the video where the specific search term was spoken will appear along with a timeline. Users can then select a snippet or a segment along the timeline to begin playing the video at the exact point in the video where the words were spoken. The timeline is synced with transcripts of the targeted portion of video.

It is anticipated that scientific videos, animations, interactive visualizations, and other multimedia will become an increasingly prominent form of scientific communications. ScienceCinema was produced, in part, as a proof of concept to demonstrate the value of speech recognition in the complex vocabulary of science.

The audio search is supplemented with a bibliographic search that includes fields for creator/author, title, description/abstract, identifier numbers, publication date, and system entry date. Some fields--such as the description--may not be populated for some records, so you may wish to try several approaches to search.

 

Crowdsourcing Corrections to Digitized Newspapers

In the article Volunteers with an eagle eye on the news, the Australian newspaper The Age reports today on the successful use of crowdsourcing by the National Library of Australia (NLA).

NLA's Trove, a large digital repository of collections about Australia and Australians, has been benefiting from the work of citizens who log in to help correct the text generated from an OCR scan of the historical Australian newspapers they have digitized. As The Age reports,

The work is done by letting visitors see a scanned picture of an article alongside a computer's best guess about what the text says. Typically, only about 60 per cent of the words are right. Where the two versions differ, humans can instantly correct the computer's gaffes.

Since the electronic scans of newspapers were made public in August 2008 and the library took the controversial decision to let anyone - even anonymous users - help, volunteers have tweaked 26 million lines of newspaper text.

The Age quotes one of the top volunteers as saying, "It's very addictive." NLA recognized their top text correctors with special Australia Day awards on 28 January 2010.

A March 2009 report by the project's director provides detail on how the text correction program works; see Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers, by Rose Holley [PDF, 28 pages].

For more, see:

• NLA's web page Get Involved. Members of the Public. Help us by correcting text.
• Australian Newspapers Digitization Program home page.
• The program's In the Media page. (They've received a fair bit of publicity.)
• The digitized newspaper collection search page.

 

 

Archives Launches New Federal Register Blog

They don't have a name for it yet, but the National Archives (NARA) Office of the Federal Register (OFR) has launched a new blog. OFR made the announcement in their first blog post, Introducing the Federal Register Blog, on the website FederalRegister.gov (also called "Federal Register 2.0"):

In our new FR Blog, we aim to give you an insider’s view of FederalRegister.gov (FR 2.0) and open up lines of discussion about the Federal Register system in general.  We will post news updates about the FederalRegister.gov website, create a forum for readers, and also stray into items about our other publications and services on FDsys.gov, OFR.gov, and Archives.gov.

We want you to stay on top of all our initiatives...For example, we will soon blog about a new, currently updated edition of the U.S. Government Manual, coming online soon.

...In the spirit of notice and comment rulemaking, we’re asking our readers to take up the [blog] naming question.  Send us your suggestions through blog comments.

Readers can subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog.

 

Tune into the Sunshine Week 2011 Webcast

Mark your calendar: Sunshine Week 2011 happens 13-19 March. As explained on the Sunshine Week website,

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know.

With an inaugural grant from Knight Foundation, ASNE [American Society of Newspaper Editors] launched Sunshine Week in March 2005. It continues to be celebrated each year in mid-March, coinciding with National FOI Day and James Madison's birthday on March 16.

The nonprofit group OpenTheGovernment.org will present a Sunshine Week program on 18 March 2011. Panelists will assess Obama Administration transparency initiatives and the effect of technology on the way people get and use open government information. The event will be webcast, allowing groups and individuals to attend remotely. OpentheGovernment.org is the lead sponsor of the event; they are supported by co-sponsoring organizations including SLA. If you'd like to view the event from your own computer or host the webcast for a group, consult the information provided on the event announcement.