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good news via the govtrack mailing list

Carl Malamud of public.resource.org, with funding from a bunch of places including a small bit from GovTrack’s ad profits, announced his intention to purchase from the Government Printing Office documents they produce in the course of their statutory obligations and then have the nerve to sell back to the public at prohibitive prices. The document to be purchased is the Code of Federal Regulations, the component of federal law created by executive branch agencies, in electronic form. Once obtained, it will be posted openly/freely online.

More here: http://public.resource.org/gpo.gov/index.html

And Carl’s letter to the GPO:
http://public.resource.org/gpo.gov/the_honorable.html

It’s pretty sad that it has to come to this…but it’s also pretty awesome that it’s happening.

I got a chance to meet Jennifer Rigby of the National Archives UK at the LinkedDataPlanet Conference in New York City (thanks Ian). Jennifer is the Head of IT Strategy, and told me lots of interesting stuff related to a profound shift they’ve had in their online strategies to:

Provide and Enable

So rather than pouring all their energy into making applications to visualize archival resources, the National Archives have recognized that making machine readable resources available to the public (in formats like RDF and RDFa) is really important to their core mission. In addition to providing services and data, they are trying to enable an ecosystem of innovation around their assets–or in their words:

• We will allow others to harness the power of our information, leading to a far wider range of products and services than we could provide ourselves.
• We will continue to work with commercial partners to provide online access to millions of records.

Jennifer said we can look forward to an announcement around OpenTech2008 (July 5th) about a set of important publications that are going to made available by the Archives as RDF and RDFa. In addition I heard about how they work with website data harvested by Internet Archive to create a resolver service for transient publications on the web.

Hearing how a big organization like the National Archives can come to this realization of “Provide and Enable”, and then start to execute on it was really encouraging–and inspiring. It is also refreshing to see people recognize, in writing the importance of semantic web technologies:

We have started exploring new ideas and technologies, including using RDFa for publishing the Gazettes. The way we now publish legislation has a key role to play in the further development of the semantic web.

I don’t know … but it sure is nice to see that 26 Nobel Laureates at least understand the direction libraries ought to be headed:

As scientists and Nobel laureates, we are writing to express our strong support for the House and Senate Appropriations Committees’ recent directives to the NIH to enact a mandatory policy that allows public access to published reports of work supported by the agency. We believe that the time is now for Congress to enact this enlightened policy to ensure that the results of research conducted by NIH can be more readily accessed, shared and built upon ­ to maximize the return on our collective investment in science and to further the public good.
…
The public at large also has a significant stake in seeing that this research (researched funded by the National Institute of Health) is made more widely available. When a woman goes online to find what treatment options are available to battle breast cancer, she will find many opinions, but peer-reviewed research of the highest quality often remains behind a high-fee barrier. Families seeking clinical trial updates for a loved one with Huntington’s disease search in vain because they do not have a journal subscription. Librarians, physicians, health care workers, students, journalists, and investigators at thousands of academic institutions and companies are currently hindered by unnecessary costs and delays in gaining access to publicly funded research results.

Exciting times for libraries and the medical profession! I just hope they can convince Congress.

As announced on the jisc-repositories list there is now a US counterpart to the EU Petition calling for Open Access.

We, the undersigned, believe that broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America’s taxpayers to obtain an optimal return on their investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or the members of the public. Today, the Internet and digital technologies give us a powerful means of addressing this problem by removing access barriers and enabling new, expanded, and accelerated uses of research findings.

The petition was put together by the Alliance for Taxpayer’s Access in response to the 28,000 odd enlightened folks who signed the EU petition. I was encouraged to see prominent sponsor icons for American Libraries Association, Association of College & Research Libraries on the US petition.

I haven’t been tracking the Open Access movement as well as I should have–but I did take a few seconds while drinking coffee at the breakfast table this morning to sign the petition. The movement seems to be really making a lot of progress recently.

Via a bit of synchronicity Caroline Arms sent a message around at $work about the recent Emerging Libraries conference at Rice. Apparently Brewster Kahle and Paul Ginsparg had a meeting of like like minds. I guess it’s not surprising considering their roles in bringing libraries and archives into the computing age with The Internet Archive and arXiv. What is surprising is that it took this long. These two projects are wildly successful, living and breathing examples of Open Access projects.

The audio for all the conference presentations is available from Rice…including the very listenable Universal Access to Human Knowledge (Kahle) and Read as We May (Ginsparg).

Tim Reiterman has a good article about imperiled federal libraries, and their collections…some of which are already ending up in dumpsters.

I think we are living in a world of digitized information…In the end there will be better access.

(Linda Travers of the EPA)

Which makes me wonder what “end” she is talking about. I think there is a real danger as more and more information goes online that people simply assume that paper collections are no longer necessary.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the libraries that are currently in danger the most belong to the Environmental Protection Agency, whose library budget is being slashed by 80 percent. These collections and others that are in danger (like NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) have collections that support research into global warming.

If you are interested in learning more and what you can do about it ALA has a useful resource page that allows you to contact your representative using a service similar to EFF’s action center.

If there world’s population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this.

(thanks Jeroen)

I saw this in yesterday’s Washington Post and just learned it won the Best of Photo Journalism Award for 2006. The picture says it all, but the story is just as harrowing. What a sad mess.

Here’s to making sure that code4libcon 2007 is a watershed moment for women library technologists.

code4libcon 2006 in Corvallis wasn’t all male, but it was largely…and I can only remember two women speaking to the audience. To a large extent code4libcon was modeled after technology conferences like yapc, pycon, oscon, barcamp, etc–which have much the same sort of ratio. But libraries are different because the majority of people who work in libraries are women. So it was a bit surprising that more women didn’t end up at code4libcon 2006.

2006 did get organized practically overnight with a very small (male) clique in an irc room (that’s not always well behaved, but mean well–hey it’s IRC). When people actually started signing up and sending in papers to the more formal discussion list I think we were all kind of surprised. I seriously thought we were just going to be hanging out in some random space with free wifi, and it turned into this really successful event.

Some folks like Dan Chudnov, Art Rhyno, Jeremy Frumkin and Roy Tennant started thinking and talking early about making the conference appeal to women library technologists. But it seems that either the voting (open to all, but all men for some reason) somehow subconsciously counteracted this.

AFAIK the keynote voting is still going on, and I imagine you can still suggest speakers. There will only be more voting to do as we get into selecting presenters. If you’d like to participate just email Brad LaJeunesse and he’ll hook you up with a backpack login. Also, sign up for the code4lib and code4libcon discussion lists. Luckily Dorothea Salo is involved and vocal and I’m hoping that other women technologists will get involved too. This is a grassroots thing after all, not some sort of LITA top-tech trends panel. It’ll become whatever we want it to be.

It’s nice to see that Dr. King’s papers found a home at his alma mater–and won’t be locked away in somebody’s safe.