LISNews: Librarian News

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

This project got its inspiration from Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), an astronomy project which has a database of 1 million galaxies that researchers asked regular folks to classify as ellipical, clockwise spiral, or anticlockwise spiral. They aimed for and got at least 20 classifications per galaxy. If a particular galaxy was classified a certain way by 80% of users who assigned a classification to that galaxy, that classification was accepted. This "person on the street" data was compared with a small subset (50,000) of galaxies that professional astronomers had managed to classify on their own. The researchers found that there was pretty much total agreement between the professional and amateur assessments. Documents are more complex than galaxies. :-) , but if 9 out of 10 people tag an epa document as air quality, then it's probably about air quality. -- Read More

In response to a congressional mandate that the Environmental Protection Agency restore closed libraries, the agency said it will proceed with modernizing its library network, leading some people to believe the EPA will not resume physical library operations. Molly O'Neill, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Environmental Information, issued a statement Monday that said, "EPA continues to modernize its library network to enhance access to information for EPA employees and the public."

Buried in two short paragraphs within the voluminous omnibus appropriations bill Congress sent this week to President George W. Bush is a Christmas present for EPA scientists and anyone else that wants to use the library network of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Congress ordered the EPA to restore its library services across the country and earmarked $3 million for that purpose, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, PEER, a national association of workers in natural resources agencies.

A Press Release From Judicial Watch says the National Archives told U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson during a December 17, 2007 court hearing that a portion of Hillary Clinton's White House office records will be ready for release by the end of January 2008; after which it will notify President Clinton. Under the Presidential Records Act, President Clinton has upon notice thirty days to review the documents. The National Archives will also provide a status report of President Clinton's review by March 1, 2008. The records include Hillary Clinton's White House daily schedule.