Radreffies' blogs

author:  Brosgol, Vera

Russian 1.5 generation immigrant teenager Anya Borzakovskaya falls down a well and meets a ghost. The ghost is scary at first, then helpful, then scary again and in the end helps Anya learn valuable lessons and quit smoking.

reviewdate:  Apr 13 2013 isn:  978-1-59643-713-5

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It was another busy week at the State Agency Databases Project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

For a full list of last week's activity, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are the week's highlights:

PAGE REORGANIZATION

April Sheppard reorganized the Oklahoma page into the project's standard format. We hope this will make Oklahoma resources more directly comparable to those listed for other states.

DATABASES ADDED

COLORADO (Samantha Hager)

Minority and Women-Owned Businesses - a searchable database of minority and women-owned businesses from the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Find businesses by name, topic, or NAICS.

MARYLAND (Siu Min Yu)

Waste Kitchen Grease Transporters Search - From the website, "Search here for certified transporters of waste kitchen grease. You may search by the type of certificate, the name of the company registered, or the license plate of the vehicle registered."

SOUTH CAROLINA (Ed Sperr)

State Salaries Over $50,000

WYOMING (Karen Kitchens)

Wyoming State Trademarks - This database covers state trademarks issued between 1906-current located at the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office. New applications and renewals are added monthly. This database will ultimately include the inactive applications and mark images for Wyoming trademarks located at the Wyoming State Archives, back to the first state trademark in 1881.

PROJECT WIKI SEEN AS USEFUL TO JOURNALISTS

We were pleased to learn that State Agency Databases Project got a brief shoutout from staff at NPR Stateimpact. At around the 52 minute mark of Basics of Data Journalism (April 11, 2013) at http://vimeo.com/63929281, the "State Agency Databases wiki" compiled by ALA is cited a very useful resource. We're happy to see the news of this project get beyond the library community.

Finally, this will be the last activity report for April due to some vacation time. We expect the next activity report will be May 5th.

Video from NPR Digital Services on the value of government information resources in journalism. Provides examples of data driven stories, discusses where to find data and how to effectively use data without making "rookie mistakes." Also contains information on using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get data not currently accessible.

If you watch till the end, you'll see a mention of the usefulness of the State Agency Databases project at about 52:00.

The Basics of Data Journalism (April 11, 2013) from NPR Digital Services on Vimeo

I had a good time yesterday on a panel about Web archiving and digital preservation at the Society of California Archivists General meeting 2013 (slides to be posted there soon). The panel was organized by Scott Reed at the Internet Archive, and included Scott, Claude Zachary (University of Southern California), myself and my Stanford colleague Henry Lowood.

One of the coolest things -- other than the fascinating keynote by Dr. Michael Cohen, who talked about "Culture Wars: Engaging Undergraduates in Documenting the Crisis in California Through the Historian's Eye Project" -- was learning about the site archiveready.com. This is a handy little tool to test your Website's archivability. Paste in your url, and it goes through and checks things like standards compliance, accessibility, CSS, site maps, external media and proprietary objects like flash or quicktime, and lastly whether or not your site is already being collected by the Internet Archive's Wayback machine. Freegovinfo did pretty well in the test with an overall rating of 78%. We lost points for having some external images and external scripts (google analytics and a facebook badge), but I don't consider those things critical to the site for the long-term. How does your site do? Are you ready to be archived?!

author:  Silverman, Sarah

"At first glance you might find the above [diary entry] interesting but that's because it's me, and you obviously find me interesting enough to read this book."

"Another nice thing about the Jews is that their rabbis don't make a habit of sexually violating their youngest and most vulnerable congregants. Of course, there are obvious reasons for this. For one thing, Jewish clergy are allowed to fuck and masturbate and marry. The first two of these activities work amazingly well for relieving sexual tension. … Oh, also, the Jewish clergy are allowed to have vaginas. As a general rule for any large organization, if you're looking to reduce the rape-iness of it, try hiring more women."

"I have comic friends who are gay. Some remain in the closet, and I don't blame them. It's not just out of fear of prejudice--it's fear of the gay community taking ownership of them. Suddenly, they are a gay comic, saddled with responsibility to represent."

"Please make this book be finished. I'll be honest: I kind of blew it off." from the Afterword, by God, quoting Silverman.

reviewdate:  Apr 11 2013 isn:  978-0061987076

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author:  Dratch, Rachel

Rachel Dratch's compelling memoir is compelling. She tells the story of her fifteen-years-in-the-making overnight success, some failures (that she often managed to turn around on her second try), her friendships, getting knocked up in her mid-forties, and other stuff.

reviewdate:  Apr 7 2013 isn:  978-1-10-157990-9

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Co-presenter: 

Emily Drabinski

Lia Friedman

Event: 

Questioning Authority: Standard Three and the Critical Classroom, ACRL 2013

Abstract: 

Jim and I had a great time last week talking with Thomas Hill about FGI, the FDLP, and the future of government information. Tom is a librarian at Vassar College and hosts the Library Café, a "weekly program of table talk with scholars, artists, publishers and librarians about books, ideas, and the formation and circulation of knowledge." Thanks Tom for the opportunity to talk about the future of the FDLP and government information and for allowing us to upload a copy of the audio file to the Internet Archive.

If you provide public service for legal or government information, you have probably come across "private laws" and may have wondered what they are. These are not secret laws (which are laws that the public cannot even see!). These are private laws, which means that they usually deal with immigration issues or claims against the government. You might find this CRS report of interest:

• Procedural Analysis of Private Laws Enacted: 1986-2013, by Christopher M. Davis, Congressional Research Service, RS22450 (April 9, 2013)

Hat tip to Steven Aftergood!

Some libraries, library organizations, and library managements believe they can "manage" their collections better by first digitizing historic collections of books and other paper and ink information sources and then weeding their collections of these materials. Such projects will reduce the number of copies held in the aggregate by all libraries (Lavoie, Schonfeld, Schottlaender, Yano). One problem that these projects often overlook is the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between the legal standing of paper and digital objects with regard to access and use. Too often, creators of digital objects attempt to impose copyright restrictions on the digital objects even if the originals were in the public domain. Additionally, digital objects are often encumbered with licenses and technological restrictions that limit how they can be used and who can use them. The digital objects are often just not as accessible or as usable as the original print. How bad would it be if we threw away our print collections in favor of digital collections that are less accessible and less usable?

Randal C. Picker, who is Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law and Senior Fellow at the The Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory University of Chicago Law School, has written a paper and created a presentation on just this issue.

• Picker, Randal. 2013. Access and the Public Domain. Rochester, NY: University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics. Coase-Sandor Institute For Law And Economics Working Paper No. 631.
• Picker: Access and the Public Domain (Fordham IP Talk), YouTube (Apr 6, 2013).

  "This is a version of a talk that I gave at the Fordham IP Conference on April 5, 2013. It is based on my paper Access and the Public Domain, which was published in the San Diego Law Review."

  
  

In the paper, he considers how legal issues affect digitization projects such as The Internet Archive, JSTOR, Google Book Search, HathiTrust, and THOMAS.

His take-aways from the presentation are:

1. Access rights and use rights are different animals and operate in different legal settings.
2. Even though the public domain is coming online, the financing models for the projects will result in efforts to restrict use ina variety of ways.
3. Those efforts will be situated at the intersection of technology controls, contract, terms of use, copyright and the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).
4. Perhaps a truly public public domain, something like the DPLA perhaps, is required to avoid the path of non-copyright control over the public domain.

Hat Tip: ARL Policy Notes.

Endnotes

Lavoie, Brian F., Constance Malpas, and J.D. Shipengrover. 2012. Print Management at “Mega-scale”: a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-05.pdf (Accessed July 19, 2012).

Schonfeld, Roger C., and Ross Housewright. 2009. 28 What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Ithaka S+R. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/what-withdraw-print-colle....

Schottlaender, Brian E.C. et al. 2004. 82 Collection Management Strategies In A Digital Environment, A Project Of The Collection Management Initiative Of The University Of California Libraries, Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. University of California, Office of the President, Office of Systemwide Library Planning. http://www.ucop.edu/cmi/finalreport/index.html.

Yano, Candace Arai, Z.J. Max Shen, and Stephen Chan. 2008. Optimizing the Number of Copies for Print Preservation of Research Journals. Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research. http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~shen/webpapers/V.8.pdf.

The Digital Access to Legal Information Committee (DALIC) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has created a new website to host information about the status of online legal materials in every state with respect to authentication, official status, preservation, permanent public access, copyright, and universal citation.

• State Online Legal Information, American Association of Law Libraries.

  AALL and chapter volunteers researched primary legal materials in their states to determine if online legal materials are trustworthy and preserved for permanent public access. This website brings together information from AALL's National Inventory of Legal Materials and updates AALL's Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories, 2007 State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources and 2009-2010 State Summary Updates. Information is provided about the online Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court Opinions in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the following categories*:

  Official Status
  Authentication
  Preservation
  Permanent Public Access
  Copyright
  Universal Citation

  The state pages will be updated as information changes and as we learn more about developments in the states. AALL’s Digital Access to Legal Information Committee (DALIC) will monitor this site and periodically check in with AALL’s state working groups to ensure the accuracy of the information. DALIC also welcomes your additions or corrections.

• New Website for State Online Legal Information, By Elizabeth Holland, American Association of Law Libraries, Washington Blawg (April 9, 2013).

See also:
State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources (2007).

Sunlight Foundation's OpenGov Champion of the month is Sandra Moscoso. Sandra is a mom of two public school students in Washington DC, and a member of the Capitol Hill Public School Parent Organization (CHPSPO) -- oh and she just happens to manage an open data portal at the World Bank’s financial sector.

...she and other CHPSPO members were able to collect data to show how the schools that had a full time librarian had better test score results than those who had lost theirs due to budget cuts. The group was able to use that figure as an effective basis for their request to the city to restore funding for librarians.

I love runs without pressure. Without the need for anything to be accomplished other than have fun. 

Saturday's three hour was a lot of fun. I had some pain at times and had a fairly decent page, but nothing too crazy. Yes, I pushed hard at the end, but mostly, I figured I'd do whatever and life would be good. And best of all, I had a friend who believed in me and pushed me to win.

Yesterday, I headed up to Bear Mountain with Iliana, Georgia, JT, Beth, and Kristen. We had a little too much fun running, getting lost, looking at maps, hiking, eating pretzels, getting lost, laughing, getting lost...it was a good time. We planned on sticking together, having time on our feet, and having fun.

Sometimes, having fun is the most important thing.

Really, always it is.

Wikileaks today announced the launch of the Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), a searchable database with the release of Special Project K: the Kissinger cables -- ostensibly, PlusD will include other records in the future. WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic records -- including cables from previously released Cablegate cables, intelligence reports, and congressional correspondence -- from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976, the period during which Henry Kissinger was secretary of state and national security advisor. The documents were formerly confidential, classified, or labeled "NODIS" ("no distribution") or "Eyes Only". The database can be accessed at http://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/.

According to Wikileaks:

...Most of the records were reviewed by the United States Department of State's systematic 25-year declassification process. At review, the records were assessed and either declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata records declassified. Both sets of records were then subject to an additional review by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Once believed to be releasable, they were placed as individual PDFs at the National Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection. Despite the review process supposedly assessing documents after 25 years there are no diplomatic records later than 1976. The formal declassification and review process of these extremely valuable historical documents is therefore currently running 12 years late.

According to the Guardian:

The data, which has not been leaked, comprises diplomatic records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, covering a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence.

Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had been working for the past year to analyse and assess a vast amount of data held at the US national archives before releasing it in a searchable form.

WikiLeaks has called the collection the Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), describing it as the world's largest searchable collection of US confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications.

Assange told Press Association the information showed the vast range and scope of US diplomatic and intelligence activity around the world.

Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state and national security adviser during the period covered by the collection, and many of the reports were written by him or were sent to him. Thousands of the documents are marked NODIS (no distribution) or Eyes Only, as well as cables originally classed as secret or confidential.

Assange said WikiLeaks had undertaken a detailed analysis of the communications, adding that the information eclipsed Cablegate, a set of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks from November 2010 and over the following year. He said WikiLeaks had developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with complex and voluminous data.

Top secret documents were not available, while some others were lost or irreversibly corrupted for periods including December 1975 and March and June 1976, said Assange.

Co-presenter: 

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Janice Radway, moderator

Event: 

Archivo-Punk: on the Politics of Preserving Riot Grrrl & Girl Zines

Abstract: 

author:  Ferrer, Caridad

Soledad is an 18-year-old Cuban-American dancer from Miami making plans to go to NYC and audition for ballet companies when she's presented with the opportunity to go pro with a drum and bugle corps. (Right? But it sounds like a really cool thing, and a great way to spend the summer after graduating from high school, not to mention with the hottie who suggested her for the gig.)

reviewdate:  Apr 5 2013 isn:  978-0-312-65004-9

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author:  Georges, Nicole J.

That queer feminist Nicole Georges would call regressive right-wing meanie Dr. Laura Schlessinger for advice about how to navigate a family secret is what makes Nicole and her story so interesting and surprising. Maybe it's just me, but I had the idea that Nicole, a long-time maker of zines and minicomics, was tough and a little scary. (There's a good chance I have her minicomics collaborator Clutch McBastard to blame for that impression.) The Nicole I met in this graphic memoir is not scary; she's scared. Dr. Laura makes her cry, her mom makes her go silent, and she's easily hurt by her girlfriend, Radar.

reviewdate:  Apr 1 2013 isn:  978-0-547-61559-2

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As March link checking was completed, activity has slowed at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. But we reached a a major milestone as we once again have full coverage of the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

We started the year with six or seven "orphan" states but that was quickly whittled down to just Hawaii, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Those stayed in the orphanage for a couple of months and recruiting here and govdoc-l wasn't helping.

So three of our project volunteers stepped up and took on second states. I'd like to offer a loud round of applause to:

• Jenn Zuccaro, for taking on Hawaii in addition to West Virgina.
• Paul J McDonough, for taking on Minnesota in addition to Vermont
• April Sheppard, for taking on Oklahoma in addition to Arkansas.

Now, for this week's activity. You can find a full listing of all the week's changes by visiting http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED:

MICHIGAN (Michael McDonnell)

GeoWebFace - GeoWebFace is a mapping service provided by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. It can be used to access all kinds of geologic information. Accessible layers are too numerous to list here but include; mine and quarry data, geologic and hydrological information, land ownership and leasing information, and the location and type of oil and gas wells. There are also links to USGS topographic maps.

WASHINGTON (Marilyn Von Seggern)

Fertilizer Product Database - Database of fertilizer products currently registered for distribution in Washington. Two major pieces of information in the database are the nutrient guarantees and the levels of nine heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, mercury, molybdenum, lead, nickel, selenium, and zinc) found in the product and for which the state has developed soil loading standards.

SUBJECT PAGE ACTIVITY

HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONER DATABASES (Lynn McClelland)

Louisiana

LPN Disciplinary Actions - Current disciplinary actions, by type

Historical LPN Disciplinary Actions] - Lists of disciplinary actions, back to November 1997.

I was bitterly disappointed that my cousin scheduled his wedding on the same day as the Umstead 100 Miler. (Who does that? Really? Well duh, he's not an ultrarunner!) Family's first, so I spent the night drinking vanilla martinis and pina coladas and watching Gram dance to Gangnam Style (a moment I will never forget for the rest of my life!) instead of going to bed early (and no, Ray K's idea of "Just have Wayne drive you down post-wedding didn't work...esp since the wedding ended at 1am and Umstead started at 6am - a 10 hour drive away).

Then I found that Broadway Ultra Society was having a three AND a six hour run. SCORE! Okay, so we would be an hour from the start by the wedding, but Wayne would not get up at 6am to drive me to be there at 8am for the six hour start. Okay, okay. So I'll have another martini. Instead, we slept in until 8am, got ready, did some family stuff, and then drove over to the 3 hour.

I def felt those martinis - and no, I was not drunk or did not have THAT much to drink anyway. But normally I don't have that much...and I get a little more sleep.

So I decided, "I'll do the 3 hour easy. Just relax, run with my friends." Erin and Gabriel were running the 6 hour (and both did awesome, Erin got 11th woman and got a nice trophy and Gabriel also got a trophy and is a total animal for coming back after not having run for WEEKS due to his appendix being removed!). And Emmy was there so we started off and began chatting easily - catching up, talking about what friends were doing, wondering how Tony was doing in Umstead, our training, our families, our lives, the usual stuff, just having fun. And I felt tired, yes, but soon, the miles flew by and the time.

At the start, Emmy was saying, "You are going to win this," and I said, "Please, I ran 24 hours last weekend and went to a wedding last night, so no thank you." Towards the end, Emmy said, "Cherie, you're going to win." I told her, no, another woman was in the lead - and I pointed her out.

"Cherie, you can get her! GO! GO CHERIE! GO, fast, GO GO GO GO GO!" 

And I took off. I was somehow pushing hard the last four minutes, and I passed the first place woman. Emmy was somewhere behind me, which I didn't realize but ultimately, Emmy took second. I finished, and as my poor feet were tired, I sat down. Then a bunch of dogs began barking like crazy, so I moved over, sat down, and began catching up with Trishnul about running and races and training and herbs and all sorts of things.

Then we went back to the gazebo. I was pleased to learn, not only had I won first place woman in the 3 hour, but I won the Grand Prix Award for the races last year (that GLIRC and BUS put on, with NY Ultrarunning) - first for women 30-39. Pretty sweet, I got a nice plaque. And then I ate a bunch of pizza and made Wayne go shopping at Home Goods and then I went home. Ahhh....

I didn't have a lot of time and wasn't feeling good. I ran to the gym and began lifting weights. I went to the first "fat thigh" machine (that's what I call it; it's great for strengthening hip and IT and muscles) and then moved on to the next. A much older lady sat down on the seat I had just vacated.

"Oh my. Oh my. Did you really do all of this?"

I had the weights set to over 200 pounds. I nodded.

"That's amazing. That really is. But you need to be careful, not to do too much. I don't do too much. But I'm glad I can."

She began telling me - she had worked in the schools as an aide, never had any time until ten or fifteen years ago when, in her early seventies, she retired. Her children were all raising their own kids, and now, without a job, without children, she had time to pursue her own interests. In her eighties now, she went to the gym several times a week, to lift, use the various cardio machines, go to the aqua-aerobics classes.

"I am so impressed. That's incredible," I told her. Eighties and going to the gym.

She asked me what kind of working out I did. I admitted I liked to run a lot.

"Now, don't do too much. Those marathons..."

"Well, I don't exactly do marathons. I've done them before."

"They're too much. People get hurt."

I told her I run 50 milers, 100 milers, 24 hours. She seemed stunned.

"I don't get hurt. I pull back. The second something doesn't feel good - I stop. I'm not using that machine," I said, pointing to a hamstring strengthening machine, "because I hurt my hamstring months ago and it's still not strong enough to lift that. I don't have a problem stopping, and that's why. If you stop the first sign - you often don't get a second sign."

We went back to my racing and she asked me questions. Then she said, "You're an inspiration. You really are."

I blushed. "No, you are an inspiration. I hope when I'm your age, I'm still doing it."

She smiled and I had to leave, go to work, to the grind. But it's hard to leave the active world, where we all inspire each other.