Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Free Government Infomation's Best. Titles. Ever. is back! It's now a tumblr, it's hilarious as ever, and it's managed by the amazing Aimee. Come for the lulz, stay for the muskrat meat. Thanks, GPO and Pueblo, Colarado.

This mab of the London Tube is rendered entirely in CSS! It's hasn't taken advantage of that for accessibility, but it'd be easy: a positioned off-screen header before each line, some text to announce junctions of two lines.

In response to "Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people":

Christopher Myers: "The Apartheid of Children’s Literature" in the NYT.

The mission statements of major publishers are littered with intentions, with their commitments to diversity, to imagination, to multiculturalism, ostensibly to create opportunities for children to learn about and understand their importance in their respective worlds. During my years of making children’s books, I’ve heard editors and publishers bemoan the dismal statistics, and promote this or that program that demonstrates their company’s “commitment to diversity.” With so much reassurance, it is hard to point fingers, but there are numbers and truths that stand in stark contrast to the reassurances.

And père. Walter Dean Myers: Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?

Simple racism, I thought. On reflection, though, I understood that I was wrong. It was racism, but not simple racism. My white co-worker had simply never encountered a black chemist before. Or a black engineer. Or a black doctor. I realized that we hired people not so much on their résumés, but rather on our preconceived notions of what the successful candidate should be like. And where was my boss going to get the notion that a chemist should be black?

Two links today which were both partially inspired by the 20 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

First, the depressing one: Via Jennison Mark Asuncion, Dennis Lembree identifies several accessibility gaps on the home page of the new section508.gov web site. The site was launched partially in celebration of the 20 year anniversary of the ADA, and some of the accessibility gaps Lembree finds are whoppers: overly styled text instead of heading tags, for example. As Jennison said, what does it say when the chief US gov agency promoting IT
accessibility is not where it needs to be with their own site?

But let's follow with a much more inspiring post: jesse_the_k: "20 Years and a Day for the Americans with Disabilities Act". This essay inspires me to see all the good we've done in two decades. From jesse_the_k:

So, thanks for my life, ADA: many mundane things, and a few great big ones.

The law is not enough; as Cal Montgomery taught me:
Discrimination is always illegal; only activism makes it unwise.

And something I don't say very often, because I'm still pissed off about certain comments about atheism, But thanks, George H. W. Bush, for signing the ADA into law. Because of that law, I have a job.

My office at work in the most pleasant of locations (notwithstanding its windowless and freezing environments). Situated in the stacks, surrounded on all sides by LOC E-P, so practically every nonfiction book I decide I want to read is right there around me.

My favorite walk to my workspace ("favorite" here meaning "I only have to use my hands once") goes right to government documents, and because our government documents section uses compact shelving, my route is slightly different every day. When I see an interesting looking book or pamphlet, I often grab it to bring back to my desk.

Some of my recent perusals:

( Bulletin of the Department Of Labor: Volume VI, 1901 )

( Report on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, with Illustrations, by Sheldon Jackson D.D., General Agent of Education in Alaska. 1896 )

( Coastal-change and glaciological map of the Northern Ross Ice Shelf area, Antarctica: 1962-2004, Geological Investigations Series Map I-2600-H, 2007 )

( US Support for the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. The Secretary Of State. April 11, 1979 )

Public.Resource.org's suggestions to Obama's transition team on improving public domain access to government resources are fabulous. I hadn't known about FedFlix [FedFlix on the Internet archive, Fedflix on YouTube], but what a fabulous resource: Public.Resource.org and NTIS teamed up together to make public domain digital copies of many government videotapes.

Or how about their idea for The Library of the USA, which would not only create a fantastic archival series of curated documents, but would be a nice New Deal-style public works jobs program in a time where even libertarians are beginning to realize we need one.

And nobody can deny that right now high-speed Internet access is part of enfranchisement in modern society, and a program to bring high-speed Internet to more rural parts of America would be fabulous.

We are in prime time to do both so much good and so much harm. Traditionally, government information has been printed by the GPO, an organization which knows that its mandate from United States code includes permanent public access, and knows that all work of the United States government is in the public domain. Their digitization efforts include an understanding of the public domain. But these days, the US government publishes many documents directly to the Web, without involving the GPO, and the individual departments responsible for that publication can be unaware of their responsibilities to the public. Comedians make jokes about Dick Cheney and his shredder, but the problem goes beyond illegal government programs and secret laws. Evil people will always do evil, and it's our responsibility to stop them, but a lot of what's going on now is just carelessness and ignorance. If government departments don't know they have a responsibility to publish into the public domain, if by bypassing the FDLP with direct-to-Web publication they don't realize they are bypassing a mandate to permanent public access, then it doesn't take any evil whatsoever to deny the public our right to permanent access to these public domain materials.

Some government offices, such as the Government Accountability Office, are already on the right track. Let's make sure the new administration keeps us going the right way.

Some library, book, archives, records, baseball fandom, and government information musings and links just so I can clear the tabs out of my browser again: ( Cut to save your screen real estate )

Here's another great one from free_govt_info: "Expect more from ExpectMore.gov". ExpectMore.gov provides performance reports on man government programs. If you want to be depressed, check out the list of programs marked as "ineffective", which includes programs such as Amtrak:



If it's not obvious, I vote for #1.

Anyway, the search engine is non-existent, but the transparency (we have a moderately effective "Geothermal Technology" program? An adequate "CDC: Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis" program? Only four DoE programs ranked "effective"? Who knew?) is truly awesome.

If you're not reading free_govt_info, consider it. A few days ago they linked to The American Presidency Project's database of all presdential signing statements. Did you know that George Bush, Sr. felt that "To provide for the minting of commemorativecoins to support the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games and theprograms of the United States Olympic Committee, to reauthorize andreform the United States Mint, and for other purposes" impinged on his constitutional authority?

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In other linkage, from openaccess_rss, a hilarious and apt analogy to the current academic publishing model:



It goes on, getting more painful with every line.

And in incredibly depressing news, judges have been citing Wikipedia in verdicts. Copiously.