[LINK] Australian Government web sites

[Kevin Littlejohn]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 02:18:23PM +1000, hartr@interweft.com.au wrote:
> On 29 Nov, Kevin Littlejohn wrote:
> 
> > My standard complaint here.  If there's standards for Metadata and Information 
> > Provision, why aren't some of those standards in wider use for, for example, 
> > press releases?  Given most press releases end up on the web, but in anything 
> > from plain text to pdf...
> 
> I would prefer that the docs I put up on Interweft's web site used
> metadata correctly (or at least adhered as closely as seems reasonable)
> to these standards (given that I am only very much a part time web
> master).
> 
> Can you (or someone else on link) point me at an online version of these
> standards - or preferably fairly short but explicit guidelines?


Hrm.  My email was fairly explicitly referring to standards for govt. -
particularly thinking of AGLS
(http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/user_manual/agla_metadata_elements.html)
(Thanks Jan and others for pointing me at this some time ago)

See, when I started in on archiving press releases, it was my naive belief
that there'd be some central feed site, maybe pushing out XML or similar
encoded press releases with a standardised set of metadata, and my life would
be simple.

It turns out that finance.gov.au puts out the "official govt" press releases
in a particular format (title, source, url, and snippet - with url
pointing to anything from text to pdf on any of a number of different
servers, with no set format to help extract the actual release
programmatically), and various other organisations (the various state
govts, state opposition and other parties, federal opposition, etc) all
put out their press releases via many different channels, in many different
formats, mostly without the <sarcasm>vast wealth of metadata the
finance.gov.au stuff has</sarcasm>.

I'd love to hear from some of the journos on-list as to whether you all
have a better source of info than us unelightened mugs have.  I'd dearly
dearly love to work out how to encourage the various bodies responsible
to feed their press releases into a central system somewhere, so people
"on the street" can perform meaningful searches over them (imagine a service
that will forward you any press releases from your local member, plus
anything matching particular search criteria such as "federal environmental"
or whatever).

Anyway, that's my soapbox.  Well, one of them.

KJL