[LINK] ICT Predictions 2009 - little OT (gov't reports example)

[Anthony Hornby]

http://www.handle.net for the handle system - sorry didn't check link
prior to sending ...

FAQ's page makes for good reading http://www.handle.net/faq.html


Anthony

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Anthony Hornby
<anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tom & Linkers,
> some comments interfiled below.
>
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Tom Worthington
> <Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au> wrote:
>
>> There does not appear to be any legal requirement for government agencies to
>> send paper copies of reports to libraries. Changing to electronic copies
>> would save about two tonne of paper per year*.
>
> I think they are  required to ... not that this means we always get them ...
> http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/service-improvement-and-delivery/publishing-information/lds.html
>
> <snip>
> Under the LDS Australian Government departments and agencies are
> required to provide one copy of each publication that they produce to
> each participating deposit library. Deposit libraries comprise the
> National Library of Australia, State Libraries and publicly funded
> universities identified under the Higher Education Funding Act 1988
> [External Site].
>
> The LDS supplements legal deposit [External Site], a statutory
> requirement under the Copyright Act 1968 [External Site] and
> equivalent State legislation, administered by the National Library of
> Australia and State reference libraries respectively. Please note that
> by complying with the LDS, publishing agencies also meet their legal
> deposit requirements.
> </snip>
>
>
>> If the electronic version of a report is the "Best copy" (the technical term
>> for the most complete version of the work), then that would be acceptable to
>> supply. Instead of actually mailing, or e-mailing, electronic copies, it
>> should be sufficient to put them on the web and tell the libraries where
>> they are.
>
> The format would be acceptable to me but isn't the major problem. As
> to "putting them on the web" we'd like to harvest the information from
> some well ordered source this would save everyone time.
>
>> AGIMO could change the procedures to encourage electronic distribution, with
>> the paper option retained for the few items where this is not suitable. If
>> the agencies put some metadata in the reports to identify them, then
>> specialized crawlers can find them (such as the NLA and AGIMO ones). The
>> obvious identifier to use is an ISBN in the appropriate Dublin Core element.
>> The agencies would then not need to send any report forms or any printed, or
>> electronic, copies anywhere: just publish to their own web sites and let the
>> crawlers find them.
>
> Problem is government agencies merge and change names constantly so
> basic web links would likely break fairly quickly. Far better to have
> them in repositories somewhere for preservation / persistent links.
> State libraries / NLA / Government run would all be good options.
> Universities also all have repositories now and if the central
> repository was setup for simple harvesting of items everyone else
> could replicate whatever they wanted to preserve locally very simply.
> As to ISBN's why not ditch that and give departments handle
> (handle.net) prefixes and allow them to use whatever suffix they like.
> Failing that let them buy into the commercial DOI scheme which seems
> to just be a commercial implementation of handle.net anyway
> (http://www.doi.copyright.com.au/). Handle is a far more flexible
> discovery mechanism than ISBN for many reasons and used in the bulk of
> Australian university repositories and worldwide.
>
>
>> Agencies could help the process by improving the quality of their reports,
>> making them easy and efficient to read online, instead of just facsimiles of
>> printed documents. This would reduce the cost of production and
>> distribution.
>
> Seems perfectly reasonable to provide layout and presentation
> appropriate for the medium.....
>
>>> All government reports should also be released under a creative commons
>>> licence to allow us to copy and preserve them with ease. ...
>> The Queensland Government seems most willing to consider this, perhaps
>> because the Australian CC experts are at QUT in Queensland. Jessica Coates
>> talked about it at the Open 2020 Summit last year:
>> <http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=9&topic=11>.
>
> Nice advantage of CC is it is simple to end users to understand and
> also simple to allow metadata harvesters to bring back the rights also
> as these are nicely standardised.
>
>> * CALCULATING THE WEIGHT OF GOVERNMENT REPORTS: There are 104 agencies
> ......
>> will be about 2,231 t.
>
> Most of it waste *sigh*.
>
>
> Regards Anthony
>