GPO hunts for fugitives
GPO hunts fugitives. I’ve got an idea: convince the various agencies to add RSS feeds to their websites. Then GPO catalogers could simply open their favorite aggregator and catalog/index/capture everything that comes through. OR…they could give $$$ to a private vendor to come up with some highly technical solution that doesn’t answer the problem.
As more federal agencies publish government information on Web sites without notifying GPO, important documents that should be indexed, catalogued and preserved for public access in the Federal Depository Library Program have instead become “fugitive” documents, according to GPO officials.
Their answer to the problem is to use Web crawler and data-mining technologies to find them. GPO officials request that companies with those technologies submit proposals by June 2 for services they describe as “Web harvesting” in a recent solicitation for bids.
[Thanks LISnews]
May 27th, 2004 at 3:32 pm
It looks like the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau is using RSS to deliver documents in just the way you are suggesting. Brillent idea! Sorry I was too thick to see the logic when I was on LISNews!