Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Got Oklahoma Gov't Info?

Since August I've been spending my Monday evenings at the OU SLIS instructing graduate students on Government Information.

Since this is my first time teaching the course I can only hope the students are getting as much out of it as I am (for the record - I'm really enjoying it). If their Mid Term is any indication they are at least discovering a few things. They've been working on a wiki project for ALA/GODORT
GODORT provides a forum for the discussion of problems and concerns and for the exchange of ideas among librarians working with government documents...

The project is the State Agency Databases
In every US State and the District of Columbia, agencies are creating databases of useful information - information on businesses, licensed professionals, plots of land, even dates of fish stocking. Some of this content is available on search engines, but much of it is part of the invisible web.

In any event, no resource we're aware of has tried to pull together all publicly accessible state agency databases until now....

The OU SLIS class has been collecting the entries for the Oklahoma Page.

The finds include everything Oklahoma related - Lottery numbers, Doctor inqueries, County Accessor information, and the list goes on. The Mid Term work is due next week Monday by midnight -- but I think you will agree with a little less than a week left they've compiled an impressive list of state databases available to the public.

I'll mentioned this project to the Oklahoma State Webmanagers Group yesterday, during the meeting at ODL. They seemed interested to know if all their hard work is actually able to be located by the public. What do you think?

2 comments:

Aaron K. said...

This is great stuff, Adri! Your students have done a great job. We never did anything this cool when I took the gov. docs. class in 2004. I don't think wikis were even all that developed back in '04. It's amazing how fast things develop and change. Our government documents cataloger loves this tool, and I'm going to try to get it included in the Metropolitan Library System homepage somewhere.

Aaron Killough--Cataloger
OU SLIS Class of 2004

Unknown said...

This is friggin' sweet! I have it tagged on our del.ic.ous. I bet your students are having a blast with this (I would be anyway).