Oklahoma Supreme Court says no court docs 4 u

Wow - first limiting tax forms to online and now limited court records online - Oklahoma state government is proving to be a growing bastion of anti-convenient access to government information. And seems to be contradicting itself...

Citizen Media Law Project reports:

Earlier this week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court adopted new rules governing public access to court records, cutting off all public access to court records via the Internet and limiting public access to other information that has been available in the past.

When the rules go into effect on June 10, online access to court documents in the Oklahoma Supreme Court and district courts would be limited to court dockets only and parties will be required to redact certain personal information before submitting a filing to the court clerk....

Mind you it's not all bad - honestly some of this "Mandatory Redaction of Personal Data Identifiers" information probably shouldn't be so easily accessible online:

A. Social Security Numbers. If an individual's social security number must be included in a pleading or other document, only the last four digits of that number shall be used.

B. Taxpayer Identification Numbers. If a taxpayer identification number must be included in a pleading or other document, only the last four digits of that number shall be used.

C. Names of Minor Children. If the involvement of a minor child must be mentioned in a pleading or other document, only the initials of that child shall be used. In the alternative, the filer may refer to the child in the manner that shields the identity of the minor in the context of the proceeding (i.e., by symbol [Child A, Child B]; as Doe1, Doe2; or by the child's status in the litigation [Witness, Victim, Ward, Beneficiary]).

D. Dates of Birth. If an individual's date of birth must be included in a pleading or document, only the year shall be used.

E. Financial Account Numbers. If financial account records are relevant or mentioned in a pleading or other document, only the last four digits of these numbers shall be used.

F. Home Addresses. If a home address must be included in a pleading or other document, only the city and state shall be used.

FOI Oklahoma has links to several other articles on the topic and seem to be rather upset about this decision.

Where I do want access to information easily accessible to all - would I want the above information about me freely available online? I mean as now the amount of information that county accessors give online is creepy - I've seen some that show floor plans and photos of the houses - which sure, is great for home buyers but it's also dandy for stalkers and robbers.

So I guess I agree with the judges who issued separate opinions.

..."What I disagree with is the instantaneous restriction of public access to current public court documents on line," Justice Yvonne Kauger wrote in a separate opinion. She was joined by Justice James Edmondson.

"The court made this decision with input only from the court clerks. Others directly affected by the decision - the bar, the bench, the Legislature, the public - were not consulted," Kauger wrote.
...
"However, as a result of this order, not only is the court taking a giant, 30-year leap backwards to a time when the personal computer was nonexistent, the public is now paying for access to a system which is made inaccessible by the order," Kauger wrote.

Senat said the order did not explain why the court feels a lot of information previously available should now be omitted from court documents.

"This is giving far too much weight to what they consider to be sensitive or private information," he said. "Some information is certainly personal, but that doesn't make it private."

I'd be curious to know what some of our fabulous documents librarians in the state think of this.

No print tax forms 4 u!

The Duncan Banner is reporting a little secret Oklahoma librarians have known for a while. And it's a secret that will impact those without H&R Block.

Traditionally this time of year has librarians are found sorting through boxes from the state and getting tax form displays ready for the public -- not this year though:

This tax season, people expecting to get their Oklahoma tax forms at the Duncan Public Library will be in for a surprise.

No state tax forms will be delivered to any libraries, post offices or banks in Oklahoma in the next tax cycle.

Instead, the tax forms will be primarily available online. The Oklahoma Tax Commission will continue to mail tax forms to residents.

Library Director Ann Brown said, “Basically, the State of Oklahoma has decided not to do the bulk mailing. It’s not that we don’t want to carry them. We can’t get them.”
Brown said the library gets quite a few people picking up forms each year and, because of this change, they’ll have to find a way to get the forms or locate a computer to use.

I know at the university we would get a lot of students wanting the paper (normally so they could take it home for mom and dad to help).

“There’s a lot of people who move and the form goes to their old house,” Brown said. “It always seems to penalize the people who can afford it least.”

She said she thought the state was trying to reduce costs by doing away with additional tax forms.

Now the thing to keep in mind - is that the forms themselves are only a few pages - at 10 cents a copy one form will probably cost you less than 50 cents. BUT the directions on how to fill out the forms will cost you because they tend to run many pages. Of course you can always be like me and furniture and say screw the directions and then wonder why you have an extra leg to a chair.

Despite the lack of Oklahoma tax forms, the federal tax forms will still be available at the library, she said. The change will affect only the state forms.

The federal forms will be available starting Jan. 2.

Brown said people can call the taxpayer assistance number at 1-800-522-8165 to request a tax form. The Oklahoma Tax Commission will begin taking requests for forms during the last week of December.

“People can not only request forms, but they can also state they are very upset,” she said.

“It probably won’t do any good this year, but might make a difference next year.”

Although the state tax forms will not be available to be picked up at the library, people can still stop by the library and fill their forms out online.

And don't worry you all don't have to drive to Duncan to use the computers to file your taxes - this applies to other Oklahoma libraries as well. :-)

Government documents on the edge

Several weeks back I bragged on the students in the OU LIS 5143 Government Publication course. Their midterm project was locating, annotating, and wikifying Oklahoma State Databases. And they did a great job.

I was absolutely terrified to teach this course. It was my first time of dealing with government information, on an in-depth level, since 2002. Four years is a long time to be gone in the world of documents librarianship and in that time I was gone the FDLP reset their priorities and Browse Topics had another facelift. But I believe it's a subject with which all librarians absolutely must be familiar -- regardless of which desk or area you work in a library. And that's the approach I took in teaching the course. I type teach -- but I don't know if I really taught that much -- I always hated classes that were heavy on lecture and didn't allow me time to explore the subject on my own so I tried to direct the class that way. Although I wish I had found a way to encourage discussion more in class. Perhaps that's a skill that comes with much more experience than a first attempt at teaching a subject to graduate students allows. And I still have a lot to learn regarding teaching graduate students....But I digress - if the students gained nothing else from spending Monday evenings with me this Fall I at least hope they remember that government publications cover a wide range of topics. Whether it's cooking squirrel or birth control options - if you can make money off of it the government will publish about it.

Of course if the graduate students remember a second thing from the course it should be that marketing your collection is essential - you market to keep funding, expand a patron base, or just to keep people interested -- and sometimes you have to stretch your imagination to do that.
You can do it the form of a youtube post (like below)



Or you can do it in the form of special finding tools - like annotated bibliographies -- and that is exactly what their final projects were. An annotated bibliography of government publications and the topics had to be from popular culture. I know kind of weird but if you know me you wouldn't expect anything less. And I hoped it had the students practicing their search skills for government resources and also it would allow them to see that there is something out there for everyone from the government.

Now to the fun part - with permission of the students -- I've uploaded their final bibliographies to scribd and have linked to them below. Some are better than others - but they all have fabulous parts. So enjoy - and if any of these soon-to-be new librarians apply for a job with your library or archive then give them a try -- because they aren't afraid to try something new and they have a lot of potential.

In no particular order (and not all maybe loaded right away because scribd does have an up loading ques you have to sit in):

Batman
Autism
Extraterrestrials
GATTACA
Gilmore Girls
Rent
Lindsay Lohan
Pulp Fiction
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Romeo & Juliet

So run to your nearest government documents department and give the librarian there a big smile. And then ask them where the government documents are that can help you survive a zombie attack -- because you have a bibliography and or display to make!

Free access to Oklahoma legal notices

Bill Y sends this Library Story:

Oklahoma newspapers have launched a new website that provides the public with free access to legal notices:

http://www.oklahomanotices.com/

>From the site's home page. . .
Government should be accountable to the public and warn citizens of government actions affecting their way of life.

Printed public notice is part of our national heritage. For hundreds of years, newspapers have been the best form of public notice. Oklahoma newspapers take this responsibility seriously and are committed to broad dissemination of notices to the public.

Now you can read the same notices on the Internet that appear in Oklahoma newspapers. It's print power with Internet ease.

Oklahoma newspapers voluntarily created this free site at no cost to government to help citizens find information that affects their way of life.

Inhofe wants to undermine OA

Open Access News is relaying a library story involving an Oklahoman.

It seems Sen. James Inhofe's amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill that would affect the NIH open access mandate.

So what is this OA thing Inhofe is wanting to amend? Well this what it says without amendments...

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

A good summary of legislation surrounding the topic can be found here.

Folks wiser than me, on the specifics, say that Inhofe is adding text that is very similar to Canadian legislation that allows any publishers a loophole to block OA access after the set period of time -- if it doesn't comply with the publishing house policy. So I guess publisher policy supercedes public access to government funded research?

If you have an opinion one way or another on the topic drop Sen Inhofe a line and let him know how you feel.

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?

NYT | A quest to get more court rulings online, and free

Thanks to GOVDOC-L for this story --
NYT A quest to get more court rulings online, and free

SEBASTOPOL, Calif., Aug. 14 — The domination of two legal research services over the publication of federal and state court decisions is being challenged by an Internet gadfly who has embarked on an ambitious project to make more than 10 million pages of case law available free online.

The project is the latest effort of Carl Malamud, an activist who founded public.resource.org in March, with the broad intent of building “public works” accessible via the network, and with the specific plan to force the federal government to make information more publicly accessible.

Last week, Mr. Malamud began using advanced computer scanning technology to copy decisions, which have been available only in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson, and LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

The two companies control the bulk of the nearly $5 billion legal publishing market. (A third, but niche, player is the Commerce Clearing House division of Wolters Kluwer).

He has placed the first batch of 1,000 pages of court decisions from the 1880s online at the public.resource.org site. He obtained the documents from a used Thomson microfiche, he said.

Mr. Malamud, who is a self-styled Robin Hood of the information age, has confounded executives and administrators at organizations as diverse as the Smithsonian Institution, the House of Representatives and the Commerce Department by asserting the public’s right to government information and then proceeding to digitize it and place it in the public domain....

Poster contest for kids!

Ok sure it's from Kansas -- but no reason why an Okie can't win...right?

News to share, the Gov Doc Kids Group presents a poster contest for Constitution Day, September 17, 2007. Any child K-12 is welcome to participate.

Pass the word to teachers, librarians, home schoolers, and anybody else who might be interested. A couple of suggestions--forward this message to other listservs, friends and colleagues, post the form and poster on bulletin boards, and put copies of the contest form out for anyone to pick up.

A gift certificate valued at $125 for an 8-week art class offered by the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will be awarded to a winner from the Kansas City Metropolitan Area.

PRINT AND POST http://govdocs4children.pbwiki.com/f/PosterContestPoster.pdf

The GovDoc Kids Group is made up of librarians from Johnson County Library, Overland Park, KS and Emporia State University, and an archivist from the National Archives-Central Plains. The Group is co-sponsored by Kansas Library Association Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT).

Coburn to increase library funding for 2010!

Ha ha! Made you look!

The real headline from FCW.com is Lawmakers want online census for 2010 (here's additional info as well)

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) can’t understand why the U.S. Census Bureau has decided not to use the Internet for at least some part of the 2010 census.
...
“They could do a pilot so by the 2020 census they are online,” Coburn said after a hearing where he lambasted the bureau's director, Louis Kincannon, about this issue. “I can’t think of a reason not to do the census on the Internet. I don’t think anyone else would disagree with me.”

During the hearing, Coburn pointed to the Internal Revenue Service’s success with accepting tax returns online as an example for Census. He also said if other private-sector financial institutions can operate securely online, there is no reason the census cannot.

“I’m appalled that you are not at least trying to do this on the Internet,” he said. “We don’t have a vision to get this done. I will do everything I can to force the Internet down your throat with amendments. You are living in the past, not the future. I recommend you get on board for 2010.”
...
After the hearing, Kincannon said the 2003 test offered paper and Internet options, while the 2005 test offered only an Internet option.

“Overall, our response rate in the 2005 test was 5.7 percentage points lower than with paper,” he said. ...

As one of the lucky people living in Oklahoma who have fast Internet access at home and work I love the option of being able to file my taxes, banking, and many other things online. Heck I would even complete an online census if given the chance -- but I am also well aware that I am a minority when it comes to embracing technology. Heck, most of my colleagues don't even utilize technology in the same way or to the extent that I do. So I have to say I disagree with the Honorable Mr. Coburn.

The past several weeks I have been traveling to various libraries in Oklahoma and talking with kids and adults who do not have (or have limited) Internet access at home. These folks are lucky enough to have a local library with computers and Internet access. Yet many still have problems printing their tax W2s off the Internet when their employer only makes them available that way. So how would those Oklahomans be expected to interact with an online census form? Or does Oklahoma have such an over whelming response rate it can afford to miss the not so tech savvy folks? Or what about the many in Oklahoma who do not have Internet access or a computer at home and also do not have a library with convenient hours or stable equipment near them? Is the area Coburn represents not rural at all? So they don't have to worry about missing out on the information that would be obtained from a census? Better yet, will he set up mobile computer census labs to enable seniors, the poor, and non-tech savvy to get census assistance needed? Or will this online census be achieved by sampling the urban wired areas and to hell with the rural?

My observation is -- as more government services move online or have options available for online completion the more libraries are required to fill the information gap. And this isn't just public libraries -- academic libraries also have to step in and help college students figure out federal student loan forms, tax filings, etc -- yet the libraries obtain no additional funding (and rarely free classes from federal agencies) to help educate or train the public or staff on these online government endeavors. Before any significant part of the census is moved online the people need to be assured that everything and more is being done to insure an accurate census for all demographics.

Many of our elected officials are demanding agencies cut spending by moving information retrieval and dissemination online -- yet they don't understand (nor care to) what it entails or who it impacts. Many are focusing so hard on their political legacy they forget what the world is like for those not so privileged. Heck they are even willing to force not well thought out change down our throats -- so open wide!

Job Posting | Ada

Job Title: Cataloging/Government Documents Librarians/Instructor
Organization: East Central University
Location: Ada, Oklahoma,
Description: Cataloging/Government Documents Librarian/Instructor

Librarian position with Instructor/Assistant Professor/Tenure-track, if eligible. East Central University (ECU) is a student-centered regional state university located in Ada, Oklahoma. ECU offers thirty-three undergraduate baccalaureate degree programs in arts and letters, business, education, mathematics and sciences, nursing, and the social sciences. Eight master's degrees are offered in education, human resources, and psychology. ECU's 4,500 students come from 24 countries and 25 different states. About 70% of the 165 faculty members hold doctorates.

DUTIES: Managing the cataloging/technical services and government document units; supervising two full-time paraprofessional staff; shared reference and library instruction; and serving as faculty liaison and collection development in assigned subject areas.

QUALIFICATIONS: Required - ALA-MLS, excellent communications skills, strong public service orientation, computer literacy skills, knowledge of AACR2, LC and Dewey classification, MARC formats, and OCLC. Preferred - experience in cataloging, government documents, an academic library, and with INNOPAC Millennium. T

Application Information:TO APPLY: Send letter of application, unofficial copies of all transcripts, and names/addresses/email addresses/phone numbers for three references to: Ms. Leslie Martin, Director of Human Resources, East Central University, Ada, OK 74820. Review of applications will begin July 23, 2007 and continue until the position is filled.