I’m pleased to present my first VoxPopuLII post on open data for folks who aren’t exactly open data people: librarians like you and I. In a nutshell: there are lots of goals surrounding open government data, and frankly, you’ve got to set your own goals because your needs are unique to you. I’m all in favor of transparency, but I’m willing to say “yay accountability,” while also saying “yay projects that help me support my mission and impress the folks who give me money.” Enjoy!
Information in everything.
Nice post, Megan. I haven’t been a regular VoxPopuLII reader, so I’m just catching this now.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation and contributed what I could to the #freeTHOMAS effort. More recently, I’ve been working on a public domain THOMAS scraper and bulk data producer (it works pretty well – Scout is using its results now). So I care a lot about this stuff!
But I do respect your POV as an individual librarian that needs to bring back immediate ROI to your institution. It’s always fair to point out that the bulk data that advocates like us are pushing for is not in and of itself immediately useful to most people.
I do believe that most of us are realistic about expressing that particular fact when we ask for it. But we are asking for it because we believe in the power of that next step – what the developers, researchers, and professionals of the world will do with that data, including making applications, tools and analyses that make the data meaningful to regular folks. It can’t just be the government who decides how the data should be presented, so someone’s got to be asking for this as their Number One, since for so many people it is necessarily their Number Two.
I’ll have a post up on Vox PopuLII soon myself, touching on a lot of this stuff, in the context of why we built Scout. I’ll be interested in your impressions!