25 Government Information - Information Venues (Information Research)
Description
This article is from the Information Research FAQ, by David Novak david@spireproject.com with numerous contributions by others.
25 Government Information - Information Venues (Information Research)
links and more at http://spireproject.com/gov.htm
We pay a high price in both direct and indirect taxes for our
government. These are intelligent people, paid to be informed.
Government experts and documents are thus generally detailed, factual
and reliable ... and helpful. It should not surprise you that
government documents have a high quality, tend to have a little problem
with time.
Central to finding government information on the web is the way the
clear organizational structure is replicated online. Each country will
have a primary website with links to the websites of each national
government department. Each state will have a primary website with
links to the websites of each state government department. Each
department website will link to all sub-departments. If you wanted to
see the website for the New Zealand statistical agency, just visit the
New Zealand government website, then look for the statistical agency.
If you wanted to see the website for the Mississippi government agency
responsible for childcare, just visit the US government website, find
Mississippi, then look for an agency that might be responsible for the
family, then keep clicking till you find the page you need.
With a little more maturity, many corporate website were redesigned to
present answers as they are needed by the visitors - instead of having
marketing, accounting and distribution directories, websites were
rearranged to have sections for customer sales, investor relations and
distributor relations. Government website have begun the transformation
too, with websites serving the perceived needs of visitors. Clever
sites will present both structures but some will have an alternative
structure linking you through to the agency website.
* There are two fine internet directories of international government
websites, one by the University of Michigan Documents Center, another
by the University of Southern California.
* There is a specialized, government-only webpage search engine called
GovBot as developed by The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval
(CIIR). Altavista and All-the-Web also let you restrict a large global
search to a specific domain. This allows you to search just for .gov
sites.
* Government Publications are effectively organized in a national
publication database. The US MOCAT database (Monthly Catalog of US
Government Publications), the Australian AGIP (Australian Government
Index of Publications (AGIP) and the United Kingdom Stationery Office
publications list are all free online.
For information not available, many nations permit Freedom of
Information (FOI) requests. This essentially forces government agencies
to release information they can not justify keeping secret. FOI
requests may cost you a token fee (and is often less for members of the
media). The Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) maintains a good FOI
archive (http://www.eff.org/Activism/FOIA/), as does the Society of
Professional Journalists (http://spj.org/foia/index.htm).
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