Hauling Data: Is There a Chance of Derailment?
February 13, 2025
Another dinobaby write up. Only smart software is the lousy train illustration.
I spotted some chatter about US government Web sites going off line. Since I stepped away from the “index the US government” project, I don’t spend much time poking around the content at dot gov and in some cases dot com sites operated by the US government. Let’s assume that some US government servers are now blocked and the content has gone dark to a user looking for information generated by US government entities.
If libraries chug chug down the information railroad tracks to deliver data, what does the “Trouble on the Tracks” sign mean? Thanks, You.com. Good enough.
The fix in most cases is to use Bing.com. My recollection is that a third party like Bing provided the search service to the US government. A good alternative is to use Google.com, the qualifier site: command, and a bit of obscenity. The obscenity causes the Google AI to just generate a semi relevant list of links. In a pinch, you could poke around for a repository of US government information. Unfortunately the Library of Congress is not that repository. The Government Printing Office does not do the job either. The Internet Archive is a hit-and-miss archive operation.
Is there another alternative? Yes. Harvard University announced its Data.gov archive. The institution’s Library Innovation Lab Team said on February 6, 2025:
Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. It will be updated daily as new datasets are added to data.gov.
I like this type of archive, but I am a dinobaby, not a forward leaning, “with it” thinker. Information in my mind belongs in a library. A library, in general, should provide students and those seeking information with a place to go to obtain information. The only advertising I see in a library is an announcement about a bake sale to raise funds for children’s reading material.
Will the Harvard initiative and others like it collide with something on the train tracks? Will the money to buy fuel for the engine’s power plant be cut off? Will the train drivers be forced to find work at Shake Shack?
I have no answers. I am glad I am old, but I fondly remember when the job was to index the content on US government servers. The quaint idea formulated by President Clinton was to make US government information available. Now one has to catch a train.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2025
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