Public Libraries and Open Government Data: Partnerships for Progress
Public libraries have long served as infomediaries between government and the public. This intermediary role, a mainstay of our democratic society, is now more vital than ever: Our profession’s commitments to providing equitable access to government information (Robinson & Mather, 2017; Yoon, Copeland, & McNally, 2018; Bertot et al., 2006; Whitacre & Rhinesmith, 2015) has new urgency, as we support the public in confronting a pandemic, recession, civil unrest, and the associated onslaught of conflicting, misleading, and false information. With the acceleration of open data, libraries can expand the scope of their infomediary capacity to include providing access to valuable structured government information. In fact, as suggested in a previous Library Journal article, libraries have a professional obligation to do so, especially at the regional level (Enis, 2020), and they are beginning to take on a range of roles, as data stewards, publishers, educators, and partners in data stewardship (IFLA, 2020).
Carole Palmer
Nic Weber
Kaitlin Throgmorton
Bree Norlander
Projects in Library & Information Science
- Fines and Fees in Public Libraries
- Data Challenges for Libraries in Africa
- The Effects of Suggested Tags and Autocomplete Features on Social Tagging Behaviors
- Studying Subject Ontogeny at Scale in a Polyhierarchical Indexing Language
- E-rate Funding and Libraries: Preliminary Analysis of Trends Post-Modernization
- How Music Fans Shape Commercial Music Services: A Case Study of BTS and ARMY
- FlashSciTalks: Carole Palmer
- E-rate Funding and Libraries: Preliminary Analysis of Trends Post-Modernization
- Public Libraries and Open Government Data: Partnerships for Progress
- Cross-disciplinary data practices in earth system science: Aligning services with reuse and reproducibility priorities