Tuesday 10 July 2007

50 state database wiki project

An enterprising govdocs librarian from the Alaska state library has started a wiki project to collect and assemble databases of information that state agencies have created. In his introduction he says "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" and the wiki has the worthy goal of gathering all this information together by state. The Pennsylvania page doesn't have any information yet, but you can see what the wiki hopes to be by looking at the state of Alaska page. The idea is to list available databases by state agency - and eventually to provide subject access and federated searching.

1 comment:

Daniel said...

Thanks for mentioning this project of the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force.

Could I interest you or one of your PA based readers into populating the PA page so it won't be empty? :-)

Also, I wanted to say that while I hope that this project facilitates others to provide database listings by subject and federated searching, our aim is simply to build the list of databases.

We figure that once people see the range and richness of what's available, they'll be able to work on how to enhance the value of what's there.

Thanks again for providing some publicity. I can be reached at dan DOT cornwall AT alaska DOT gov if people have questions about the project.