Friday, August 22, 2008

The Death of Census.gov?

Following up on yesterday's piece about the SEC's EDGAR changing, the J.J. Hill Library wonders whether other government sites will follow. "A recent study from Princeton researchers suggests that the government give up creating their own Web sites altogether and instead focus on creating data feeds of government information to third party site creators. Interesting, in that this would surely result in better-designed sites, troubling in that it may bring agendas into the mix of public data. We’ll keep a keen eye on the developments."

I opined: "How will this play in the copyright issue? Currently, most govt stuff can't be copyrighted, but if the vendor brings 'value-added', then who owns what?
Maybe I'm being overly cynical. Probably not."

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