Library of Congress Website Upgrade

by

Via the Library of Congress blog, it looks like the LOC Website will be getting an upgrade in the coming weeks. They make a good point about choosing between providing RSS feeds and email updates, noting that many more people use email than RSS:

While only a fraction of people on the Web use RSS feeds, something like 100 percent of them use email, and this is just another part of our efforts to get information to people in the way that is most useful to them. You can get a sense for how the email updates will function by looking at the FBI’s Web site.

Happily, they’re not choosing between the two, and have a pretty broad set of RSS feeds already on offer on their RSS page.

 

Of particular note on the existing RSS feeds are the LOC blog feed (whereby I noticed this update post), the digital preservation feed, a legislation update feed from the Copyright office (I wonder if other agencies are doing this?), and a feed of Federal Register items relevant to the Copyright office. (I’m also curious as to the degree of automation in gathering agency specific items to form these feeds. How are they set up, and from where are they gathered? What would it take to reproduce this in other agencies?) Looks like NARA’s got three feeds set up: news and events, today’s document, and Federal Register Documents on public inspection.

The GAO has a great offering as well.
Could the GPO or CAO be close behind?

Know of any other forward looking government information sources?

(Crossposted from the Open House Project blog.)