On May 9, 2013, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 13642, declaring that “the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable.” The announcement coincided with a memorandum outlining the creation of an open data policy that requires government agencies “to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities. This includes using machinereadable and open formats, data standards, and common core and extensible metadata for all new information creation and collection efforts.”
Taken with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s release of the CKAN data management system and OKFN’s announcement that CKAN will be used for data.gov, these moves set a strong example for other organizations to support open data initiatives. The release of government data will be a boon for librarians, digital humanists, and many others, and we look forward to seeing new projects that take advantage of this data.
This post was produced through a cooperation between Lauren Gottlieb-Miller, Chella Vaidyanathan and Amy Wickner (Editors-at-Large for the week), Zach Coble (dh+lib review editor for the week), and Sarah Potvin and Roxanne Shirazi (site editors).