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Open Government Comes to the
Department of State
A case study exploring the Office of the Historian’s migration to web
publication
The Office of the Historian is…
An Office in the Bureau of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State
We were founded by President Lincoln in 1861
We are staffed by 40 full-time historians, ¾ of whom hold PhD degrees (please no light-bulb jokes)
The Office of the Historian…
Researches and writes the congressionally mandated Foreign Relations of the United States documentary series
Writes policy and history related studies for government officials
Creates and distributes its publications in print and online
…does all digital history in-house, little reliance on contractors!
Foreign Relations of the United States
The “Olde” New Media and the “New” New Media
The old website versus the new:The old website, started in 1996, represented our first attempt to disseminate materials online
The new website offers full text search, tools for research and teaching, and data visualization (timelines, maps, etc.)
1996 Website Sample
The post-2001 era Website
Today’s Website (2009+)
The Hoops we Jumped Through
1. A business model used to outsourcing to large IT companies who provide COTS products with little customization
2. Suspicion of non-traditional relational database solutions; unfamiliarity with solutions for large amounts of semi-structured text
3. Suspicion of open source software
Challenges we faced:
Overcoming our own Biases
1. Historian are used to working with paper
2. Historians are critical of giving up print publications
3. Historians are suspicious of the reliability and archivability of digital born products (insert microfiche joke here)
The Hurdles We Face
Everything in the Office is paper-based.
How do we move to a digital workflow?
Big Question:
The Future of Digital Publishing in the Government
• Digital Books (ePub)
• Print on Demand
• Online browsing
From a single master XML file we can deliver many formats…
• Raw data through data.gov
Our Open Platform for Digital Publishing
• TEI: An open standard for encoding and annotating digital texts (a flavor of XML)
• eXist: A free open source native XML database (which combines a search engine, database and a web server)
• XQuery: A W3C standard for querying and processing XML
Our Priorities: • Open standards• Open source software• Contribute back to the community: patches, enhancements, and wikibook articles
Our Other Tools:
• Oxygen XML Editor
• MarkLogic Server
data.gov and the Open Government Initiative
