Legal Research

Things I hate about Government and associated organisations online

By scott

No Links to documents

Publishing press releases mentioning other documents such as consultations without providing a link or url to the document, instead just adding a note under ‘Note to Editors’ that the relevant doc is available from your website. Very helpful. Even more helpful, when ? for example yesterday I read the Press Release on the DCMS site ‘ Libraries must move with the times to win back public support and secure their future says Culture Minister Margaret Hodge’ informing me about a consultation paper I’d like to read. A quick look and there it was : -

Notes to Editors
1. ?Empower, Inform Enrich ? The modernisation review of public libraries? is available from the DCMS.

Note, this didn’t even say the DCMS website, just from the DCMS. It wasn’t on the website of course. [ Thanks to the power of Twitter a problem with the PDF was identified as the problem with the delay in posting the actual doc, which appeared around 3 hours after the press release - thanks to @marxculture ]

It was great this got sorted out, but the basic point that most Press Releases from UK government departments are still drafted and posted to websites like the internet didn’t exist - they still continue to treat press releases as if they were still printed items to post to people / the press. HELLO, did someone say digital economy ? eGovernment? Don’t make me laugh.

PDF Press Releases

Which leads me nicely onto the question of why do the Information Commissioner’s Office publish their Press Releases in PDF format only? They say these are tagged for basic accessibility ? whoop dee do ? but I still don’t understand why they do it at all? Put them on as html page pages and they could be made fully compliant, accessibly wise, and visitors wouldn’t need to have an additional piece of software to read them. Although if anyone from the ICO is reading this and they’d like to explain the logic behind this practice, I’d love to hear it.

No RSS at all

Ok, first off, the UK govt has done much better on this front ? as my govt rss wiki shows (and yes, it needs to be updated to add some new feeds that have now been added on this front) ? but I’m still at a loss as to why an organisation such as the Financial Services Authority (FSA) still doesn’t have any RSS output? Seriously, what gives here? One of the biggest regulators we have and it still operates in the dark information ages. Not good enough, really.

Giant URL competition

Step up, The European Court of Justice. The URL to the opinion of AG Mengozzi in Case C-171/08 - European Commission v Portuguese Republic is:

http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en&jurcdj=jurcdj&newform=newform&
docj=docj&docop=docop&docnoj=docnoj&
typeord=ALLTYP&numaff=&ddatefs=25
&mdatefs=11&ydatefs=2009&ddatefe=2&
mdatefe=12&ydatefe=2009&nomusuel=&
domaine=&mots=&resmax=100&Submit=Rechercher

I mean, come on, what is this all about? How about some short, common sense, permanent URIs? Too much to ask?

So endeth the rant …

Full post as published by Information Overload on December 02, 2009 (boomark / email).