Advertising on government websites? The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is trying it. It’s billed as a pilot project, and here is an excerpt from the Web Advertising Pilot Project page:

The pages with advertising are on a wsdot.com address instead of the wsdot.gov address because federal guidelines prohibit government agencies from selling ads in the .gov domain.  Banner ads are currently for sale on the popular ferry vessel watch and twelve ferry schedule Web pages.  During the pilot project, advertising space will be available on other WSDOT Web pages such as mountain passes and traffic conditions.

The project is not new–the press release is from December 2010–but it was new to me. WSDOT had commissioned a Website Monetizing Feasibility Study (PDF), released in January 2010 and linked from the project page.

Governing magazine recently reported on it in Click Here for More Revenue, 6 September 2011, by Jessica Mulholland.

Kudos to SLA Government Information Division member Jennifer Boteler for her article Masters of Information published in the current issue of the Federal Highway Administration newsletter Public Roads. The article describes the work of transportation librarians and their collaboration with public and private transportation libraries and information providers. Along the way, Jennifer makes key points about librarians’ roles as information filters, innovative researchers, organizers of information for retrieval, and networkers extraordinaire.