This story reports on the results of a survey done by newspaper employees who were "dispatched to every city and county in the state [Virginia] in September to see how the 134 local governments responded to requests for public information that is supposed to be available under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act."

Access to public data hard to come by, by Harry Minium / The Virginian-Pilot Daily Press Hampton Roads, Virginia (December 31, 2006)

The results were hardly encouraging for citizens who want to see how their government works, advocates for open government said.

A little less than half the media representatives saw the requested records that, under state law, cities and counties have to provide.

About one in every four times, the person seeking the information was denied access to what's supposed to be public information.

"Unfortunately, some localities just have a predisposition to keep things secret," said Forrest "Frosty" Landon, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

We've posted two new govdocs videos to our audio/video promotion page. The videos are:

• Marines Get Around! (approximately 1 min, posted 12/24/2006) - Roundup of documents showing how active Marines have been in our nation's history. Posted to CHBN, YouTube, and MySpace.
• Shield of Freedom (2 min, posted 12/30/2006) - USCG documents set to the tune Coast Guard's Chief Petty Officers March.

These videos close out the set of military services videos I produced.

If you or someone you know have produced any kind of video or audio spot promoting depository libraries or government information in general, please send us the link to the spot.

New book reveals censorship's perils By Dave Zweifel, Capital Times (Madison WI) Dec. 27, 2006.

The book is First Into Nagasaki by George Weller and Anthony Weller

George Weller was a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the war’s end in September 1945, under General MacArthur’s media blackout, correspondents were forbidden to enter both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But instead of obediently staying with the press corps in northern Japan, Weller broke away. The intrepid newspaperman reached Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb hit the city. Boldly presenting himself as a U.S. colonel to the Japanese military, Weller set out to explore the devastation.

More here:

George Weller, Reporting from Nagasaki NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, June 25, 2005

Long-Suppressed Nagasaki Article Discovered Democracy Now! August 5th, 2005

The Resource Shelf had an entry about “Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2006”, truthiness. This word is not new as it was voted the 2005 word of the year by the American Dialect Society.

My favorite new word for 2006 came from my work (I work for an aerospace company on a big defense program). A year-end communication from Program Management cautioned us to be wary of mosiacing our presentation content (read: Power Points) prior releasing them to the public. That is, we can’t just re-use content that had already been approved for public release; rather, anything and everything must be submitted to a public release process.

Mosiacing? Was April Fools day coming in December? At my first reading, and after I stopped laughing, I tried to make sense of what mosiacing was and what the authors of the memo had against using plain speech in their communication --instead of introducing this strange, unfamiliar word for a simple concept. I also wasn’t sure if they spelled mosiacing correctly. Could they mean mosaicing, with the “i” and the “a” reversed? And were they borrowing, re-purposing, a word used in a different context (in this case, art and design –as far as I can tell). And does the use of such a word help clarify the meaning of what they’re trying to say? Who knows. I doubt even the authors of the memo even know. The expressionationing of my truthiness over my confusionation to my management was high over their use of mosaicing. The use of the word mosaicing applied to public release of information also cannot be clarified by simple googling (another top word in 2006 according to M-W this year).

It seems making things ‘clear’ or to ‘clarify’ something is a recurring goal for governments, corporations, and big defense programs (my program spends over 3 billion a year). I come across statements about clarifying or making clear something very often in my work. In fact, my work is all about making things clear: I am a policy analyst and deal primarily with Department of Defense IT and information management policies. I read the policy documents (memorandum, DOD Instructions, Directives, etc.) and try to make clear to my managers what is important of those policies in relation to our program.

We strive for clarity: work statements have the word ‘clarity’ appearing often enough to be elevated to the status of a 'power word' --its concept has importance but no 'clear' way to attain it. It seems that just by saying we’re going to be clear, or say we intend to strive for clarity (suggesting that things are currently unclear and not moving toward clarity), we’ll somehow arrive at it, becoming, perhaps, a CMMI Level 5 of Clarity Maturity Organization (that's a joke; there is no CMMI for Clarity that I know of).

Stating a goal of clarity but then getting the opposite result seems typical in all bureaucracies (government, corporate, and that weird hybrid, defense programs). I confess i have made statements like 'we need to clarify the refinement of requirements' or ‘our architectures are made to clarify user needs’ in my email and presentations. The 2006 report on government responses and preparation for Katrina, “Failure of Initiative” has a lot to say about clarity in language and intentions between government to government, and government to citizen.

Are we hopeless? I don't think so. PlainLanguage.gov , started around 1994-95, defines ‘Plain Language’ as

Plain language (also called Plain English) is communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it. Language that is plain to one set of readers may not be plain to others. Written material is in plain language if your audience can:
• Find what they need;
• Understand what they find; and
• Use what they find to meet their needs.

In the world of digital government information, the kind I use and enjoy, I seem to get at all three of these bullet points: when I find what I need, it's usually understandable and it usually meets my needs. In the corporate experiences I’ve had, the opposite is true. As corporations do more work in place of government (literally, doing the work of government for a fee), can initiatives like PlainLanguage.gov help? Perhaps. Certainly, a resource like it take us a long way.

One big case that can affect Net Neutrality is the AT&T proposed buyout of BellSouth. There is news that AT&T has made big concessions to network neutrality, but early reports from those who've looked at their memo carefully show that AT&T is not making any concessions at all. According to TechDirt, "AT&T promises not to violate network neutrality on a network they never intended to use that way, and carves out permission to use it on their new network, where they had planned all along to set up additional tollbooths."

• And By The Time Anyone Reads The Sneaky Fine Print On AT&T's Concessions, The Merger Will Be Done TechDirt (December 29th, 2006)

And David S. Isenberg has more details and links.

• Loophole watch in AT&T-BellSouth merger by isen, December 29, 2006

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, "Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees."

• How Old Is The Grand Canyon? Park Service Won’t Say Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, December 28, 2006

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed. In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes. Moreover, unlike a library the approval process is very selective. Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item -- the creationist book.

Do you have 4 minutes to learn about net neutrality? Check out this excellent video from SaveTheInternet

• Save The Internet! video

Then, Sign the petition. And post it on your own govdocs web site!

Here is a follow up to one of the stories in last week's post (Government Openness and Government Secrecy).

Jon Wiener, who teaches history at University of California Irvine and who placed a FOIA request for FBI files on John Lennon in 1981 writes in the current issue of The Nation about what we learned from the release of the last few pages of these files.

• The Last Lennon File by Jon Wiener, The Nation December 20, 2006 (January 8, 2007 issue).

Why did four administrations fight in court to prevent the release of information that was already public? ... The answer, I think, has nothing to do with John Lennon. It has everything to do with the FBI and the Justice Department, and what they see as the principle they are defending: that they alone should define what constitutes a national security secret. They argued repeatedly in this case that the courts should defer to the FBI, which supposedly has expertise on national security that judges lack. The FBI and the Justice Department don't want the courts telling them they are wrong about what constitutes a national security secret--and they certainly don't want the ACLU telling them.

For the ACLU too, it's not just about John Lennon, it's also about a principle--but a different one: the principle of freedom of information. In a democracy, the government's information belongs to the people; the people have a right to know the information in government files--and the FBI and the Justice Department do not get the last word in deciding what to release and what to withhold. That's what the Freedom of Information Act says: It gives the people the right to appeal decisions to withhold documents; it gives federal judges the power to examine documents the FBI is withholding; and most important, it gives judges the power to order federal agencies to release documents they conclude have been improperly withheld. That's the principle at the heart of the FOIA, and it's at the heart of the Lennon FBI files case.

I'm not exactly sure what to say about this new training video on the VA website, but i feel compelled to pass it along. Thanks to Boing Boing (Department of Defense remakes Gilgamesh online Thursday, December 28, 2006) for pointing to it:

• The Epic of Gilgamesh. Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management, a Flash animation

There are lots of good translations of Gilgamesh. Try this one to refresh your memory: The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, by Anonymous, Edited by Morris Jastrow, Translated by Albert T. Clay

Happy holidays all! I thought you'd get a kick out of the following:

Wise Bread noted that the FBI considered "It's a wonderful Life" -- one of the most tear-inducing films ever IMHO!! -- to be communist propoganda.

Unfortunately, Wise Bread only linked to two pages of the more than 2,000 pages in the FBI's Communist Infiltration- Motion Picture Industry (COMPIC) FOIA file, but I left a comment to point readers there as well as to let them know about the FBI's FOIA Reading Room.

File 10a has a list of films from 12/31/55 (this was a running memo from 1942 - 1958!) which include such subversive titles like A Song to Remember (bio of Chopin), Buck Privates Come Home (abbott & Costello), Keeper of the Flame (Tracy & Hepburn) and Salt of the Earth, the only film ever actually banned in the US, but later deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

BoingBoing has more background on HUAC and the blacklisting of many directors, actors, and writers.

As a follow-up to our previous story on the media deal between the Showtime Channel and the Smithsonian Institution, FGI would like to draw the attention of our readers to this General Accountability Office report on the deal:

Smithsonian Institution: Additional Information Should Be Developed and Provided to Filmmakers on the Impact of the Showtime Contract, GAO-07-275, December 15, 2006

They conclude in part:

It is too early to determine the long-term impact of the contract. Access to the Smithsonian's collections and staff for research purposes remains unchanged, but the direct impact on filmmakers will depend largely on how many request permission to use a substantial amount of Smithsonian content. So far, 6 of 117 filming requests have involved a substantial amount of Smithsonian content--2 were denied and 4 were approved as exceptions. The Smithsonian contends that it will be able to accommodate the same level of filming activity as it has in the past based on its historical analysis of filming contracts. GAO found that this analysis was unreliable because it was based on incomplete data and oversimplified criteria. In addition, concerns have been raised about damage to the Smithsonian's image and the appropriateness of limiting the use of the collections held in trust for the American public.

Hmm, what is appropriate about the limiting the use of the collections held in trust for the American public? I can't really think of anything. Can you?

The report suggests that the Smithsonian might see as much as $150 million from this deal after 10 years. While this may seem like a lot, this amount could only fund about 13 hours of our current occupation in Iraq. This is estimated from the Iraq Study Group's estimate of $8/billion per month.

Couldn't we spare a day's worth of Iraq funding this year to make deals that limit national collections unnecessary?

The Georgia Public Library Service has developed and is now using Evergreen, an an open source, enterprise-class Integrated Library System (ILS) "that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run."

See Librarians stake their future on open source by Michael Stutz, Linux.com (December 21, 2006 )

The Evergreen catalog "has many features and innovations that are lacking in non-free systems. It does on-the-fly spellcheck and gives search suggestions and adds additional content, such as book covers, reviews, and excerpts. The Shelf Browser shows items ordered along a "virtual" shelf built out of the holdings of the entire system. Patrons can create "bookbags," which are lists that contain a selected collection of annotated titles. Bookbags can be kept private or shared as a regular Web page or as Atom or RSS feeds."

The President decided to ignore some reporting requirements in a Palestinian Authority related bill, and we've updated our Presidential Signing Statements page to tell you how.

On December 21, 2006, President Bush signed S. 2370, the "Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006" , but made a statement indicating he intends to ignore reporting requirements:

The executive branch shall construe section 3(b) of the Act, which relates to access to certain information by a legislative agent, and section 11 of the Act, which relates to a report on certain assistance by foreign countries, international organizations, or multilateral development banks, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information that could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

According to the final version of the bill on Congress' Thomas web site, here are the "offending sections" in the President's view:

Section 3(b):

`(b) Exceptions- Subsection (a) shall not apply with respect to the following:

`(1) ASSISTANCE TO MEET BASIC HUMAN NEEDS- Assistance to meet food, water, medicine, health, or sanitation needs, or other assistance to meet basic human needs.

`(2) ASSISTANCE TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY- Assistance to promote democracy, human rights, freedom of the press, non-violence, reconciliation, and peaceful coexistence, provided that such assistance does not directly benefit Hamas or any other foreign terrorist organization.

`(3) ASSISTANCE FOR INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE PALESTINIAN LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL- Assistance, other than funding of salaries or salary supplements, to individual members of the Palestinian Legislative Council who the President determines are not members of Hamas or any other foreign terrorist organization, for the purposes of facilitating the attendance of such members in programs for the development of institutions of democratic governance, including enhancing the transparent and accountable operations of such institutions, and providing support for the Middle East peace process.

`(4) OTHER TYPES OF ASSISTANCE- Any other type of assistance if the President--

`(A) determines that the provision of such assistance is in the national security interest of the United States; and

`(B) not less than 30 days prior to the obligation of amounts for the provision of such assistance--

`(i) consults with the appropriate congressional committees regarding the specific programs, projects, and activities to be carried out using such assistance; and

`(ii) submits to the appropriate congressional committees a written memorandum that contains the determination of the President under subparagraph (A).

Section 11:

SEC. 11. REPORTING REQUIREMENT.

Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, and annually thereafter, the Secretary of State shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report that--

(1) describes the steps that have been taken by the United States Government to ensure that other countries and international organizations, including multilateral development banks, do not provide direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority for any period for which a certification described in section 620K(b) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (as added by section 2(b)(2) of this Act) is not in effect with respect to the Palestinian Authority; and

(2) identifies any countries and international organizations, including multilateral development banks, that are providing direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority during such a period, and describes the nature and amount of such assistance.

FGI leaves it to others to interpret section 3(b) above, but in denying the validity of Section 11, the President appears to be saying that he considers mere reporting of aid to the Palestinians by other nations and groups to be harmful to the national interest.

Does this mean that the Administration is aware of non-humanitarian aid to the Hamas-led government, but doesn't want to make that public? If so, it must be coming from our "allies" in the Mideast, since presumably Iranian or Syrian Aid would be splashed across the front pages of papers.

These are the kinds of questions we are left with by a secretive administration.

How many of these signing statement will it take to convince Congress that any "compromise" legislation based on reporting requirements in exchange for new powers or resources is doomed to failure? Will this pattern of allowing the administration to pick and choose from the laws it obeys continue with the new Congressional majority? FGI hopes so.

This week we've updated our Audio and Videos page to include three new videos and a link to an University of Minnesota tutorial on creating streaming media.

The latest video posted is one of mine and it highlights Army resources in depository libraries:

Remember, this registration page is for YOUR videos and audio spots as well. If you are creating govdocs promotional materials, PSAs, etc that others can use, let us know. Either post the link to comments on the videos page, or send the link to admin AT freegovinfo.info.

We're aiming to update the page once a week on weekends, and it would be great to include links to your govdoc related content.

Given the Government Printing Office's intention to "digitize a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications" (GPO's Digitization and Preservation Initiatives) and the mass digitization of books that the Google Books Library Project and the Open Content Alliance and others are doing, this is a good time to read Karen Coyle's excellent overview of mass digitization.

• Mass Digitization of Books by Karen Coyle. The Journal of Academic Librarianship Volume 32, Issue 6 , November 2006, Pages 641-645 [subscription required]
• Mass Digitization of Books by Karen Coyle. [Preprint]

Coyle notes that "Google has clearly stated that their book project is solely aimed at providing a searchable index to the books on library shelves. They are quite careful not to promise an online reading experience...." and says that "we have little idea how the digitized books will be used." She then raises some important questions:

...who does this digitized library serve? How does it serve users? How will the system respond when there are ten million books in a database and a user enters the query “civil war”?

...Will some users read these books online in spite of the relative inconvenience of their formats and the computer screen's technology? Will it be possible to use the digitized pages to produce something more e-book like?

In a related article, (An ATM for books, By Emily Maltby, FORTUNE Small Business Magazine, December 14 2006) Maltby describes Espresso - a $50,000 vending machine that is "nearly consumer-ready" that will debut in ten to 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007. "The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes." All this sounds very similar to the Internet Archive Bookmobile.

Lapham's Quarterly and the Institute for the Future of the Book "present a new form of discussion and critique -- an annotated edition of the ISG Report on a website programmed to that specific purpose, evolving over the course of the next three weeks into a collaborative illumination of an otherwise black hole."

Iraq Study Group Report, With a running conversation in the margins...

We've opened up the report to a quorum of informed sources both foreign and domestic, asking them for notes, commentaries and corrections at any point in the proceedings that incites them to further clarification or forthright translation into plain English. The respondents are free to address any one of the seventy-nine recommendations, to doubt an assertion or deconstruct a paragraph, to bring to bear an historical perspective on an opaque sentence or a clichéd chapter heading, to lend the ballast of their collective marginalia to the hot air balloon of a text sorely in need of tethering to the ground of common sense and geopolitical reality.

—Lewis Lapham

Also see: live, on the web, it's the iraq study group report! if:book (12.21.2006)

The Government Printing Office issued this announcement via e-mail today:

Library Services and Content Management recently completed an exploration of avenues to provide distance education opportunities, particularly Web-based, to meet the training needs of the Federal depository library community. As a result of a demonstration conducted with volunteers from the depository library community, we are pleased to announce the procurement of Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) for use in the FDLP in 2007 by GPO and Federal Depository Library participants. We are currently working on an implementation plan, and we will keep the depository community informed on progress.

The depository library community has long expressed a need for GPO to provide training. While the annual Federal Depository Library Conference and Interagency Seminar meet with rave reviews, staff of many depository libraries cannot avail themselves of these opportunities because travel to Washington, DC is required. With OPAL, GPO will be able to provide training that users can access in their own facilities.

OPAL provides the following functionality:

* Live presentations
* Text chatting
* Voice-over IP
* Synchronized browsing through PowerPoint presentations
* Archived sessions
* Podcasting
* Presentations open to anyone
* Private or limited attendance at sessions

Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) was purchased as an interactive Web-based meeting and conferencing service, administered by the Alliance Library System, the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center, and the Illinois State Library Talking Book and Braille Service. Visit OPAL online at:
.

I have attended several OPAL programs, including the demonstration referenced above. I am very pleased to hear that GPO has acquired use of this technology for the depository community. I look forward to seeing the implementation plan and encourage people to go to GPO/FDLP OPAL programs as they become available.

Great step GPO!

We are posting to FGI to let you know about an ongoing project to deal with depository CD-ROMs (and other legacy formats). This post talks about recent pilot projects and a pending NSF proposal to test emulation and initiate migration activities.

As some of you may know, there was a presentation on CD-ROMs at the Fall depository library conference, chaired by Lisa Russell of GPO.

Julie Linden of Yale and Gretchen Gano of NYU talked about a migration pilot they have been working on
slides

Kay Collins was also on the panel; her presentation on weeding CDs and
DVDs - which ends up where we all seem to end up, considering a
cooperative effort to solve the problems of this collection! - is here:
slides

The other panelist was a computer science professor from Indiana
University, Geoffrey Brown, who is exploring "virtualization" (emulation) as a
strategy for long-term access to government documents distributed on tangible
electronic media. His presentation slides are here:
slides

Shortly after the conference, Professor Brown invited Julie and Gretchen to collaborate on an NSF proposal to fund his emulation work. A significant aspect of the proposal is to
involve "domain users" (NSF terminology) - in this case, depository librarians - in testing the emulation environment, contributing CDs that Indiana doesn’t have, contributing metadata, etc.

We will not find out whether it is funded until the middle of next year. In the meantime, we are continuing to think about models and funding for a large-scale collaborative effort to ensure long-term access to the CDs. We welcome suggestions, musings, cautions, leads - anything - from you all. We are planning to put up a web page with information about our project and will let you all know when it is live. What follows is a summary of the proposed grant activities:

*******************************************
Project Summary III-CXT Virtualization of
Government Information in Legacy Formats: Enabling Long-Term
Access to a Large Collection of Digital Documents

Over the past 20-years the United States Government Printing Office (GPO) has distributed important data and reports on electronic media such as floppy disk, CD-ROM, and DVD through the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). This digital document collection, comprised of more than 3000 items with millions of individual files, includes fundamental data on the economy, the environment, the population, the life sciences, and the physical sciences. Accessing many of these items requires installing proprietary and increasingly obsolete software. The goal of this project is to develop technologies supported by a large user community to ensure continued long- term access to these documents (the "FDLP collection") while lowering existing barriers to their use.

This project will generate tools to evaluate the software requirements of this large document collection, and to configure and automate the delivery of individual collections through emulation (virtualization). In addition, the project will extend schemas for descriptive and preservation metadata to document both the contents and technical requirements of the collection.

This collection represents a significant preservation challenge because of its size and heterogeneity, and because the collection exists only on physical media distributed across the many depository libraries. Fortunately, a large community of depository librarians with extensive knowledge of the issues supports the collection. Success in preserving these materials requires actively engaging these users. To encourage and enable their participation, the project will utilize off-the-shelf tools to provide web accessible renditions of the collection and its associated metadata. Participation of these users will range from simply accessing a "virtual" collection, to contributing to the creation of metadata, to configuring and testing document renditions delivered through emulation.

A key technology this project explores is the use of emulation to enable access to documents within their contemporary software infrastructures. While emulation has been frequently discussed as a preservation strategy and has been used successfully for small-scale projects, it has never been explored in the context of a large and diverse document collection. Applying emulation to such a large document collection requires developing technology to automate tasks such as the evaluation of software requirements and the dynamic configuration of specialized emulation environments.

The GPO documents on electronic media are important resources at risk of becoming inaccessible due to obsolescence. Furthermore, many of these documents already present a significant access barrier because they require specialized skills and equipment for installation and because most of the roughly 1260 depository libraries have only selected subsets of the overall collection. An expected outcome of this project is a technical strategy to en- able all depository libraries access to the entire collection with significantly lower technical barriers to access. The primary outcomes of this project are technologies, strategies, and metadata to ensure the long-term access to this important document collection.

Let us know what you think...

Julie Linden --julie.linden@yale.edu, Gretchen Gano --gretchen.gano@nyu.edu, and Geoffrey Brown --geoffrey.brown@acm.org

See our new site for updates on the project

A tip of the FGI hat to Herrick Heitman for pointing us to this list of documents that the Bush Administration has chosen to stop publishing rather than report negative news.

The article appears to be well documented, however I believe that the number of attacks in Iraq has either been unclassfied or was not classified to begin with as the article implies.

I believe this because the Pentagon just issued a report indicating that Iraq violence is at an all time high, and up 22% over last quarter.

I'm travelling for a few weeks so haven't been in touch much. However, I got a chance today to glance at the NYT and was greeted with this very favorable item by Scott Shane (NY Times 12/21/06). An executive order passed by the Clinton administration calls for documents to be automatically declassified after 25 years. The law reversed the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars requested via FOIA requests. "Several hundred million pages will be declassified at midnight on Dec. 31, including 270 million pages at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has lagged behind most agencies in reviews."

This is really great news for historians and advocates of open government. I hope someone from the CA Digital Library's Web at risk project -- or others who are harvesting web sites and documents -- is reading this and will set their harvesting tools to scoop this boon up!

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

Press Release: Library of Congress Launches RSS Feeds News from the Library of Congress (December 18, 2006)

Library of Congress RSS Feeds . The Library's RSS service has launched with the following feeds:

• News
• Upcoming Events
• New on the Web
• New Webcasts
• News from the John W. Kluge Center
• And What's New in Science Reference
• Several feeds on Copyright from the U.S. Copyright Office

As we reach the end of the year, it is a good time to review government openness and transparency and secrecy. There are a number of reports and comments and relevant stories coming out this week that relate to this topic. Here are a few:

The Good the Bad and the Ugly
OMB watch has a useful wrap up in its 2006 Transparency Awards (December 19, 2006 Vol. 7, No. 25). They include The Best New Transparency Law, Warrantless Spying Program, Cutting Toxics Release Inventory Reporting, Closure of EPA Libraries, Proliferation of Sensitive But Unclassified Information Categories, National Archives’ Reclassification, Dismissal of Data Quality Act Case, Acceptance of Increased Use of State Secrets Privilege, and more.

Good news from USDA... and a public interest group
The Associated Press reports that the Department of Agriculture plans to release a database that reports who gets about $56 billion in subsidies (USDA discloses individual farm payments, by Libby Quaid, Yahoo / AP, Dec 19, 2006). It will take them time to do this, but a public interest group is already posting some of the data. The Environmental Working Group has at least two databases of public information, the Farm Subsidy Database and the U.S. Mining Database. These are noble efforts to remix government information and make it more accessible than the government itself does. Bravo! (Thanks to Ted for this story!)

More Good News: Britain will not invade U.S.! John Lennon didn't fund bookstore!
This week saw the release of the last few documents from the FBI's John Lennon files. The Los Angeles Times reports that among other secrets the government fought 25 years to conceal was the fact that two British leftists tried to get Lennon to "finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London" but that Lennon didn't. Why did the U.S want to hide this trivial information? It claimed that releasing it could result in "military retaliation against the United States." Really, that's what they claimed. We still don't know which government shared these secrets with the U.S, but the article says that it is very difficult to believe that it could be any government other than the United Kingdom. "I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents" said historian, Jon Wiener. The ACLU is quoted as saying that the classification of these documents makes it seem that "...the head of document classification for the FBI must be (TV show satirst) Stephen Colbert." See FBI to release last of its John Lennon files, By Henry Weinstein Los Angeles Times (December 20, 2006). The documents will be posted on the Internet today at http://www.LennonFBIfiles.com

Mr. Vice-President: Are You Listening? Award
While Vice President Cheney continues to claim that the people can't know who he consulted when he worked on energy policy for the people (see Blow against open govt in Cheney case), at least one new member of Congress believes that openness is better than secrecy and is leading by example. The New York Times reports that "Representative-elect Kirsten Gillibrand has decided to post details of her work calendar on the Internet at the end of each day..." and comments that "For all the worthy proposals for ethics reform being hashed out by the incoming Congress, a heavy dose of Internet transparency should not be overlooked in the effort to repair lawmakers’ tattered credibility. The technology is already there, along with the public’s appetite for more disclosure about the byways of power in Congress." Congress and the Benefits of Sunshine, Editorial, The New York Times (December 14, 2006)

The YouTube Effect
Finally, an Op-Ed in today's Los Angles Times points out that the ability of citizens to make use of information and repost and remix it makes it harder for governments to lie and cover up misdeads. In The YouTube effect (Op-Ed, By Moisés Naím, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2006) Naím says that a video posted on YouTube disproves a Chinese government claim that soldiers shot Tibetan refugees in self-defense. He notes that "Governments are already feeling the heat of the YouTube effect -- and cracking down online. Almost a third of all reporters jailed this year were Internet journalists. The U.S. military recently ordered its soldiers to stop posting videos online. Iran's government restricts connection speeds to limit its people's access to video streaming." We might add that, if we lose Net Neutrality, we will increase the ability of the private sector and governments to filter and control what we see and who can see what.

What about Depository Libraries?
We stand at a crossroads. Technology provides many new possibilities for individuals and consumer groups and journalists and even politicians and governments to provide more access to more information to more people. But even as we see the possibilities, we see the battles getting tougher and governments going out of their way to control information. As OMB Watch says, The penchant for secrecy in the Bush administration "has pushed the pendulum far from openness and transparency."

As Government information specialists we help people find information, but we rely on tools that are provided by the government and the private sector. Our ability to provide service is both enhanced and constrained by the decisions of these others (our "partners" as we like to call them).

When we give up our collections in the hopes that others (GPO and government agencies) will keep content available, we abrogate our role in the flow of information from producer to user. When we do this we no longer actively select, acquire, organize, and preserve information, but hope others will. When we do this, we change from being an active part of the information flow to a passive spectator of what others do. When we do this, we base our services, not on our work, but on hope: on hope that others will value the same information that we and our users value and that they will do so for as long as we do; on the hope that others will never make choices to cover up, hide, remove, alter, or charge for information.

As much as we'd like to hope that the technology crossroads will lead to more openness, we know as we look back on the battles of the past year that we can't rely on that happening. As much as we'd like to hope that governments will be honest and open, we know they often will not. As much as we'd like to hope that governments will not base information decisions on budgets or politics, we know that all too often they do. As much as we'd like to hope that the private sector will do good things, we know that even the most altruistic among them don't promise to "do good" but promise to "do no evil" and that, by definition, they make decisions based on profitability, not altruism.

We know that "hope" is essential to what we do, but that "hope" is not a policy or a method. We know that we have to do more. We have to be active and fulfill our societal role of ensuring long term preservation and access and usability of government information. We can't do that by relying on others. It is our role to do that and doing less is a betrayal of the trust that our users place in us.

In the issue of AT&T's proposed buyout of BellSouth, Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell's has decided he will not vote even though FCC counsel ruled that he could. His decision "raises the potential that merger conditions are now more likely to include Network Neutrality."

• McDowell Will Not Vote on AT&T, by Kevin Taglang, (December 18, 2006).
• Today's Quotes 12.19.06 (McDowell Decision) by Kevin Taglang, (December 19, 2006):

"I find that I have no choice but to abide by the terms of my Ethics Agreement, heed the independent advice of OGE and my personal ethics counsel, and, ultimately to follow my own personal sense of ethics. Accordingly, I disqualify myself from this matter." -- FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell on his participation in the AT&T-BellSouth merger

"FCC Commissioner McDowell has courageously elevated professional responsibility over expedience." -- Media Access Project

"This is too important a transaction to be clouded by the ethical questions that would have come up had the Commissioner taken part in the proceeding." -- Public Knowledge

EPA Loosens Toxics Reporting, By Erik Stokstad, ScienceNOW Daily News (18 December 2006)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized regulations today that relax the reporting requirements for manufacturing plants and other industrial facilities that use toxic chemicals. The agency says the new rules will encourage companies to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals they emit. But critics are unhappy that the change will allow industry in some cases to conceal exactly how much is used and released.

OMB Watch has documents and commentary on the EPA's plans to relax the requirements for reporting of releases of toxic chemicals on its Toxics Release Inventory Resource Center page.