Here's some great news for those of you who have not heard: the UN Treaty Series Collection online can now be accessed without subscription! That's right ... "Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations" is now available for free.

The United Nations Treaty Series is a collection of treaties and international agreements that have been registered (or filed and recorded) with and published by the Secretariat of the United Nations since 1946, pursuant to Article 102 of the Charter. The UNTS includes the texts of treaties in their authentic language(s), along with translations into English and French, as appropriate.

The collection currently contains over 158,000 treaties and related subsequent actions which have been published in hard copy in over 2,200 volumes. Currently, the UNTS is being enhanced to include the latest desktop published volumes.

There is a good article in Searcher Magazine that documents specialists and other interested in public domain materials should read:

Title: 'Copyfraud' and Public Domain Works.

Author: Ebbinghouse, Carol

Source: Searcher; Jan2008, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p40-52, 9p

Ms. Ebbinghouse does a good job of explaining how some try to usurp the public domain through fraudulent notices and/or slight alterations of materials. Her opening gives a good flavor of what's to come:

You find a PDF version of the Federalist Papers on the internet that is just what you need, but it carries a copyright date of 2001. Now that's odd, considering that the last Federalist paper was written and published in 1788. Cautious, you find an ASCII text version, but it has a copyright date of 1999. Can you download this one? Does the fact that one is an image and the other plain text make any difference? And how the heck does anything written in the 18th century end up with post-1923 copyright dates?

Can someone legitimately move public domain text into copyright? What about when you go to an archive, only to find open source and nonpublic domain titles mixed in with public domain items, but the archive seems to put restrictions on your subsequent use of everything (no copying without permission; no commercial re-use, etc.)?

What leads some vendors to attempt to convince people that public domain materials are really under copyright? In part, because there's little legal cost to doing so, According to Ms. Ebbinghouse:

As Jason Mazzone points out, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: The law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain. Accordingly, copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The limited penalties for copyfraud under the Copyright Act, coupled with weak enforcement … give publishers an incentive to claim ownership, however spurious, in everything. Although falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act [17 U.S.C. §506(c)] prosecutions are extremely rare. Moreover, the Copyright Act provides no civil penalty for claiming copyrights in public domain materials. … [and] no federal agency is specially charged with safeguarding the public domain."

Reading this paragraph gives rise to an interesting idea. What if there were substantial fines for removing works from the public domain and the fines were used to run an orphan copyright registry that people could use without fear of prosecution. What if the American Library Association could get together with large foundations and start suing corporations for violations of the public domain? Would it lead to a world where if you weren't certain of a work's, you presumed it was public domain for fear of the consequences of an illegal claim of copyright? We could live with that.

Waking up from that daydream, I want edto point out this articles to readers of FGI because so much government information is both public domain and often repackaged as being in copyright. And occaisionally like the first edition of the Iraq Study Group report, government documents have copyrighted materials embeded into them. Ms. Ebbinghouse's article can help you navigate these difficult issues and help you deal with the copyfrauds out there.

Some of you may remember that we've been interested in visualization tools like tag cloud generating services (i.e., Tag Crowd). We haven't done one of these for a while, but watching tonight's State of the Union address, I thought it'd be interesting to visualize that text (courtesy of the NY Times). Let us know what you think.

Seeing  two news reports so close together got me thinking about the eternal connections (perhaps affinities is a better word) between government information and urban development. It strikes me that the myriad issues of information haves and have nots extends not only in terms of economics, but also in terms of population density. In other words, for the great many of the poor around the world live in essentially dense urban wastelands with little access to services or facilities that are quite commonplace in most developed cities. In America, this discussion often plays out along rural versus city lines, but even in most cities, there are still tens of thousands of people equally isolated from much of the broadbend and robust aspects of the web many middle-income families take for granted at home, work, and in school.

A recent UN report shows that the issue of housing and the poor is only going to become more difficult. World’s Cities Report 2006/7 points out that it --

"...comes at a time when the world is entering a historic urban transition; in 2007, for the first time in history, the world’s urban population will exceed the rural population. Most of the world’s urban growth – 95 per cent – in the next two decades will be absorbed by cities of the developing world, which are least equipped to deal with rapid urbanization. The majority of migrants will be moving to small towns and cities of less than one million inhabitants. Already, more than half of the world’s urban population lives in cities of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, and almost one-fifth lives in cities of between 1 and 5 million inhabitants."

At the same, from another source, zdnet, is mention of an initiative called the Open Architecture Network (http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org) a program designed to use open source software to facilitate more affordable housing.

Strikes me that these reports are just further indication that the importance of other kinds of public information (state, local, international, regional, non-profit) will likely dominate in our near futures.

A good overview of the need for open availability of government information and the current status of making Thomas more open:

• Lawmakers Favor Outside Access To Legislative Data, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, January 23, 2008 PM edition [subscription required] [The article is available without a subcription here and  here ]

Excerpts:

The legislative process could become a lot more exciting if lawmakers get their way in freeing the data inside the Library of Congress' legislative Internet database so that independent Web sites can repackage the information....

The data is important because no single view into the workings of Congress is best for everyone...

But the change likely would affect paid-subscription sites that charge for legislative updates. Their "business model will need to evolve to compete with citizen technologists," Sunlight Foundation Program Director John Wonderlich said.

There also may be resistance from congressional administrators, who "are often wary of taking on new departmental responsibilities if they are not accompanied by statutory justification or appropriations," Wonderlich said.

US censors Arctic scientists' findings as it prepares for oil and gas auction, By Daniel Howden, The Independent, January 22, 2008.

The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.

Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was "huge frustration" that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.

The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world's energy reserves.

Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report's lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: "They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions."...

 

This seems to be a week of stories about the need for better broadband access in the United States. Yesterday, we noted the new report from the state of California. Today, we find a story in The Economist and a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

• Open up those highways, From The Economist print edition, Jan 17th 2008.
• Municipal Broadband: Demystifying Wireless and Fiber-Optic Options, by Christopher Mitchell. (See also: press release.)

From The Economist:

What accounts for the differences among rich countries? Two or three years ago demography was often cited: small, densely populated countries were easier to wire up than big, sparsely inhabited ones. But the leaders in broadband usage include Canada, where a tiny population is spread over a vast area. The best explanation, in fact, is that broadband thrives on a mix of competition and active regulation, to ensure an open contest.

From the ILSR press release:

The United States, creator of the Internet, increasingly lags in high-speed access to it. In the absence of a national broadband strategy, hundreds of communities have invested in broadband infrastructure to solve their problem locally. A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) explores this essential infrastructure and the options now available to communities.

The ILSR Report contends that DSL and cable networks fail to offer the speeds and capacity necessary for the digital future.

"As broadband has gone from convenience to necessity, communities can no longer rely on private providers to satisfy their broadband needs," explains Christopher Mitchell, author of the study and Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative for ILSR.

Researchers at The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism have assembled a full-text database of every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding (1) Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and (2) Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

The database was assembled from official government publications, news accounts, books, and more. Sources include the websites of the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, transcripts of interviews and briefings, texts of speeches and testimony, prepared statements, articles from major newspapers, transcripts of television programs, government studies or reports, and books.

• Searchable database
• Overview of the Project
• methodology

The "Overview" of the research says that

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Press coverage:

• Study: False statements preceded war by Douglass K. Daniel, Associated Press, Jan 23, 2008.
• Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims by John H. Cushman Jr., January 23, 2008

The Fund for Independence in Journalism, is a nonprofit, tax exempt organization "created to foster independent, high quality public service journalism in the United States and around the world." It provides legal defense and endowment support for the Center for Public Integrity, The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization "dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy."

MAPLight.org has announced the availability of "widgets" that you can use on your web site to display the fundraising activity of any of over 1,500 congressional candidates.

• Money Race Widget Empowers Bloggers

Citizens can now track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates with free widgets for blogs, social networking pages, and personal web sites. MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group, released today customizable widgets - portable chunks of code that allow content to be displayed on any web page - that make political fundraising more transparent. Bloggers and reporters will be able to easily share the campaign finance data for any number of congressional races with their audiences.
 
Try it on your own website!
 

A new report on broadband access in California highlights some of the problems of broadband that are often glossed over in other reports.

The report is available in several files including maps and a spreadsheet here: The State of Connectivity: Building Innovation Through Broadband.

The report says that, while 96% of California residences "have access" to broadband of some kind, only half of Californians have access to broadband at speeds greater than 10 Mbps. And though access is available, barely more than half of Californians have adopted broadband at home. Further, "broadband infrastructure is deployed unevenly throughout the state, from state-of–the-art to nonexistent." And 1.4 million mostly rural Californians lack broadband access altogether.

Since by some measures, according to the report, "California remains a domestic leader in broadband adoption", this is not an inspiring situation.

I found the spreadsheet, "Appendix: Broadband Pricing Survey" particularly interesting. It compares more than 100 broadband services throughout the state and shows the price for download speed varies from $3.81 to $144, per megabyte.

Press coverage: California Broadband Task Force Releases Final Report, By Gina M. Scott, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

This project got its inspiration from Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), an astronomy project which has a database of 1 million galaxies that researchers asked regular folks to classify as ellipical, clockwise spiral, or anticlockwise spiral. They aimed for and got at least 20 classifications per galaxy. If a particular galaxy was classified a certain way by 80% of users who assigned a classification to that galaxy, that classification was accepted. This "person on the street" data was compared with a small subset (50,000) of galaxies that professional astronomers had managed to classify on their own. The researchers found that there was pretty much total agreement between the professional and amateur assessments. Documents are more complex than galaxies. :-) , but if 9 out of 10 people tag an epa document as air quality, then it's probably about air quality.

So please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging and get started. And tell your friends, coworkers and especially any environmental professionals that you know to get involved. Also, if you have a network in del.icio.us, we'd appreciate you putting on a "for:[friend name]" tag for every member of your del.icio.us network.

UPDATE 1/25/2008 Forgive my overzealousness with the above suggestion to tag every person in your del.icio.us network. I should never advocate spam. BUT, if there are people in your network interested in the environment or government documents, please consider sharing our project page with them.

The more people involved with this project, the better the descriptions and the more robust the subject access provided by the tagging will be. At least that's our hope.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.
B) How many documents were tagged.
C) How many documents were described.
D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given document. We will make our compilations publicly available along with any analysis we have.

Hope to see you on del.icio.us soon making environmental documents easier to find and easier to digest!

The most recent issue of Dttp:Documents to the People (Winter 2007) had two very good student papers that used government documents in a major way to tell history. I found them engaging and informative and hope you'll find a copy and read them through:

Space Tourism: These Trips Are Out of this World by Alex Bertea on page 19.

Waterfowl and Wetlands: A History of the Federal Ducks Stamp Program by Marcy Carlson on page 23.

Both Bertea and Carlson are library school students. I'm glad to see LIS students researching well and able to communicate their hours of research that made me care about their subject.

This article was first published in 1997 but Government Technology reprinted it this month. Enjoy!

• When Our Systems Make Us Stupid, by Gopal Kapur, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.

If you're a member of Facebook and a fan of Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS), then you should join the LOCKSS group on Facebook. If you're not on Facebook, then check out the main LOCKSS web site at http://www.lockss.org or read some of our coverage about LOCKSS.

So far the Facebook group has 31 members, including some members of the LOCKSS team. Check it out if you can, if only to get your friends intrigued by LOCKSS.

This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time." (See "Google Generation Myth" Report.)

The Library has provided a recording of the press conference of the release of the report at the British Library on January 16, 2008.

• Recording of the Wednesday 16 January launch event (MP3, 77min 22sec, 66.3MB)

The recording includes:

• Lord Triesman, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills: keynote speech (minutes 2-17)
• Ian Rowlands and Professor David Nicholas, the report's authors from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at the University College London (minutes 17-30)
• Dr Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC (minutes 30-37)
• Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive British Library (minutes 37-46)
• Questions and Answers

This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time."

• Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth, British Library, Press Release, 16 January 2008.
• Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB)

The reseach addresses the "media hype surrounding the 'Google generation' [those born after 1993] phenomenon" with an aim "to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way."

Two things jumped out at me in the report. First, the idea that there is a "google generation" that has different information-seeking behavior from other generations because it has grown up with the Internet, the Web, search engines, and so forth, is largely false.

In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.

As Ian Rowlands says, there is a lot of "powerpoint puff" about this idea of a very different "google generation" ("Net Generation", "Digital Natives", "Millennials") and "many people have instant opinions" about it, but, until now, we have had very little evidence to support the assumptions. Now we have some research that says that "Many of the claims made on behalf of the Google Generation in the popular media fail to stack up fully against the evidence."

Second, there are changes in how all people seek information and do research. As the report notes: "much writing on the topic of this report overestimates the impact of ICTs [Information and Communications Technologies] on the young and underestimates its effect on older generations" [emphasis added]. The information seeking behavior of researchers, not just young people, but professors, lecturers and practitioners, has changed significantly.

Everyone exhibits a bouncing / flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all. [emphasis added]

There is a lot of interesting information in this study and it deserves to be read by every librarian. In its conclusions, I noticed several themes that we've emphasized about government information here at FGI:

The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:

• they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines [e.g., Is your search engine finding the government information you need?]
• they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop. [Having a one-stop, single repository (GPO's "Federal Digital System") as the only digital repository of government information is not as good an idea as supplementing such a monolithic repository with many subject collections that mingle non-government information with government information. See, Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program]
• they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce. [Preservation of the less-used and seldom used materials will continue to be a cost drain on a government that is using cost-savings as a reason to justify its digital decisions. See, e.g., Be aware: semi-annual regulatory agenda is 1,700-pages online, 483 pages in print and GPO's Budget and Priorities.]

Since its inception in 2005, we at Free Government Information have envisioned this group conducting and promoting research of various types into government information. This page is dedicated to that goal.

This page is divided into two sections: 1) The research that the FGI volunteers themselves are conducting or have completed and 2) Ideas that we do not currently have the resources to carry out but which we hope will inspire others.

Current and past FGI conducted projects

• EPA Document Tagging Project (started 1/18/2008) - Can document users and others improve the findability of government documents and add value via del.icio.us? Join us in finding out! We are planning to compile results on this project in early May 2008.

Ideas for Research

These are for anybody, but especially for LIS students looking to improve knowledge in the field of government information. If you know of a project that already covers an idea below, please let us know!

• Calculate the storage space for a year's worth of FDLP documents
• Analyze agency robot.txt files to see which agencies exclude search engines from all or part of their web sites.
• Estimate the percentage of an agency's PDF files that have keyword and description metadata.
• Estimate amount of agency documents in older formats (wordperfect, etc)
• Survey non-internet users on how (or whether) they access government information.

If you've got other government information research oriented ideas, please send them our way, either in comments or by e-mail admin AT freegovinfo DOT info.

Aimee, Daniel, Kathy, Jim, Anne, Debbie:

Thank you much for each of your thoughtful remarks (and I hope others contribute their own bricks and mortar to this curricular barn raising!)

It has been a week since I posted -- after about 15 hours with the Govt. Information studnets, and another six with my other class, I can say with some confidence they grasp all of our collective point -- goverrnment information and libraries rapidly change with each successive generation of technology, political and economic upheavals, as well as the dynamics of how our global society defines both traditional and civic literacies.

The take away from the first weekend, I hope the students got anyway, is the following:

-- you must understand how government works before you can understand the information products that these civic processes create. (I suppose this is why completing an extended legislative history on a particular law at the federal level remains a cornerstone of my teaching; even though it feels so "old school" to me.)

-- the formats or forums where these govenment information objects might appear (or distributed) has become less important to me. As I told the students -- I am going to try to teach them how to be the best librarians who can find government information, not the best government information librarians. Seems to me with the consolidations, reorganizations, and reconsiderations many libraries (academic, public, special) now put their traditional documents departments through -- I am convinced the next generation of government information librarians will come to professional maturity in library organizations that do not give government information services or collections any special consideration.

-- that this is essentially hard and difficult work. The traditional bibliographic tools (if not perspectives) no longer work in a variegated world of digital, tangible, and print formats. Government information is where you find it (another way of expressing the ideas of the previous point). I think the relevance of government information for our users will evolve through how we structure our public interactions with them, and how we build a sustainable knowledgebase of this interactions over time and among communities. In other words we are moving from a form of librarianship based on formats (with all its attendant organizational schemes and theoritical controls) to a much more rough and ready form of librarianship focused on singular and collective service to our communities.

One other takeaway I got from this conversation so far is the reminder of how much of our storehouse of government information "best practices" remains scatterred across our professional and digital landscapes.  In the eight comments over the past week there was mention of

GODORT Handout Exchange at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange
LISRadio
Webjunction. The Government Information section at http://webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=14562
Individuals in particular areas who contribute to our students' learning by bringing their experience with "best practices" into the classroom

Perhaps through the library associations, the association of Library and Information schools, and other integrating collaborative entities can begin to work bring these strands together into a stronger fabric. I am on the GODORT Education Committee (www.ala.org/ala/godort/godortcommittees/godorteducation/index.htm) and know we are discussing aspects of this issue -- focusing in particular on the compentencies for government information professionals.

That's enough from here for the moment -- got to get some notes prepared for the next class.

I appreciate the discussion so far -- and am anxious to hear more people join!

jashuler

From the 1-18-08 post:

I am about to spend my first weekend teaching Government Information Resources for the Spring semester at Dominican University. I have been teaching such a course here in Illinois and other places for the last 17 years. What I wonder is – for those of you who use government information resources out there – what would be your take-away for library students interested in the future of the government information resources and our bibliographic institutions. In other words, given the number of weeks and hours we will spend together over the next three months, what words of wisdom would you like to see them walk away with?

Is it the technologies of egovernment and how they shape the paths of public information distribution?

Is it the shifting fortunes of civil liberties that threaten aspects of a open and transparent government?

Is it the changing nature of our library institutions, and by the same token, their shifting responsibility of libraries to keep and preserve government information?

Or is it all the above?

Obviously I am not looking for yes or no answers here. Just trying to get a sense of how my colleagues are dealing with these problems in the communities of practice.

Looking forward to your responses.

 jashuler

Note: The project period was January 18, 2008 through April 18, 2008.
The participation period for this project has closed

Please see below for unique tags assigned to documents. To view the tagging directly on del.icio.us, please see http://del.icio.us/tag/epapilotproject

Update 4/23/2008 - Data has been compiled into a spreadsheet available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pybymZBlZ80PVat2ggty2GA
Interpretation to follow.

Update 5/7/2008 - The results report is finished and may be read and commented on at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

Below is the original project announcement:
============================

Free Government Information needs your help to investigate whether social tagging of government documents is a viable idea.

We have stashed 32 documents from the Government Printing Office's EPA Web Harvesting Pilot Project in the Internet Archive. We would like as many people as possible to bookmark, tag and provide brief descriptions of all 32 of these test documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service.

If you would like to join this effort and have a del.icio.us account, please follow this proceedure:

1) Visit http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=epapilotproject and go to a document on the list. Open the pdf file in a separate browser window.
2) In del.icio.us, tag the page for the Internet Archive record (i.e. not the PDF file) after examining the PDF file.
3) In the del.icio.us "notes" field, write a one or two sentence description of what the document is about.
4) In the tags field, please use epapilotproject, for:freegovinfo and then any tags that you feel describe this document.

Please do steps 2-4 for as many documents as you can, ideally all 32.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.

B) How many documents were tagged.

C) How many documents were described.

D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given document.

We have a belief, based on projects like NASA Clickworkers, GalaxyZoo and the Library of Congress' Flickr project, that the community of government documents users can improve the findability of government information and provide a valuable adjunct to traditional cataloging. We also believe that a successful tagging environment will provide better access than GPO's newly declared brief bibliographic records process. Time will tell. Help us find out!

=====================================================

List of harvested EPA test titles for this project:

Aerosol Test Facility at Research Triangle Park - Aerosol-propellants, Environmental-health-Research, Research-Triangle-North-Carolina, Terrorism-Prevention
Air Quality Data Analysis Technical Support Document for the Proposed Interstate Air Quality Rule - air, pollution, quality, data, ambient, monitoring
Air Sealing: Building Envelope Improvements - Air, air-sealing, airsealing, building-insulation, efficient, energy, energy-efficiency, Energy-Star-Branding, energyconservation, energystar, epa, EPA-advertising, globalwarming, greenhousegases, home-building, home-building-techniques, home-construction, home-improvement, homes, hvac, indoor, leakage, money-saving, quality, sealing, ventilation
Analysis of Atmospheric Deposition of Mercury to the Savannah River Watershed - water-quality, mercury-levels, water-pollutants, Clean-Water-Act, water-testing-results
Approval of Urban Bus Retrofit/ Rebuild Equipment - Air, Air-quality, Air-toxins, buses, emissions, engine, engines, engines-retrofit-and-rebuild-equipment, matter, particulate, pollution, retrofit, transit-buses-emissions, Urban-transportation
Approval of Urban Bus Retrofit/ Rebuild Equipment (Oct 1997) - Air, buses, Clean-Air-Act, emissions, engine, engine-retrofit-rebuild-kits, engines, matter, Particulate, particulate-matter, pollution, retrofit, transportation, Urban-transit
Are You One of the Top 20? - 2005, benefits, Best-Workplaces-For-Commuters, business, commuters, commuting, companies, emission, employers, epa, flexible-scheduling, fortune500, govdocs, incentives, misspellings, private-transportation, public-transportation, reduction, telecommuting
Are You Ready to Take Advantage of the New Commercial Tax Incentives - Energy-Star, Energy-saving-tax-decuction, Commercial-buildings, Commercial-building-improvements
Arsenic Rule Benefits Analysis: an SAB Review - Arsenic, Arsenic-levels, Cancer-causing-agents, costbenefitanalysis, drinking, environment, Environmental-health-Research, exposure, exposurelevels, Freegovinfo, health, public, standards, water, Water-quality, Water-treatment-costs
Best Workplaces for Commuters Application Form - Applicationforms, applications, audience:hr, benefits, bestworkplaces, carpool, carpools, communting, commuter, commuter.benefits, commuters, commutersepa, commuting, employerincentives, employers, environment, environmental, environmentalimpactofcommuting, epa, etc., forms, impact, incentives, program, publictransportation, telecommuting, telework, transportation, vanpool, vanpools
Best Workplaces for Commuters Graphic Standards and Usage Guide - EPA-branding, Best-Workplaces-For-Commuters, Government-agencies-public-relations
Boxed In? - 2004, airpollution, cleanair, emissions, environmentally-friendly-shipping, epa, fleet, gases, global, globalwarming, govdocs, greenhouse, greenhousegases, management, money-saving, posters, shipping, smartway, transportation, vehicle, warming
Business Case for Information Services: EPA's Regional Libraries and Centers - Environmental-libraries-United-States, Environmental-libraries-United-States-Costs-and-benefits
Calculation and Use of First-Order Rate Constants for Monitored Natural Attenuation Studies - attenuation, attenuation-rates, biodegration-rates, contaminants, contamination, epa, govdocs, ground, groundwater, mna, monitored, natural, plume-concentrations, remediation, research, water
Carpool Incentive Programs: Implementing Commuter Benefits as One of the Nation's Best Workplaces - air, carpools, commuters, commuting, employers, Employers-and-employees, EPA-advertising, EPA-branding, incentives, pollution, transportation, Workplace-conditions
Chloroneb - Chloroneb, pesticides, pesticides-safety, Cotton-crop-management-and-control, ornamental-plants-and-grasses-pesticide-treatment
Community Involvement Plan for the Copper Basin Mining District Site, Polk County, Tennessee - Freegovinfo, Copper, Basin, mining, community, involvement, cleanup, environmental-cleanup, community-involvement-in-environmental-programs-details
Conformity SIP guidance - transportation-regulations-states, Conformity-state-improvement-plans-SIPs, transportation-federal-regulation, transportation, conformity, SIP, air, quality, standards
Development of a Performance-based Industrial Energy Efficiency Indicator for Automobile Assembly Plants - vehicle-assembly-plants-energy-use, assembly-plants-energy-efficiency, automobile-assembly-energy-use-studies, manufacturing-process-energy-used
Diclofop-Methyl - 2000, bioaccumulation, cancer, carcinogens, Commercial-use-of-pesticides, golf-courses, diclofop-methyl, epa, Freegovinfo, golf, govdocs, herbicides, pesticides, reregistration, toxicity, toxicology,
wild-oats-control
Diesel Retrofits: Quantifying and Using Their Benefits in SIPs and Conformity - emissions, Diesel-engines, engines, engine-rebuild-retrofit-kits, environmental-state-implementation-plans-SIPs, environmental-regulation-states environmental-regulation-federal
Difenzoquat - Difenzoquat, pesticides, wild-oats-control, barley-crop-yields, wheat-crop-yields, agriculture-crops-and-yields, difenzoquat, herbicides, pesticides
Energy Star Wins the Bid - 2006, bottled_water, efficiency, electricity, energy, energy_star, energy-efficiency, energy-efficient-water-coolers, energy.conservation, energy.efficiency, energy.star, energyconservation, energystar, environmental-benefits, epa, EPA-branding, Energy-Star, freegovinfo, govdocs, money-saving, pressreleases, purchasing, umaine, water

ENERGYSTAR Building Upgrade Manual - Energy-Star, Buildings-energy-saving-improvements, Energy-savings-plans, Energy-costs
Environmental Economics Research Strategy - Environmental-economics-influences, Behavioral-science-economic-impacts, Behavioral-science-effect-on-policy-development, Business-and-human-behavior
Environmental Results Under EPA Assistance Agreements - Tagged with (gmp), 2005, assistance.agreements, assistance, agreements, compliance, environment, environmental, environmental.protection, epa, epa.policy, epa.strategic.plan, evidence-based, funding, goals, objectives, governmentagreements, grant, grantee, grants, management, outcome-based, plan, policies, programs, regulations, research, results, results-oriented, strategic
EPA's Diesel Retrofit SIP and Conformity Guidance - emissions, Diesel-engines, engines, engine-rebuild-retrofit-kits, environmental-state-implementation-plans-SIPs, environmental-regulation-states, environmental-regulation-federal
Final Emission Standards for 2004 and Later Model Year Highway Heavy-Duty Vehicles and Engines
Guidance for Quality Assurance Project Plans - Quality, assurance, environmental, data, EPA-quality-assurance-project-plans, EPA-QA-project-plans, Organizational-quality product-quality
Guide to Technology Commercialization Assistance for EPA Small Business Innovation Research - Small-Business-Innovation-Research, Small-business-finances, small, business, innovation, technology, commercialization
Heavy-Duty Engine Emission Standards for Highway Trucks and Buses - trucks, transportation, Air-quality-history, trucking-industry, emissions, NOx-standard, Nitrogen-oxides, Global-warming greenhouse-effect
Preliminary Risk-Based Screening Approach for Air Toxics Monitoring Data Sets - Air, Air-quality, air-toxics, Air-toxins, assessments, Clean-Air-Act, data, Data-analysis, data-screening, dqo, freegovinfo, methodology, monitoring, pollution, r4-slt, risk-based, Screening, sets, toxics, Biomarkers

The pentagon has posted a link to a long version of the Straight of Hormuz incident on page with the transcript of the Cosgriff press conference of January 7, 2008.

• DoD News Briefing with Vice Adm. Cosgriff at the Pentagon, Arlington, Va.

• Video - Long version (Three U.S. Navy Ships Approached by Iranian Boats)
  [Hosted by a commercial service, feedroom.com, not a .mil or .gov site]

Unfortunately, the Defense Department has chosen to provide this video a Flash video format embedded in a javascript and SWF files so that there is no direct link to the video. In other words, you can watch, but you cannot download.  The tools I have tried to cirmument this have not worked.  If anyone does successfully download the video, please let me know.

See also: Documenting the Government -- Strait of Hormuz edition.

Thanks, and a Tip of the Hat to Steven Aftergood!!

UPDATE 1/16/2008 - An alert reader who attended Ric Davis' speech wrote me to say that the speech was his prepared text and that there was more information about shared regionals than his speech text indicated.

If anyone else has observations, please make a comment. We welcome feedback and discussion.

------------------------

In a refreshing change from the mid 2000s, the Government Printing Office has already posted a speech given by Acting Superintendent of Documents Ric Davis at the 2008 Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association.

The speech can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/file-repository/gpo-attended-events/lscm-director-speech-ala-midwinter/view.html and covers a variety of topics including GPO's Budget, the new FDLP desktop, web harvesting plans, current FDSys status and new marketing plans that sound like they will be developed in conjunction with depository libraries, at least in part. The whole 13 page, double-spaced speech is worth reading and I hope that at least some of you will have comments on it.

FGI tips its hat to Ric Davis for posting his ALA MW speech only a few days after it was given. It beats the months we've sometimes had to wait in the past.

While this short article doesn't have everything about earmarks, it should be of interest to anyone who does reference work on Congress, particularly legislative histories and spending.  It provides an interesting bit of history while describing some practial details and laying out some of the past and current polital battles over "congressional provisions directing that funds already authorized be spent on specific projects" (Wikipedia definition of political earmarks). Did you know, for example that some earmarks  "are listed in the reports accompanying spending bills, rather than in the text of the laws themselves"? Or that "airdropping" is  "the practice of including earmarks in spending bills after they have passed either the House or Senate"? Yikes!

• Congress Braces For Potential Anti-Earmark Executive Order, By Peter Cohn, National Journal's CongressDaily, January 15, 2008 AM edition. [subscription required]

 And, for those interested in current politics, it has insights into the current climate as Congress braces for a potential executive order by President Bush directing agencies to ignore spending earmarks:

"This is about more than earmarks; this is about moving decisions from Congress to the executive branch," one former senior congressional aide said. "I'm not sure what the strategy here is, maybe just an opportune time to grab power away from that meddlesome Congress. ... It should be more than just appropriators that care about this."

See also: CongressLine by GalleryWatch.com: The Earmark Reality By Paul Jenks, September 28, 2007 LLRX.

The Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation have announced My OpenCongress (registration page).

• Announcing "My OpenCongress": Network, Comment and Vote on Congress

You can create a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington, track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area and much more.

See  these suggestions that they put together on how to get started.

The Special Libraries Association Government Information Division has an article on EPA Libraries Budget Info  on its blog.

A reader recently left a comment on our Government Podcasts Directory informing us about the Spotlight on Science podcast from the Smithsonian Institution. This led us to the Smithsonian Institute podcast portal at http://www.si.edu/podcasts/. According to the 2007-2008 US Government Manual, the Smithsonian Institution is a quasi-official agency of the US Government and so fits our critera of a federal agency.

The podcast portal page has a wide variety of podcasted programs, including:

• The Folkways Collection
• Freer and Sackler Galleries Curatorial Conversations
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries Podcast
• National Museum of the American Indian Podcasts
• African Art Museum Podcasts

Interestingly, the Spotlight on Science that we were originally pointed to isn't listed on the portal page. That may be because its last podcast appears to have been from April 2007.

If you know of a federal, state or local government podcast that isn't listed in our directory at http://freegovinfo.info/node/174, please leave a comment on the directory page, or here, or send an e-mail to admin AT freegovinfo.info.