We've got a special treat in store for the month of August with a very special blogger of the month. I'm not going to tell yet, but suffice it to say, it's gonna be BIG! So stay tuned :-)

US Department of State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security Countermeasures Directorate has recently launched a new public exhibition on cold-war era eavesdropping gadgets entitled, "Listening In: Electronic Eavesdropping in the Cold War Era." Scientific American posted a slide show ("Spying on the spies") of the exhibition and much of the text written about the devices, from old-school keyloggers to phone tap detectors. The permanent exhibit is located in the lobby of a State Department building in Rosslyn, Va.

Perhaps one of our DC readers can help us out and confirm the location. According to the State Department's list of field offices, there are 2 buildings in Rosslyn within a few blocks of each other: 1400 Wilson Boulevard and 1801 North Lynn Street.

MASON A3B RECEIVER: U.S. State Department engineers working for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security needed a receiver in order to find devices subversively transmitting signals to the enemy. The best kind of receiver was one that could be moved from room to room without looking like a radio, and the Mason A3 more than fit the bill.

A week from today, I (Daniel) will be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. If you're attending, let's talk. If there's enough of us, maybe we can do a meal or something.

I'm attending for my library and I'm mostly looking for ways to better serve our large number of remote users. But I'm sure there'll be something that can be put to documents use. Assuming there is, I'll do my best to blog about it here.

Do you know your SIC from your SITC? Do you know where to find foreign trade statistics? How about where to look up an unfamiliar term from international trade? Let this week's ALA GODORT Handout Exchange guide help you:

International Trade (Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) CC

This guide is part annotated bibliography and part explanation of different trade classification schemes. It is broken down into the following areas:

Background Information for Foreign Trade
Trade Classifications
Trade Statistics-United States
Trade Statistics-States
Trade Statistics-Other Countries
Background Data About Foreign Countries
Trade Barriers
Trade Treaties, Laws, and Regulations
Key Government Agencies Supporting Foreign Trade

The CC next to the guide name above means that this particular guide is available for noncommercial copying and adaptation if the original author is cited as stipulated under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. So as long as you provide credit to Ed Herman, you could change his library's call numbers to your own, and print out as many handouts for your students as you like.

Check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available. Are you a librarian with a govdocs handout to share? Add your handout to the Exchange Wiki by either linking your handout to the wiki or typing the handout into the wiki. Need help? Ask Daniel at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

According to a press release, NASA and Internet Archive on Thursday "made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video.... [T]he Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource."

• NASA and Internet Archive Launch Centralized Resource for Images, PRNewsWire, July 24, 2008.
• NASA Images

The Internet Archives says that it entered into an agreement with NASA in 2007 to create this service, but that the it receives no financial support from NASA. The project is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation and and IA is encouraging users of the site to help support this project.

Anthony Clark, an independent researcher writing a book on the politics and history of presidential libraries, has written a provocative piece on access to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records about administration of Presidential Libraries:

• Why Is It So Hard to Get Documents from the National Archives About the National Archives?, By Anthony Clark, History News Network, July 21, 2008.

Clark claims that NARA is "improperly withholding its own records." He says that as part of NARA's job of overseeing the twelve presidential libraries, it has records that detail the development of the libraries through 1964, when NARA created the Office of Presidential Libraries (NL), but none of NL's records are available. NARA is calling these records "operational," which makes them available only through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Clark quotes Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, as saying, "It is hard to understand how records that are old enough to have been destroyed if the records schedule had been followed can be considered 'operational.' Presidential libraries are an area of keen congressional and public interest and information about them held by NARA should be affirmatively disclosed to the greatest extent possible."

Clark's article has produced an extensive discussion and Comments, including the NARA Response by Gary M. Stern on July 24, 2008.

Kate at ArchivesNext has posted a thoughtful response after talking off the record to archives staff: Access to records of the National Archives, July 24th, 2008.

One of my favorite web sites is The Memory Hole, which exists "to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known." It has been offline for a while, but is back with a new URL. This is a project of one person, the dedicated Russ Kick, winner of the Project on Government Oversight’s “Beyond the Headlines” Award 2005. Check out his first new post.

We have updated the FGI blogroll with the new addresses and items from the Memory Hole feed appear again in the FGI aggregator of feeds and in the category of Blogs from organizations of interest to FGI.

Fire and Smoke, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NASA satellites, aircraft, and research know-how have created a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires. These tools also have helped scientists understand the impact of fires and smoke on Earth's climate and ecosystems. This Web site brings together NASA's latest images, research news, multimedia and other resources pertaining to this ongoing effort.

As part of the fruit of the ALA GODORT State and Local Documents Task Force's State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project, I used the project blog to create a listing of state-level campaign finance databases.

So far I've got nine states: Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio. Do you know of other state campaign finance databases? Either leave a comment below of drop me a line at dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

And if you use any of the databases listed above, I'd really love to see your comments on the project blog entry for that database.

Official government publications, reports, laws, hearings, and judicial decisions are only a part of the collection of the University of Georgia's Civil Rights Digital Library. The collection includes a variety of audio visual media, most notably historical news film of a broad range of key civil rights events. In addition to the news film, the digital library provides a seamless virtual library connecting related digital collections from 75 libraries, archives, and museums across the nation. Most are original documentation of the period, such as oral histories, letters, diaries, FBI files, and photographs. It also has instructional materials to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process.

See also: History comes alive, by K.K. Snyder, The Albany Georgia Herald July 20, 2008.

There are few things more complicated than the US federal budget process. This week's guide:

U.S. Government Documents: The Budget Process (Jerry Breeze, Columbia University, 1999) Last Updated sometime in 2008

Can help you untangle the fiscal knots that is the United States Budget. This selective guide points to information about the current budget, including state by state budget impacts as well as historical data and background materials.

This guide also has a federal budget calendar which can help you see when different budget publications becomes available. Finally, Jerry provides a section on News and Commentary which draws from non-governmental sources.

The next time you are faced with a concerned citizen or a student writing about an aspect of the US budget, point them to this guide. Then see what else is available from the Handout Exchange. Don't see the subject you're looking for? If you're a documents librarian why not research the subject yourself, put a guide together and link that to the Exchange? Or build a guide on the Exchange wiki itself?

Update: September 4, 2008

It breaks my heart and embarrasses me to do this, but I've discovered that the circulation figures I used for the post below were flawed. Specifically, the reports I consulted treated internal processing as a checkout.

Once we recalculated our circ stats to only include transactions involving real patrons and ILL transactions, we found that our document circulation has been relatively low and flat for the last five years. No visible bump from cataloging the collection.

Is this the end of the story? I doubt it. First, we only completed the retro project this year, so a number of documents haven't been available in the catalog for too long. Second, staff are now in a better place to identify and promote federal documents then we were last year. This may make higher circulation possible. But I don't know. I'll get back to you.

- Daniel

======Original Post==========
At the Alaska State Library, we recently completed a barcoding project which finally let us put all of our manual shelflist items into our catalog for our patrons to find. This also meant that our holdings went onto Open WorldCat for others to find.

I'm happy to report that we've had a 7% increase in checkouts of federal documents compared to the previous fiscal year. I'm sure the cataloging project was responsible because the rate of increase for documents checkouts outperformed other parts of the collection.

Since the project was only completed in the fiscal year that ended on June 30th, I expect to see more growth in documents checkouts in the coming year.

There are many ways to make open a tangible collection to the world. Good cataloging is a start!

MultiMedia RSS Feeds - State of California State of California.

From the Air Resources Board to the Legislative Analysts Office, to New Opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit, lots of RSS feeds!

No this isn't a news item from The Onion! It's Stephen Colbert's latest Wørd segment. In it, Colbert finds much to celebrate that our individual monetary value (IMV) as derived by government actuaries has declined by almost a million dollars -- a 12% drop in five years. And Colbert rightly points out that with IMV dropping, the cost of environmental regulations is higher than their benefits which causes IMV to drop even more in a "circle of life -- minus the life!"

If the video doesn't load here, you can also get it over at Crooks and Liars!

Ketchup and Caviar has a very good post describing in flow charts the old FISA law and the changes made with the new FISA law. Click on the charts to get larger images.

The George W. Bush Library at at Southern Methodist University has been a source of controversy for some time. Now, a new story and video by the Times of London suggests more trouble.

• In New Headache for SMU's Bush Library, Lobbyist Hints at Cash-for-Meetings Deal, Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, July 14, 2008

Do you want Vice President Dick Cheney’s undivided attention for an hour? Stephen P. Payne, a Texas-based lobbyist, has some advice about how to grease the wheels for such a meeting: Make a six-figure donation to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, a library and museum complex that is scheduled to be built at Southern Methodist University.

Government Executive has a new feature that allows you to easily track their stories about many individual government agencies:

News By Agency

Last Wednesday was a pretty dark day for me and millions of other constitution-loving people when Congress passed the the FISA Amendments Act that included retroactive immunity for US telecommunications companies who'd participated in the Bush administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program of US citizens.

Well, a little ray of sunshine just broke through those dark clouds when, according to Threat Level (Wired News blog), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit Thursday (along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)), challenging the constitutionality of the act. The ACLU contends (.pdf) that the expanded spying power violates the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

If you can afford it, please consider donating to one or both of those orgs (link to EFF, ACLU) so they can keep up the good fight! (disclosure: I'm a proud EFF member!).

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has more including a podcast interview with Jameel Jaffer, the Director of the ACLU's National Security Project.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

In a new report, the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation of the Department of State reports continuing problems with the essential series: Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS).

• Report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation,
  January 1-December 31, 2007 [early release available from the Federation of American Scientists]

The publication of the Foreign Relations series stands as a symbol of commitment to openness and accountability. It is recognized as such throughout the world. The Historical Advisory Committee believes the series is at a critical turning point. The momentum it had acquired in recent years, largely from the increase in staff and resources, has now stalled. Rather than reinvigorating its commitment to reaching the 30-year deadline, the Historian now provides reasons for why that deadline cannot be met.

Read a summary by Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News: Foreign Relations Series Still Fails to Meet Legal Deadline.

E-mail public documents get erased, disappear, by Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008.

A 50-state survey by the Associated Press of government e-mail retention earlier this year found a wide variety of laws and practices, with the vast majority of states officially treating e-mail like printed documents. But most of the states with e-mail laws allow officials to choose which ones to turn over in Freedom of Information requests and to decide on their own when e-mail records are deleted.

Last week we introduced the ALA GODORT Handout Exchange Wiki, a set of resource guides created by documents librarians for the larger community of government information users. Last week I forgot to mention that the committee that maintains the guides are actively seeking new additions as stated on their website:

The goal of this GODORT Education Committee project is to gather into one place the many tools available to government information librarians to assist in the successful management of electronic government information and in building advocacy skills to promote access to this information.

Please feel free to add your handouts, guides, and tutorials to the Exchange to assist your government information colleagues. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We can provide templates for one another to save time, share models, and work smarter.

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we come to this week's highlight:

Government Documents on Agriculture (Bert Chapman, Purdue University, 1999) Last modified 1/29/2008

Bert Chapman has produced a large number of guides to government information. And all of them are quite good. He generally starts his guide as he does here with an introductory paragraph that includes useful catalog subject headings:

The U.S. Government produces voluminous information on agriculture. This information covers material as diverse as gardening advice, crop insurance, rice production, soils of individual U.S. counties, wheat export statistics, and laws. Purdue Libraries have many government publications on agriculture with most of these being in the HSSE, LIFE, and MEL Libraries. Useful subject headings to search the Library Catalog for government information on agriculture include

Agriculture and State--United States
Agricultural Laws and Legislation--United States
Agricultural Price Supports--United States
Crop Insurance
Peanuts
Poultry Industry
Wheat Trade--United States

In addition to listing basic resources such as:

• Agriculture Handbook
• Crop Insurance Handbooks
• Meat & Poultry Inspection Regulations

He also points out agencies likely to have agricultural related publications at various levels of government:

• House Agriculture Committee HSSE DOC Y 4.AG 8/1: (Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Brad Ellsworth (R-IN) are members of this committee)
• National Agricultural Safety Database
• Indiana Agricultural Statistics Service
• International Coffee Organization
• South Africa Dept. of Agriculture

This guide highlights an important feature of librarian expertise -- the ability to pull together information sources on a topic from multiple levels of government in a meaningful way. So if you're interested in Agriculture from Indiana to Argentina, check out the rest of this guide. Then see what else is available.

As you probably know, early this month, a judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom records of which users watched which videos on YouTube. (Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube by Miguel Helft, New York Times, July 4, 2008.) As the Times noted, "The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there.... Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube."

What relevance does this have for documents librarians and government-information-using-citizens? Simply, this: whenever an information provider collects and retains records of information use it puts the privacy of information users at risk regardless of its own intentions. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times said yesterday:

...the lawsuit illustrates how YouTube threatens its users' privacy simply by collecting and retaining so much data. Just because Viacom isn't interested in users' identities doesn't mean that other copyright holders, law enforcement agencies or aggrieved parties won't be.

Stanton's order is a reminder that websites shouldn't retain personally identifiable data any longer than the law or their services require. Google argues that the data enable it to improve its services, combat fraud and personalize offerings. Its approach, though, reflects an engineer's habit of hoarding information for the sake of as-yet-unimagined features, not the cautious practices of a privacy-conscious company.
-- Why is YouTube hoarding data?, Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2008.

See also

Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?

Nevada Library Assn presentation: Privacy

Privacy: "I have nothing to hide"

Privacy and the "Terrorist Surveillance Act"

Who's Watching the Spies?, by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, Jul 9, 2008

The White House has rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pick for a newly created U.S. government civil liberties board--a move that may doom efforts to get the panel up and running while President Bush remains in office.

...the only government board specifically charged with monitoring the impact of U.S. government actions on civil liberties and privacy interests has a decreasing chance of ever actually meeting, much less doing anything, for the rest of the year.

The Senate passed the FISA bill Wednesday, 69-28. It turned back three amendments that would have watered down, delayed or stripped away the immunity provision demanded by President Bush.

When the president signs the bill, as expected, it will effectively dismiss some 40 lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping and privacy laws.

Glenn Greenwald has more, including this succinct rap-up of this travesty:

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country.

As we have seen through the conflict and problems of preserving White House e-mail, the law has not kept up with preservation of electronic messages.

A bill (H.R.5811, "The Electronic Message Preservation Act") moving through Congress would address the problems by adding a new Section 2911 to Title 44, Chapter 29. It would require the electronic capture, management, and preservation of electronic records, require that they be readily accessible for retrieval through electronic searches, and would establish mandatory minimum functional requirements for electronic records management systems to ensure compliance with the requirements.

The Bush administration is threatening a veto:

• White House Threatens To Veto House E-Mail Storage Bill, By Dan Friedman, CongressDaily, Jul 9, 2008 (subscription required, but freely available here).

The White House and officials at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) argue that the law gives NARA new responsibility and expands the agency's job from advice to oversight, but the sponsors of the bill say that it only affirms the National Archives' job of advising the White House on record-keeping.

The CongressDaily articles notes that:

A less-discussed but farther-reaching part of the bill updates the Federal Records Act to require federal agencies, also under standards set by the National Archives, to save all e-mail records electronically and create systems to allow electronic searches.

According to GAO and a committee report, most agencies now use "print and file" records systems for keeping e-mail, many of them spotty.

(See National Archives and Selected Agencies Need to Strengthen E-Mail Management, United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-08-742 June 13, 2008.)

A comment in the Committee Report (House Report 110-709, "Electronic Message Preservation Act" 110th Congress 2d Session, June 11, 2008) says:

To make federal agencies comply, I believe this legislation should include enforceable repercussion language. Ms. Patricia McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org suggests this is the only way to make federal agencies comply with the Federal Records Act. Ms. McDermott states that she does not "think anyone has ever been prosecuted for destroying, much less failing to preserve federal records." Just ask former Clinton EPA Director Carol Browner. She supposedly oversaw the destruction of her computer files in violation of a judge's order requiring the agency to preserve its records.