The Government Printing Office (GPO) has been busy today! Hot on the heals of their announcement about the resignation of Public Printer Bob Tapella, President Obama announced today his list of recess appointments including naming William J. Boarman as the next Public Printer of the GPO.

Press Release from GPO:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 29, 2010 No. 10-49
MEDIA CONTACT: GARY SOMERSET 202.512.1957, 202.355.3997 cell gsomerset@gpo.gov
PUBLIC PRINTER BOB TAPELLA RESIGNS

WASHINGTON—Public Printer of the United States Bob Tapella announces his resignation as head of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). Tapella has led the men and women of the 150-year-old agency the last three years. He was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2007 to become the 25th Public Printer of the United States. Deputy Public Printer Paul Erickson becomes the Acting Public Printer effective immediately.

Prior to becoming Public Printer, Tapella served as a senior executive at GPO for five years. He was part of the team that took GPO from a survival mode to the thriving operation it is today. Tapella helped turn GPO’s financial situation from years of significant losses into the positive net operating income the agency enjoys today. Fiscal year 2010 marked the seventh consecutive year of positive results. The agency also launched GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) during Tapella’s tenure, giving the American people a one-stop site to authentic, published government information.

“It has been a pleasure serving both President Obama and President Bush during the last eight years at GPO,” said Public Printer Bob Tapella. “I want to thank the hardworking men and women of GPO who have transformed an agency that opened in 1861 into a 21st century printing, digital media, secure credentialing and ISO 9001 premiere manufacturing organization. I believe the successful launch of FDsys positions GPO to meet the challenges of the Digital Age.”

Link to bio of Acting Public Printer Paul Erickson: http://www.gpo.gov/pdfs/about/Ericksonbio.pdf
Link to photos of Bob Tapella and Paul Erickson: http://www.gpo.gov/newsroom-media/management.htm

The GPO is the federal government’s primary centralized resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, authenticating, and preserving published U.S. government information in all its forms. GPO is responsible for the production and distribution of information products and services for all three branches of the federal government. In addition to publication sales, GPO makes government information available at no cost to the public through GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.fdsys.gov) and through partnerships with approximately 1,220 libraries nationwide participating in the Federal Depository Library Program. For more information, please visit www.gpo.gov. Follow GPO on Twitter http://twitter.com/USGPO and on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/gpoprinter.

University College London has a treasure trove in the papers of the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the last 50 years, it has published 27 volumes of his writings — less than half of the 70 or so volumes ultimately expected. In an attempt to spur this project along, they're crowd-sourcing the transcription of the historical documents according to the NY Times.

The story also mentions another interesting crowd-sourcing project at George Mason University to reconstitute the papers of the early War Department (1784-1800) which had been destroyed by a fire on November 8, 1800. Sharon Leon, a historian at George Mason University and Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media -- developers of one of my favorite Web tools, Zotero! -- recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to design a free plug-in that any archive or library could use to open transcription to the public.

Obviously crowd-sourcing is becoming an invaluable tool for expanding the reach of scholarship. Last week, I mentioned the Old Weather project which is crowd-sourcing old weather observations made by UK Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I in order to assist with climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Old Weather is part of the Zooniverse of crowd-sourcing projects to help scientific projects.

Some, like Daniel Stowell, the director and editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, IL, point out that hiring of nonacademic transcribers is not a panacea and in fact could produce so many errors as to make crowd-sourcing expensive and even more time consuming in correcting errors.

But, as Ms Leon points out, “We’re not looking for perfect. We’re looking for progressive improvement, which is a completely different goal from someone who is creating a letter-press edition.”

Dare I point out that the FDLP has been crowd-sourcing US government documents since 1813?! As Tomas Jefferson wrote in a 1791 letter, “Let us save what remains, not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

This just in: the U.S. Census Bureau today released the first results of the 2010 census. The new census showed the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2010, was 308,745,538. Check out the Census news conference and 2010 census winners and losers.

(NYT) These are the first results from the census conducted this year, and they will be used to reapportion seats in Congress, and, in turn, the Electoral College, based on new state population counts. The figures will influence the landscape for the 2012 presidential race and the makeup of the Electoral College, with Republican-leaning states from the Sun Belt gaining more political influence at the expense of Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states.

According to the new counts, Texas will gain four seats, Florida will gain two, while New York and Ohio each lose two. Fourteen other states gained or lost one seat. The gainers included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah; the losers included Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

I have been looking for the new FCC rules on network neutrality at fcc.gov but haven't found them yet. TechDirt reports that you'll have to file a FOIA request to see them.

• Irony: If You Want To Know What The FCC's Rules On Internet Openness Are, You Need To File A FOIA, by Mike Masnick, TechDirt (Dec 21st 2010).

There is a news release on the FCC site, but the site is not very responsive this evening and some pages won't load, including that one.

FCC Backs Net Neutrality Order, By Juliana Gruenwald, National Journal (December 21, 2010, 1:06 PM).

FCC passes first net neutrality rules, By Cecilia Kang, Washington Post (Posted at 1:07 PM ET, 12/21/2010).

The FCC tweet seems to be the only official word at the moment:

"Vote goes 3-2 in favor of the "ayes." Chairman, Comms. Copps and Clyburn in favor; McDowell and Baker against. #oir

Here are lots of excellent links on the Network Neutrality issue from Kevin Taglang at The Benton Foundation:

• Benton's Communications-Related Headlines For Tuesday, December 21, 2010

  FCC's Copps, Clyburn will not block network neutrality order
  FCC’s New New Net Neutrality Compromise Is Better
  FCC chairman describes network neutrality rule as down the middle
  Hands off tomorrow's Internet
  The Network Neutrality Order: Possible Adequacy, But No Regulatory Certainty Any Time Soon
  Verizon Weighing Lawsuit Against FCC
  Public Interest Community Disappointed with FCC
  Yes, We’re Still Talking About Network Neutrality
  Internet Access Should Be Application-Agnostic
  Vote On Network Neutrality May Alter The Way We Listen Online
  The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
  All We Want For Christmas Is Internet Equality

It's been a busy couple of weeks here. I've got a bunch of tabs open that I've been meaning to read/watch. And the end of the year is about lists anyway, so here's a list of randomly interesting things to read and watch. And by all means, read and comment on the recently released draft documents at FDLPmodeling!!

Wikileaks related links:

• Wikiriver WikiLeaks-related news feeds put together by Dave Winer at ScriptingNews
• Cablegate the game. Makes a game of sorting through the huge mass of #cablegate leaks. "The Revolution Will Be Categorized!" (thanks /.)
• Cable Search: CABLESEARCH is an attempt for an user friendly search engine of already published documents from Wikileaks.
• Wiki Rebels the documentary (YouTube)
• "Espionage Act makes felons of us all" by Darlene Storm.
  

  Dear Americans: If you are not "authorized" personnel, but you have read, written about, commented upon, tweeted, spread links by "liking" on Facebook, shared by email, or otherwise discussed "classified" information disclosed from WikiLeaks, you could be implicated for crimes under the U.S. Espionage Act -- or so warns a legal expert who said the U.S. Espionage Act could make "felons of us all."

• Why the Library of Congress Is Blocking Wikileaks. I think I already linked to this in earlier wikileaks comments, but be sure to read the (currently) 164 comments

Other links of interest:

• Old Weather: This is a cool project to crowd source old weather observations made by UK Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I in order to assist with climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. The human eye is still far better than any OCR software so please help! Part of the zooniverse of crowd-sourcing projects to help scientific projects.
• Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
• FDLPmodeling has a couple of draft documents ready to pick through and comment on. Please do so early and often.
• Theft! A History of Music (YouTube). Professor Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke University's Center for the Study of Public Domain, discusses the history of musical borrowing and regulation from Plato to hip hop
• Delicious's Data Policy is Like Setting a Museum on Fire. Gives some interesting context to the buzz about Yahoo! closing ... er ... selling delicious

Last week, the University of Washington's Master of Communication in Digital Media program hosted a public forum at Seattle Public Library to discuss the swarm of stories surrounding Wikileaks. "Open Secrets: An Open Conversation about Wikileaks and Information Transparency in America" featured a panel of local "thought leaders": Mike Fancher, Retired Executive Editor of The Seattle Times; Brett Horvath, Director of The Leaders Network; and Sarah van Gelder, Editor-in-Chief, Yes! Magazine, a progressive magazine.

The discussion exemplified the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of getting a handle on so many fractured and simultaneous dimensions at the moment they're occurring, as if trying to gather one's most precious possessions from the air in the middle of a tornado. But to the credit of the moderator, panelists, and audience, the discussion was civil and wide-ranging, creating a public forum for whatever sense-making is possible at this stage.

Even in a story that's evolving moment by moment, with a steady din of conjecture and partial information, the troops are already lining up behind their chosen heroes and challenging designated villians. Friday's discussion was no exception. The general consensus seemed to be that Julian Assange, a clever though flawed hero, has done democracy a service by tossing raw classified information into the winds. A few participants in the audience raised questions about how people who work in government (the government is comprised of people, after all) are to conduct themselves in earnest, without the expectation that each datum will be publicly available, suggesting that indeed there may be some role for classification under certain circumstances. Their questions found little traction or response. My own conjecture is that their comments met a general climate of suspicion, an assumption that government is insidiously secretive by default.

But there's another reason for this quick leap to the comfortable pro-con approach to this complex story. Many discussions in the media have been strikingly deficient in providing background on government documents and what roles they fill in the work of agencies and actors. What documents does the State Department produce, and for what purpose? Why are some of them classified? What IS classification? Are there different levels of classification? Under what circumstances can documents be declassified? What is the current state of government transparency overall, and how has this changed from the last to the current administration?

That's where you all come in, Free Government Information community. If government information stymies even librarians, then what else could WE be doing to make it accessible to the general public, beyond putting raw documents at easy reach? What else could we communicate about the information life cycle of government documents that could flesh out our analysis of the current state of government transparency and secrecy more accurately? I'm not suggesting that this would make the questions or answers any less challenging, nor do I suggest that we become apologists for government abuses of transparency. But while these stories are in heavy circulation, we have an opportunity to insert our expertise to bring grounding to many narratives that are now lacking that crucial context.

Please help out the government documents community. Each year the Notable Documents Panel of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) selects titles issued by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and governments at all levels and highlights them in a May Library Journal article -- here's last year's notable documents article.

If you see a government document, web site, database, or other information resource issued since January 2010 that merits attention, please take a few minutes to nominate it. Works in all formats are fair game, as are items published for governments and IGOs by private publishers.

Nominate early, nominate often!

Deadline is January 15, 2011.

The Federal Reserve released documents that identify the recipients of $3.3 trillion in emergency aid provided at the height of the financial crisis. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act (Public Law 111-203) required the release of this information, which had been secret. A lot has been written about this, but here are some of the links I have found particularly interesting. (Thanks to Gary and ResourceShelf for many of these tips!).

• FRB: Regulatory Reform: Transaction Data, Federal Reserve Board (The data.)
• Federal Reserve releases detailed information about transactions conducted to stabilize markets during the recent financial crisis, Sabrina I. Pacifici, BeSpacific. (Sabrina's summary of what the Fed has put online.)
• Inured to “Trillions”, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (CJR has some of the most interesting coverage, summarizing the facts and the analysis coming from journalists.)
• Audit Notes: The Federal Reserve’s Trillion-Dollar Bailout Document Dump, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (With links to more news coverage and evaluations of the data.)
• Audit Notes: Too Big to Fail Edition, By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. (CJR does more analysis of the analyses.)
• A Real Jaw Dropper at the Federal Reserve, by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Huffington Post. (Sanders, who wrote the amendment to the Dodd-Frank Bill that required the disclosure, gives his first take on the data.)
• Interactive: Which Banks Got Emergency Loans from the Fed During the Financial Meltdown?, By Karen Weise and Dan Nguyen, ProPublica. (ProPublica's interactive mashup of the data.)
• Fed Emergency Lending , Wall Street Journal (The WSJ's mashup of the data.)
• Decoding the Fed’s Emergency Programs, Wall Street Journal. (The WSJ explains some of the details.)

Getting Media Right: A Call To Action, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, Columbia University School Of Journalism, New York City (December 2, 2010).

Libraries and Journalism have a lot in common. Copps presents specific recommendations to deal with what he calls the "hour of grave peril" of American Journalism.

The place where I work -- the Federal Communications Commission -- blessed it all, encouraged the consolidation mania, and went beyond even that to eviscerate just about every public interest responsibility that generations of reformers had fought for and won in radio and TV. One FCC Chairman summed up the agency's attitude that there was nothing special about the media by saying, "a television set is nothing but a toaster with pictures." So much for the people's airwaves and for any semblance of concern for the fragile news and information infrastructure that is the lifeblood of society's conversation with itself.

Hat tip to Kevin Taglang!

Blocking Access to Wikileaks May Harm CRS, Analysts Say, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News(December 6, 2010).

“It’s a difficult situation,” said one CRS analyst. “The information was released illegally, and it’s not right for government agencies to be aiding and abetting this illegal dissemination. But the information is out there. Presumably, any Library of Congress researcher who wants to access the information that Wikileaks illegally released will simply use their home computers or cellphones to do so. Will they be able to refer directly to the information in their writings for the Library? Apparently not, unless a secondary source, like a newspaper, happens to have already cited it.”

In the past year or so that we have been tracking lost docs/document discovery reports, we've been made aware of 67 publications that appear to have been cataloged by the Government Printing Office in response to a lost docs report. We've created a spreadsheet of documents with the date reported and the date of the CGP catalog record. We have now made this spreadsheet public at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjA1ChZ8rDu5dGw0VllsRHpqSk1HcXctM1dMQVlBMWc&hl=en and will keep it up to date.

A few cautions in using data from this spreadsheet:

1) This is probably not the full list of items cataloged in response to lost docs reports. We check the cataloging status of documents the month after they are posted. This catches some, but not all items eventually cataloged. Ideally we'd have someone run the entire list of fugitive and pending documents through the CGP once a aweek, but we don't have staffing for that. If you'd like like to volunteer, send a note to dnlcornwall AT alaska DOT net.

2) We have no way of knowing for sure that a given item was cataloged in response to a specific report.

3) Although the spreadsheet offers an average and median number of days to catalog a document, those figures are only for the publications on the spreadsheet. Since we don't get notified of all the documents reported as fugitive to GPO nor all of our reports that eventually get cataloged, we can't come up with an actual solid figure for how long it takes GPO to acquire and catalog items. Our sample of 67 as of 12/4/2010 may or may not be representative.

But at least it's a place to start until GPO starts publishing their own fugitive document/document discovery statistics.

REPORT

Note from Daniel: My apologies for missing a report last month. I was carried away by National Novel Writing Month. I'm back on the job with some pretty positive news for October and November postings to the Lost Docs Blog

Before we jump into statistics, we need to announce a new category called "pending." "Pending" means that that report forwarded to us includes a statement by GPO that they are in the process of either adding an item to the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) and/or adding it to the FDLP. The category of "pending" is being given to documents posted in November 2010 and later. Items with status of "pending" will be changed to "found" when we become aware of a publicly accessible record in the CGP.

The best news we have for you from two months of light posting (October - 15, November - 11) is that the number of "found" items is going up - 9 records from (presumably) lost docs reports in October and another 4 records created from (presumably) lost docs reports in November. See these records for yourself at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with October and November 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the time for public cataloging of reported materials appears to be decreasing.

From October, six items remain listed as "fugitive documents", with one item being for an electronic copy that does have a record for the physical item.

From November, no item reported remains classed as a "fugitive document." Seven items are classed as "pending", acknowledged as in scope by GPO but without a publicly accessible record in the CGP. You can view these items lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/pending/ and looking at the postings with October 2010 dates.

Please remember that our listing of "fugitive documents" reports is only as complete as you make it, since GPO does not yet publish any statistics we're aware of on fugitive documents/document discovery.

APPEAL

If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:

1. If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
2. Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
3. Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
4. Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/
   or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.

On the both/and front, this is good news indeed. GPO will soon begin sharing its metadata from the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) with the EBSCO discovery service. This will break down to govt documents silo, combine non-documents metadata with that from the federal govt, extend the findability of US govt publications to students and researchers, AND point them to depository libraries for access -- all the things we've been advocating here at FGI! I hope GPO is talking with other database vendors to do the same.

U.S. Government Printing Office content available through EBSCO Discovery Service

Metadata from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) will soon be searchable through EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing. EDS Customers will be able to search for federal records from the Government Printing Office's Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

The U.S Government Printing Office provides publishing & dissemination services for the official and authentic government publications to Congress, federal agencies, federal depository libraries, & the American public. GPO resources that will be available through EDS include federal publications from the following catalogues:

• Congressional Serial Set Catalog
• Congressional Publications
• GPO Access Publications
• Internet Publications
• Periodicals
• Serials