GPO has just announced the release of the 2011 Economic Report of the President. The annual report is available online from 1996 - present via the GPO and is traditionally submitted as a House document as part of the US Serial Set (online via GPO 1985 - present. The United States Congressional Serial Set is also available historically via FDLP libraries around the country.

The Economic Report of the President, 2011 is now available from the U.S. Government Printing Office. It is issued by the Executive Office of the President and the Council of Economic Advisers and transmitted to Congress no later than ten days after the submission of the Budget of the United States Government. The Economic Report of the President is available from GPO's Federal Digital System at:

. Documents are available in ASCII text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), with many of the tables also available for separate viewing and downloading as spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel (XLS).

The Economic Report of the President includes:

1. Current and foreseeable trends and annual numerical goals concerning topics such as employment, production, real income, and Federal budget outlays;

2. Employment objectives for significant groups of the labor force;

3. Annual numeric goals;

4. And a program for carrying out program objectives.

Also included is the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Each year, the Council of Economic Advisers submits this report on its activities during the previous calendar year in accordance with the requirements of Congress as set forth in section 10(d) of the Employment Act of 1946 as amended by the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.

The Economic Report of the President, 2011 will be distributed to Federal depository libraries in paper format under:

* Title: Economic Report of the President, Transmitted to the Congress Feb. 2011 Together with the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers
* Class: PR 44.9:2011
* Item Number: 0848-F-02
* Shipping List: 2011-0032-S
* PURL:
* CGP System Number: 582665

The Economic Report of the President, 2011 is also being shipped as House Document 112-2.

* Title: Economic Report of the President, Transmitted to the Congress Feb. 2011 Together with the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers
* Class: Y 1.1/7:112-2
* Item Number: 0996-F
* Shipping List: 2011-0032-S
* PURL:
* CGP System Number: 795910

In addition, copies of the Economic Report of the President, 2010 are available for purchase from the U.S. Government Online Bookstore at: .

_______________________________

Amidst the spirited discussion here and elsewhere about Wikileaks, you might have missed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld set up a web site (rumsfeld.com) with hundreds of "declassified or previously unreleased documents" to accompany his new book. (Rumsfeld compared his "archive" to a sort of legitimate version of Wikileaks.) Rumsfeld didn't have to go through that pesky FOIA process to get or release those documents either. (See: Rumsfeld’s Snowflake, “Subject:Porpoises” and Rumsfeld Memoir Highlights VIP Access to Government Files).

Now, here is more news:

John Cook at Gawker has posted a collection of documents that Donald Rumsfeld neglected to include in his archival Rumsfeld Papers website that accompanied the publication of his recent memoir. Cook and company obtained the documents by sending a FOIA request to the Defense Department for all the records that Rumsfeld had requested and previously obtained from DOD via FOIA. The result was many documents that did not make their way into Rumsfeld’s online collection. The documents (available in their entirety here) portray Rumsfeld “curious to know what the rush is” in bringing enemy combatant and U.S. Citizen John Walker Lindh to a speedy trial, interested in rationalizing why administration policies toward detainees was "perfectly legal, proper, and historically correct," and emphasizing that administration officials continued "referring to our 'plan'."
--FRINFORMSUM: 2/24/2011, Unredacted, by Seth Maddox.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports are incredibly rich sources for budget-related information, and analyses of domestic social policy, foreign Affairs, defense and trade, and science and industry. But for many years, CRS has not provided direct public access to its reports, requiring citizens to request them from their Members of Congress -- and libraries to purchase them from Penny Hill Press, LexisNexis and other private publishers.

With CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan retiring in April, 2011, this was an opportune time for 38 open government groups -- including FGI! -- to send a letter to Librarian of Congress James Billington asking him to appoint a new CRS Director who will facilitate free public online access to CRS reports.

Here's the letter (PDF also available from OpenTheGovernment):

February 25, 2010
James H. Billington
Librarian of Congress
The Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540

Dear Dr. Billington:

We the undersigned organizations concerned with government openness and accountability are writing to urge you to appoint a Director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) who will work with Congress to provide online free public access to the unclassified, non-confidential, taxpayer-funded reports produced by CRS.

The public needs access to these non-confidential CRS reports in order to discharge their civic duties. American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the CRS, which generates detailed reports relevant to current political events for lawmakers. But while the reports are non-classified, and play a critical role in our legislative process, they have never been made available in a consistent and official way to members of the public.

Predictably, to fill the public void left by the CRS, several private companies now sell copies of these reports at a price. This means that non-confidential CRS reports are readily available to lobbyists, executives and others who can afford to pay. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people lack the information necessary to even request reports from their Members of Congress.

In 1822, James Madison explained why citizens must have government information: "A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." In the spirit of Madison, we ask you to appoint a Director of CRS who will help advance the goal of online free public access to CRS reports.

Representatives from the undersigned organizations would be happy to meet with you or your staff at any time to discuss this important issue. Please contact Amy Bennett, Program Associate, OpenTheGovernment.org (afuller@openthegovernment.org or 202-332-6736), at your convenience.

Sincerely,

AhEeCOSH
American Association of Law Libraries
American Library Association
American Society of News Editors
Association of Research Libraries
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
CAUS
Center for Democracy and Technology
Center for Media and Democracy
Center for Responsive Politics
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Defending Dissent Foundation
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Essential Information
Federation of American Scientists
Free Government Information
Government Accountability Project (GAP)
iSolon.org
Knowledge Ecology International
Liberty Coalition
MapLight.org
National Coalition Against Censorship
National Freedom of Information Coalition
National Security Counselors
No More Guantanamos
OMB Watch
OpenTheGovernment.org
Point of Order
Project On Government Oversight (POGO)
Public Citizen
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
RS&S INTERNATIONAL, LLC
Society of Academic Law Library Directors
Society of Professional Journalists
Special Libraries Association
Sunlight Foundation
University of Missouri Freedom of Information Center
Washington Coalition for Open Government

"The Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW) is a new resource serving as the data hub for the HHS Community Health Data Initiative. It contains standardized health outcome and health determinant indicators along with associated evidence-based interventions, which can be easily displayed, and will benefit a broad variety of users."

• Health Indicators Warehouse (healthindicators.gov).

  The HIW is a collaboration of many Agencies and Offices within the Department of Health and Human Services. The HIW is maintained by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Data, support and funding are provided by the following: * Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services * Department of Health and Human Services: o Office of the Deputy Secretary o Office of Adolescent Health o Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion o Office of Minority Health o Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation * Health Resources and Services Administration. New partners are expected to be added over time.

• "Health Indicators Warehouse Provides Data Accessibility." In: COSSA Washington Update, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Volume 30, Issue 3 (February 7, 2011)

  [NHS's Linda] Bilheimer noted that the Health Indicator Warehouse includes Healthy People 2010, a new set of Medicare indicators, national and state indicators. She emphasized that this is the first time that these indicators have been put in the public domain. She noted that HIW has extensive metadata. HIW is oriented toward large scale developers who want to use the data.

  [NHS's Amy] Bernstein reported that there are 1,130 indicators listed from 170 data sources

Interesting new book about The Internet:

• A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, by Johnny Ryan.

  A History of the Internet and the Digital Future tells the story of the development of the Internet from the 1950s to the present, and examines how the balance of power has shifted between the individual and the state in the areas of censorship, copyright infringement, intellectual freedom and terrorism and warfare. Johnny Ryan explains how the Internet has revolutionized political campaigns; how the development of the World Wide Web enfranchised a new online population of assertive, niche consumers; and how the dot-com bust taught smarter firms to capitalize on the power of digital artisans.

  In the coming years, platforms such as the iPhone and Android rise or fall depending on their treading the line between proprietary control and open innovation. The trends of the past may hold out hope for the record and newspaper industry. From the government-controlled systems of the ColdWar to today’s move towards cloud computing, user-driven content and the new global commons, this book reveals the trends that are shaping the businesses, politics, and media of the digital future.

An excerpt available at ars technica:

• How the atom bomb helped give birth to the Internet, By Johnny Ryan, ars technica.

  Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This first installment is adapted from Chapter 1, "A Concept Born in the Shadow of the Nuke," and it looks at the role that the prospect of nuclear war played in the technical and policy decisions that gave rise to the Internet.

Unfortunately, I won't be going to ACRL 2011 in Philadelphia next month. But I'd recommend that folks go to this session on Wikileaks and libraries. If anyone is going, we'd love it if you'd volunteer to send us a summary of the panel (which is confusingly listed under "Roundtables".

Session Title: Wikileaks, war, and the web: where do academic libraries fit?

When Wikileaks released the Iraq and Afghan War Diaries it raised ethical questions for academic libraries. Join the discussion and help provide guidance to such questions as: What are libraries' responsibilities regarding leaked classified information? Should libraries link to leaked classified materials? How might Wikileaks be used in an instruction session?

Date: 04/01/2011
Time: 8:30AM - 9:30AM
Location: Roundtable 3 (Exhibit Hall A, Pennsylvania Convention Center)

The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States. Created and maintained by the NTIA, in collaboration with the FCC, and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia.

See also: Are You Being Served? National Broadband Map Going Live Today, By Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine (February 17, 2011).

Users can search by address, view data on a map, or use other interactive tools to compare broadband across various geographies, such as states, counties or congressional districts.

..."The National Broadband Map shows there are still too many people and community institutions lacking the level of broadband service needed to fully participate in the Internet economy. We are pleased to see the increase in broadband adoption last year, particularly in light of the difficult economic environment, but a digital divide remains," [Larry] Strickling [assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)] said in a statement.

Here's some good news on this stormy day (at least in NorCal). GPO and the Library of Congress are set to work together on better digital access for the historic United States Statutes at Large and the United States Constitution. Anyone want to add this to the the Conan the Librarian wikipedia page?

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Library of Congress (LOC) recently received approval from the Joint Committee on Printing (JCP) to proceed on two collaborative efforts. One project involves the digitization of some of our nation's most important legal and legislative documents and the other involves enhanced public online access to the Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation (CONAN).

The digitization project will include the public and private laws, and proposed constitutional amendments passed by Congress as published in the official Statutes at Large from 1951-2002. GPO and LOC will also work on digitizing official debates of Congress from the permanent volumes of the Congressional Record from 1873-1998. These laws and documents will be authenticated and available to the public on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) and the Library of Congress’s THOMAS legislative information system.

The other project will provide enhanced public online access to the Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation (CONAN), a Senate Document that analyzes Supreme Court cases relevant to the Constitution. The project involves creating an enhanced version of CONAN, where updates to the publication will be made available on FDsys as soon as they are prepared. In addition to more timely access to these updates, new online features will also be added, including greater ease of searching and authentication.

GPO authenticates the documents on FDsys by digital signature and these authenticated documents are also available on the Library’s THOMAS system. This signature assures the public that the document has not been changed or altered since receipt by GPO. This digital signature, viewed through the GPO Seal of Authenticity, verifies the document’s integrity and authenticity.

Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy and Americas Libraries (BiblioNews) is a one-and-one-half-day convening April 6-7, 2011 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., for journalists, librarians and citizens.

This looks to be a really interesting conference! Please let us know if you are going and can blog about the event here. (Send mail to freegovinfo at gmail dot com )

For three centuries, in American towns large and small, two institutions have uniquely marked a commitment to participatory democracy, learning and open inquiry -- our libraries and our free press. Today, as their tools change, their common missions of civic engagement and information transparency converge. Economic and technology changes suggest an opportunity for collaboration among these two historic community information centers — one largely public, one largely private. How?

Siva Vaidhyanathan's new book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), is out. He finds a lot to like about Google, but also raises lots of questions about it. Among other things, he proposes a sprawling effort by libraries and like-minded institutions that would essentially give Googlers a public option.

He discusses his ideas in an interview in Inside Higher Ed.

• Google's Gadfly: new book explains how google has taken over knowledge and learning, interview of Siva Vaidhyanathan by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed (February 16, 2011)

excerpts:

[Google] has contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and the erosion of standards of information quality.

Google is not a problem because it allegedly weakens our faculties. It's a problem because Google bakes biases into its algorithms. And we fail to recognize that fact.

Most of the recent changes in Google's search algorithms make Google much better for shopping and much worse for learning....The same service cannot serve wisdom and wealth equally well.

Fundamentally, we must recognize that some things are too important to be entrusted to unaccountable private actors.

The Human Knowledge Project would be a 50-year public, global plan to design, legislate for, enable, and fund a global digital library service to deliver the best information to the most people. It's as feasible as it is desirable. In other words, if we don't do it it's because we don't really want it.

This is a bit off-topic, but so interesting that I couldn't resist mentioning it. James Moushon did a little investigation into the absence of basic provenance information in eBooks and what he discovered was not encouraging. He discovered that almost none of the eBooks he examined had any indication of "where the book's content originated from or how we got to the digital format." He asks, rhetorically, how we will be able to accurately cite eBooks and differentiate between editions.

• eBook Publishers: Are eBook Copyright Pages Missing Information?, by James Moushon, The Self-Publishing Review (February 15, 2011).

  I picked 30 ebooks and analyzed their copyright pages. Somebody must have missed the memo about what information is required and what format it should be presented in because we had a variety of formats and information, to say the least. Although 30 ebooks is not a very big sample, only one of them came close to what is needed to ID the source.

I have always been sensitive to this issue because, for years, I dealt with numeric social science data files and they were seldom adequately cited in the literature -- partly because the necessary information was not easy to obtain or identify. As we move to a more and more born-digital world for all information, we mustn't overlook the basics that we took for granted in the paper and ink world. Alas, as publishers seek to subsume all the roles of producer, distributor, and "library" (the term some of them use for their role as long-term gate-keeper and access-regulator), they don't always keep these little details in mind....

Steven Aftergood reports today that the Pentagon Paper are to be declassified:

• Declassifying the Pentagon Papers, Finally, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (February 15th, 2011).

The National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives will declassify the full text of the Pentagon Papers as well as the underlying documentation on which they are based, along with investigative material concerning the 1971 leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the NDC said yesterday.

As we noted here recently, Steven recently pointed out that "every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material."

One has to wonder if the Pentagon Papers had been released digitally and not on paper, if libraries had excluded then from their collections at the time of their release, if librarians had argued against their selection and acquisition and preservation, if they were not preserved in libraries 40 years ago, would we still have them? Would their declassification have happened today?

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced the launch of a 'beta' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website, ConsumerFinance.gov, a critical link to the American public for soliciting ideas on the bureau’s creation and priorities and for answering questions on its work.

The central mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans—whether they are applying for a mortgage, choosing among credit cards, or using any number of other consumer financial products.

You can also follow CFPB on twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr.

There is a video about the agency that describes "the origins of the financial crisis and what the consumer bureau will do to protect American families and improve financial services markets for consumers and providers alike—and ultimately strengthen the entire economy. The video is narrated by director, actor, and producer Ron Howard."

Hat tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici!

[This is the 2nd in our guest blogger series with internet activists from Jinbonet Korean activist network. Translation assistance by Shinjoung Yeo]

A Nation Punishes A Lie

By Jung Minkyung
Staff of Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet since 2009
jmk6@jinbo.net

In South Korea, there is a law that punishes a lie. According to Article 47 clause 1 of the Framework Act on Telecommunications:

“A person who has publicly made a false communication over the telecommunications facilities and equipment for the purpose of harming the public interest shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than five years or by a fine not exceeding fifty million won.”

When a person who circulates false information unjustly makes profits or harms other people, the person can be punished for defamation, fraud, trade mark infringement, etc. However, this clause allows a criminal penalty without questioning whether the circulation of false information harms the public interest. That is, “false communication” itself can be punished. In addition, the biggest problem is that the clause has been exploited for political purposes.

So far, the majority of the cases on this has been related to criticism of government policies or the President. Article 47 Clause 1 of the Framework Act on Telecommunications was established 45 years ago, yet this odd clause has never been used until 2008. In 2008, during a massive candlelight protest against US beef imports, a rumor circulated that a female college student had died at the hands of a police officer. As the rumor spread on the Internet, the prosecution indicted the person who had spread the rumor on the basis of circulation of false information.

Since then this clause has become known and become a serious social controversy -- even raising a comical incident in the case of a famous blogger nicknamed “Minerva.” Minerva was prosecuted for posting an article online that said, “the government issued an “emergency order” to major financial institutions to stop buying US dollars as if foreign exchange would stop due to depletion of foreign currency reserve." The majority of Koreans criticized his indictment on the basis of merely expressing his opinion and predicting economic doom. After Minerva’s indictment, many netizens announced their last piece of writing on the Internet. The Minerva case has brought a widespread chilling effect.

The comedy of the prosecution did not stop there. In 2008, the prosecution indicted citizens for sending text messages to suggest that students strike against US beef imports or create parody materials ridiculing current South Korea president Lee Myung-bak. Both cases were ruled as not guilty but these are clear cases which infringe on freedom of expression by forceful indictment.

Netizens were also indicted for questioning the government’s announcement that a North Korean torpedo had attacked the South Korean warship Cheonan -- or suggesting different views from the government. Recently, numerous people were indicted for spreading false information on the Internet in regard to the incident of North Korean artillery attack on Yeon Pyung Island. Despite citizens having the right to freely discuss and express diverse opinions, the prosecution ruled that this act was intended to harm the public interests by circulating clearly false information.

During the Yeon Pyung Island artillery incident, many students and other citizens were investigated or actually indicted because they had sent prank text messages to friends and said, “I heard that a war is about to break out” or “government is calling for reserve troops.” Most people took these messages as the pranks that they were as no one was harmed by the messages. Through mass media, the government could clarify their position, yet they took legal action in response to the pranks and citizens’ opinions to question the administration’s position.

Fortunately, on December 28, 2010, the Constitutional Court ruled that Article 47 Clause 1 of the Framework Act on Telecommunications was unconstitutional. The logic behind this decision is that this clause violates the constitutional principle of a clear definition and excessive restriction. The concept of “public interest” is unclear and abstract and it is difficult to judge objectively what kinds of acts maybe considered as harming to the “public interests.” Also, the expression of false information is protected under freedom of expression and freedom of press within the 21st Amendment of the South Korean Constitution. Thus, Article 47 clause 1 of the Framework Act on Telecommunications clearly violates freedom of expression.

However, immediately after the Constitutional Court ruling, the South Korean government began pushing forward an alternative legislation. The Ministry of Justice announced that in order to resolve the legal vacuum, they would soon push a bill to provide legal grounds to punish those spreading false information on war or terrorism that harms or puts at risk the national welfare. A member of the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) proposed alternative legislation to change the phrase from intention to “harms the public interests” to “national security, social and economic order or normal operation of public institutions.” However, on the basis of the recent Constitutional Court ruling, there is a great possibility that this alternative legislation will be unconstitutional as well.

The reason a majority of people express criticism about the government is because they question the administration’s position or think that the government is doing wrong. In the case of harming others and unjustly making profits, there are existing laws like fraud or trademark infringement which can be applied. Thus, punishing someone for merely “false” information should not be tolerated in a democratic country where people have a right to express diverse opinions and discuss freely. No one can own the truth exclusively and there is no need for alternative legislation for the clause that already turns out to be unconstitutional.

[Update 2/18/11: The editor at the Center for Journalism Ethics has kindly agreed to reprint our response to Bill Sleeman on their site. The piece was slightly edited from the original. We greatly appreciate their efforts in providing wide ranging context to this critical issue.]

Thanks to Bill Sleeman for his govdoc-l post and link to his op-ed piece "A Librarian Reacts to WikiLeaks." His parsing is thought-provoking, but incomplete.

I'd like to add some context to Sleeman's op-ed because I think he conflates and ignores several issues surrounding Wikileaks the organization and the leaked US State Department cables themselves. Unfortunately, I can not submit a comment on the Center for Journalism Ethics site where he published his op-ed, but I post it here in the interest of open discussion.

Sleeman ignores the information and focuses instead on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the actions of members of the American Library Association -- Al Kagan's American Libraries Magazine article as well as Larry Roman's comment/response offer a good review of the ALA Midwinter conference WikiLeaks dustup. Sleeman repeatedly suggests that we have only one choice: "embrace" WikiLeaks or reject it. This is a false choice and misdirection. In doing this, Sleeman has adopted the strategy being used by those who wish to suppress the information by distracting us from it and focusing instead on the messenger.

Libraries should be focused on how to address the information needs of their users. Different libraries will have different answers to that question, which is as it should be.

1) Sleeman casts his piece as a minority opinion. However, if the preliminary data on my WikiLeaks survey hold true (and I hope those that haven't done so will take the survey ;-)), then Sleeman is not an "outlier" as he would have us believe. The documents community seems to be split 50/50 on whether or not it is important for libraries to collect and give access to the cables -- and only 3 libraries so far say that they've even cataloged the WikiLeaks cable site. When Sleeman says that the situation, "demands more careful parsing than the [liberal] library community has been willing to do," he is, in one stroke, mischaracterizing and demeaning his colleagues.

2) The cables are not a "dump" but are in fact being actively vetted and redacted by Wikileaks and the the news organizations with which WL is working (UK Guardian, der Spiegel, NY Times, El Pais, and Le Monde). Only a very small number have actually been released (3891 of 251,287 to date). Those cables, while technically classified, are now publicly available to anyone and analysis by journalists around the world continues to grow (see WikiRiver as well as the news organizations' sites linked to at the end of this piece).

By ignoring the role of journalists and newspapers in the vetting and release of the cables, Sleeman tries to turn the issue into one of Assange vs. the world. I don't think Sleeman would suggest that we should ignore other leaked materials, but maybe he would? Does he object to any publication of leaked information in any newspaper, or is there something about this particular release that he finds objectionable? Does he oppose libraries containing any leaked information? He does not say. As Steven Aftergood wrote recently, "[T]he bulk of the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, never formally underwent declassification review.... This means that every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material." Would Sleeman say that we should remove all versions of the Pentagon Papers from our libraries -- including the 4,100 pages of the Pentagon Papers read into the record of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds by then Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK).?

3) There have always been leaks of government information, most often for political purposes or individual vendetta (Pentagon Papers and the Plame affair are but the most in/famous). There are (admittedly weak) laws on the books to protect whistle blowers but none really to protect military whistleblowers (hence PFC Bradley Manning, the alleged cable leaker, has been held without charge at Quantico Marine base since July, 2010). These cables are not "stolen" per se, but leaked information. Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous leaker of government secrets, has praised wikileaks and their work.

4) Researchers and the public are justly intrigued with this kind of information. The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series is one of libraries' most highly sought-after titles so it only makes sense that library users would want access to the cables and their cache of diplomatic information far in advance of any FRUS publication -- which is supposed to be "no more than 30 years after the event recorded" but which is currently far behind schedule in violation of the law (see Aftergood, "State Dept Series Falls Farther Behind Schedule"). These materials will certainly be sought-after by researchers and the public in the future. But who will ensure that they have that access if libraries do not?

Sleeman uses the cliche of the information on the web being like "toothpaste from a tube," saying that, once information is "out there," it "isn't going back." But this cliche is only half of the story. While it is true that one cannot guarantee that information, once released, can be successfully erased, it is also true, and more importantly so, that one cannot guarantee the preservation or integrity of information without explicit effort. This has important ramifications for libraries as they address the needs of their users. In a year (or 10 years, or more...) when a researcher wants to see the WikiLeaks documents behind news stories and books, will the researcher have a place to go where those documents have been preserved and authenticated as unaltered from the WikiLeaks release of those documents? Or will documents have disappeared or become unreadable or altered over time because they lacked adequate curation? Will there be documents, but no way to know if they are the ones that were used by earlier researchers? When FRUS releases some of these cables, will researchers be able to compare them to the WikiLeaks versions to verify accuracy of earlier research?

Libraries have a role to play in preserving information over time for their users. Sleeman would ignore these issues; he says, "I am not willing to embrace the many calls in the library community to harvest and preserve this material locally." To me that seems like a short-sighted response, inadequately justified with ad hominem rhetoric.

5) Wikileaks staff and volunteers are transparency activists.

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. We also develop and adapt technologies to support these activities.

WikiLeaks has sustained and triumphed against legal and political attacks designed to silence our publishing organisation, our journalists and our anonymous sources. The broader principles on which our work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history. We derive these principles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In particular, Article 19 inspires the work of our journalists and other volunteers. It states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. We agree, and we seek to uphold this and the other Articles of the Declaration.

--WikiLeaks about page

We cannot, of course, *know* the motivations of Assange or other WikiLeaks staff or those who leaked the documents any more than we can know the motivations behind other leaks or even the motivations behind the official release of documents in FRUS. Journalists and librarians can, however, document what we do know and provide that as context to any document or publication. As librarians, we do not "embrace the WikiLeaks initiative" when we point to it or even when we add the documents themselves to our collections. Libraries have information on all points of view created for all kinds of reasons. Part of what we do is document the record of society for others to use and evaluate. Our role as librarians is to select what is significant and give it context. (Part of that context is the bibliographic metadata that describes information and its source; part of the context is the rest of our collections that we build by subject and discipline.) Isn't it self-evident that the WikiLeaks material has become significant regardless of the motivation of those who leaked it?

Perhaps a close analogy here is to the collections of emails of scientists studying climate change (which *were* in fact stolen, not leaked). In both cases, I can see different libraries making different decisions about including WikiLeaks or those emails in their collections. I would hope that libraries that chose to collect the emails would include the several official reports that exonerated the scientists from the wrong-doing that the thieves attempted to impute. In the case of WikiLeaks, I would hope that a library would include news reports, State Department publications, and robust metadata etc., giving additional context to the cables.

6) Unintended Consequences:

There was a fascinating debate hosted by DemocracyNow in December, 2010 between Steven Aftergood and Glenn Greenwald in which Aftergood laid out many of the same arguments that Sleeman does about agencies becoming more restrictive because of the cable leak. However, I think Greenwald's arguments countering this are equally feasible.

Again, however, Sleeman is misdirecting us from the issues facing libraries. Now that the information is available and has been widely used and quoted, libraries need to deal with the existence of the information. While it is interesting to think about whether or not the information should have been leaked and what the consequences of the leaks might be, those issues are unrelated to the issue of preservation of and access to that information.

7) Quality, Provenance, Authenticity:

Sleeman says, "Yet many in the library community seem eager to point to, to acquire, and to preserve this content without any of the usual assurances regarding quality or origin that we would otherwise require when making a collection development decision."

The State Department has not claimed that any of these were invented, modified, falsified or otherwise not authentic. If anything, the official response has implied that the cables are indeed authentic.

In the digital age, it is *particularly* important that libraries document the how and where and who of acquisitions so that users can evaluate them accurately. It would be wrong for libraries to say "here are cables released by the State Department" but it is right to say, "here are cables released by WikiLeaks and claimed to be leaked from the state department." That is an accurate description of their origin.

Related to this, let's be clear: no librarian is suggesting that we should raid the State Department of all its cables. Instead, many librarians are saying that, given the prominence, public availability, and apparent authenticity of this material, and, given that reputable news organizations have published the cables as well as articles based on these materials, these are legitimate materials for us to consider providing to our users.

One option that libraries have in a situation like this is to select and acquire digital files and preserve them without making them publicly available yet. Think of this as preserving with an embargo -- something that many libraries' special collections units do on a regular basis. This ensures that the materials are preserved, but allows the library to put off the decision to make them available until more information on their authenticity and provenance and legal status is available. Preservation does not happen by accident. Preserving the materials now for possible future release is both prudent and cautious.

8) Preservation:

Sleeman does not address the preservation of these materials. Perhaps he hopes that, even though the toothpaste is out of the tube, it will slowly wither away and get lost. As noted above, I think it is important that the recently released WikiLeaks information be preserved for future scholars. The fact of the matter is that someone will have to preserve this information if it is to remain accessible. As noted above, preservation does not happen by accident.

That means the key question we should be asking is: Who will preserve it?

I am not suggesting that every library should collect these materials. Many libraries will find these materials out of scope for their collections. The strength of a community of libraries with many different collections is being able to make preservation decisions based on the needs of our users. If we rely on others (other organizations, other libraries, other individuals) to preserve material that is important to our users, we may find that we are losing important information (for a similar case in point see "While BBC Wants To Kill Off A Bunch Of Websites, Geeks Quickly Archive Them").

If we rely on a very small number of huge digital repositories, we may find ourselves without an adequate voice in their preservation decisions.

By building our own digital infrastructure, we put ourselves in control of decisions that affect our user communities. That, in my opinion, is what we should be doing. With that infrastructure in place, we should make decisions about WikiLeaks based on the needs of our users -- not based on our like or dislike of Julian Assange.

For readers who want an overview of the issues, I would recommend these additional links:

• CQ Researcher has published an paper that covers the wikileaks issue:

  Government Secrecy: Does greater openness threaten national security?. By Alex Kingsbury. February 11, 2011

• Nuanced response from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
• NY Times cable archive
• Guardian cable archive
• der Spiegel cable archive
• CableSearch search interface of cables as they're released. By the European Centre of Computer Assisted Research.
• WikiRebels - The Documentary: in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it.

In an interesting court decision, a federal judge ruled last week that some federal agencies had wrongly turned over information in unsearchable PDF files. The judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, "is regarded as an expert on electronic discovery issues, having written three books on the subject."

In addition, the judge ruled that the agency must produce requested requested metadata such as the date files were created and modified.

• Federal judge says unsearchable PDFs 'not sufficient disclosure', by Wendell Cochran, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication (Feb. 8, 2011)

Although this is surely not the last word in either this particular case or in case law in general on these issues, it is a significant step. It demonstrates that the courts are beginning to recognize that simple "access" to "information" is not sufficient any more. Information must be provided in formats that enable its use and re-use. In this particular case, plaintiffs had requested spreadsheets and received instead simple images of pages or "screen shots."

This is relevant to the dissemination of all government information. Governments must make their information not just accessible and viewable, but usable and re-usable. Perhaps more case law will help persuade agencies of the need to produce information originally in open, re-usable, and therefore preservable, digital formats.

Hat tip to Kevin Taglang!

"Americans who have accessed the WikiLeaks web site may have violated the Espionage Act, under an extreme interpretation of the law advanced by Air Force officials last week."

• Accessing WikiLeaks Violates Espionage Act, USAF Says, by Steven Aftergood Secrecy News (February 7th, 2011).

“If a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793.”

This is a breathtaking claim that goes far beyond any previous reading of the espionage statutes.

“That has to be one of the worst policy/legal interpretations I have seen in my entire career,” said William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, by email.

Would you like to run your own server? Do you feel you need a computer science degree and a huge amount of money to do that? Think again!

Dave Winer, who created RSS, has a new project called EC2 for Poets designed "to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2." Amazon's EC2 is its "Elastic Compute Cloud" which is "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

You can read about Dave's project in this nice short piece on Wired magazine's "webmonkey" site:

• A DIY Data Manifesto, by Scott Gilbertson webmonkey (Feb. 3, 2011).

Scott explains that Dave wants us to "bust the mystique of servers," break free of the corporate silos. He wants to start by focusing on corporate blogging sites like Twitter and Facebook. The idea is build "distributed systems that aren't controlled by any single corporation or technology platform."

A Condensed User Guide for FOIA Requests, by Nicole Johnson, UNREDACTED: The National Security Archive blog (February 3, 2011).

The National Security Archive has committed an entire section of its website, thirteen blog entries, and one 122-page manual, among other resources, to explain how users can effectively engage FOIA. My purpose in writing this blog is to provide you with a single reference for all FOIA inquiries. Ambitious, but possible through the invention of hyperlinks.

January was a slow month for the Lost Docs Blog. Only six fugitive documents were reported to us. Since that hardly seems worth analyzing, we'll be issuing a combined Jan/Feb report and appeal the first weekend of March.

February is looking up. As of this writing, we already have 12 reports to post.

Phil Lapsley and Michael Ravnitzky gave an intriguing talk on Freedom of Information Act (United States) or FOIA at the Next HOPE Conference, New York City, July 2010. The talk was entitled "Rummaging in the Government's Attic: Lessons Learned from More Than 1,000 Freedom of Information Act Requests."

You can access both the audio file (23 MB mp3 file) and the slides (2.7 MB pdf file). And don't forget to surf on over to the Government Attic for access to all of the FOIA'd documents.

Thanks Phil and Michael for the informative talk and for and for your studies of FOIA!

[originally posted on Govdoc-l listserv]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a new report on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) development of an Electronic Records Archive (ERA) to preserve and provide access to massive volumes and all types of electronic records.

• Electronic Records Archive: National Archives Needs to Strengthen Its Capacity to Use Earned Value Techniques to Manage and Oversee Development GAO-11-86 January 13, 2011.

  GAO recommends, among other things, that NARA establish a comprehensive plan for all remaining work; improve the accuracy of earned value performance reports; and engage executive leadership in correcting negative trends. NARA generally concurred with GAO's recommendations.

• Costs soaring for Archives' digital library, auditors say, by Lisa Rein, Washington Post (February 4, 2011)

  The cost of building a digital system to gather, preserve and give the public access to the records of the federal government has ballooned as high as $1.4 billion, and the project could go as much as 41 percent over budget...

  The Government Accountability Office blames the cost overruns and schedule delays on weak oversight and planning by the National Archives which awarded a $317 million contract to Lockheed Martin Corp. six years ago to create a modern archive for electronic records....

Steve Schultze, who is Associate Director of The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, gives an excellent history and background to the fee-based PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system and various attempts to make this public information freely available.

• PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law, by Steve Schultze, VoxPopuLII, LII / Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School (February 3, 2011).

A lot of this information will be old news if you've been following the story over the years, but I've never seen it all brought together so thoroughly in one place with so many good links before. Schultze summarizes the problem:

I was shocked that the system was charging for every single search I performed. With the type of research I was trying to do, it was inevitable that I would have to do countless searches to find what I was looking for. What’s more, the search functionality provided by PACER turned out to be nearly useless for the task at hand — there was no way to search for keywords, or within documents at all. The best I could do was pay for all the documents in particular cases that I suspected were relevant, and then try to sort through them on my own hard drive. Even this would be far from comprehensive.

The sad irony of the PACER fiasco is seeing government officials get upset when their system was being used during a free trial. (They complained because "One request was being made every three seconds"!) They shut down the free-access trial to put a stop to that! And they initiated an FBI investigation of those who were using the system so heavily! In a different world, a government agency would be proud to see its information being heavily used and valued by the public; governments would develop policies, missions, and budgets to encourage this.

But PACER generates money through its fees and, in a world in which "cost recovery" and "self sustaining programs" and "pay as you go" and restrictions on access are valued more than free public access, free use is anathema.

There is a lesson for all of us here. Budgets are bad and governments are cutting back drastically. We are sure to see rollbacks in free access; restrictions put on access or reuse or both; fees imposed; information taken offline because it is "too expensive" to keep online. Some agencies will fight these restrictions, but will be hard-put to find the resources and support to win those battles. Those agencies will need our help. Other agencies will welcome the excuse to have stricter control over what they reveal and what they hide; they will welcome the opportunity to raise money on their information "assets." We will have to fight those agencies.

In general, the economic situation in the nation means that we are going to have to fight to maintain free public access to government information. Free access to information on the web will not be a given at a time when governments are slashing budgets and politicians are campaigning to reduce government services and outsource those services to the private (fee-based) sector.

We can certainly fight politically by lobbying and supporting causes we believe in. But we also can fight using our own resources and making our own choices. One way we can do that is to get that information off of government-controlled servers and into the hands of our community libraries where our communities are in control of access. This goes against the now common idea that "everything is on the web" so we don't have to have local collections any more. On the contrary, this is the very time that we need to build digital collections to ensure long term preservation of that information and long-term free public access to it. "Self sustaining" government agencies are the enemy of free public access. We have a lot of flexibility in the digital age; "communities" no longer have to be geographically-based. Every library can have communities-of-interest and users anywhere.

Libraries that are confused about their role should see this as a clear, unambiguous opportunity. Rather than shirking the responsibility of building collections and hoping that someone else will keep information freely available, libraries can seize the opportunity to do what no one else is doing: build free digital public libraries. Providing actual collections (rather than links to content that may or may not be there tomorrow) will engender support (and funding) better than vague promises of user-assistance. Providing actual services built on top of those locally-controlled collections will attract users at a time when users are ignoring services-without-collections-libraries in favor of google.

The easiest place to start building digital collections is with public domain government information. (Is any library downloading all the documents at fcic.gov? Someone should -- before it is too late!)

I'm quite partial to honeybees since I was a hobbyist beekeeper (got my first bees from the inimitable Richard Taylor on whom David Foster Wallace wrote his undergraduate honors thesis). And so I was particularly bummed about the news of a leaked EPA document (PDF) in which, despite warnings by EPA Scientists about the pesticide clothianidin being toxic to honeybees, EPA approved its use anyway. "Clothianidin has already been banned by Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia for its toxic effects. So why won't the EPA follow? The answer probably has something to do with the American affinity for corn products. But without honey bees, our entire food supply is in trouble."

For more on honeybee colony collapse disorder, I'd highly recommend seeing the documentary Queen of the Sun

HOUSE HEARING, 110TH CONGRESS - HEARING TO REVIEW THE STATUS OF POLLINATOR HEALTH INCLUDING COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER

National Archives joins Foursquare!, by Dawn, NARAtions, The Blog of the United States National Archives (February 2, 2011).

With the help of Foursquare, the National Archives is reaching out to people where they live and where they visit, by leaving tips related to NARA from coast to coast. Each tip highlights an interesting place or event related to the Archives. In the initial launch, the National Archives is focusing on providing tips pertaining to the Washington, DC, Kansas City, and Philadelphia Archives locations. Links between the Archives and the Washington Monument, Independence Hall, Edgar Allan Poe House, US Penitentiary and many more are now available to users visiting those locations. A Foursquare user is able to walk back through time and view scenes from the motion picture, "March on Washington" while standing on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial. The Archives is now rolling out tips through Foursquare, and we'll continue to release new tips about the historical places behind all of the National Archives regional locations.