It's been a few months since we had our last blogger of the month. But I'd like to introduce Peggy Jarrett to the podium for the month of September. Peggy comes to us from the University of Washington's Gallagher Law Library. I was able to twist Peggy's arm even as she so kindly hosted me at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2011 annual conference -- which I highly recommend our readers attend, especially those in the Boston area where the 2012 conference will be held. Take it away Peggy! And as always, if you're interested in taking a turn at the FGI podium, please contact us at freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com. That is all.

Peggy Jarrett is the Documents and Reference Librarian at the Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington School of Law. She’s been at Gallagher for 21 years, and before that, spent 7 years working as a law firm librarian in Seattle and Washington D.C.

Her interest in government information dates back to the summer of 1973, when as an impressionable youth, she spent the summer watching the Watergate hearings. She is particularly interested in public access to state legal information and the intersection of reference and collection development. Her favorite part of her job is talking to students from the Law Librarianship Program at the UW Information School about government documents. She is currently a member of the Depository Library Council.

The city of New Orleans announces a new site for open data from the city:

• Data.NOLA.gov | Enabling New Orleans

  Aug 20, 2011 | This site is a catalog of public data sets produced by the City of New Orleans. We're starting small, with data sets that are found within the Department of Information Technology & Innovation, and will be adding data sets from other departments over time.

Categories include: Administrative Data, Demographic Data, Geographic Reference. Types include: Datasets, External Datasets, Files and Documents, Filtered Views, Charts, Maps, Calendars, and Forms.

New Performance.gov website faces performance problems of its own, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (08/26/2011).

A last-minute deal between the Obama administration and House Republicans to avert a government shutdown in April cut fiscal 2011 funding for online open government initiatives by more than three quarters to just $8 million.

[An] OMB official said Thursday the administration does not consider the current version of Performance.gov to be compliant with the 2010 Government Performance and Results Modernization Act...

...The current version of Performance.gov does have a search bar, but it is only minimally functional. Searches for the names of federal agencies, such as "defense," "agriculture" and "transportation" for instance did not turn up any results.

When the funding deal with lawmakers was reached, then-federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told Congress he would cut two planned open government initiatives and suspend planned improvements to others, including Performance.gov.

This isn't new information, but I don't think we've mentioned it here before. UNT, one of the participants in the End-of-Term Web Archive project (EOT), which aimed to capture the entirety of the federal government's public Web presence before and after the 2009 change in presidential administrations, is hosting a project to investigate innovative solutions to issues around web archives. The issues include being able to to identify and select materials in accord with collection development policies and being able to characterize archived materials using common metrics in order to communicate the scope and value of these materials to administrators.

The project will use 10 librarian Subject Matter Experts who will classify the EOT collection according to the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification System. The project will also develop a set of metrics to enable characterization of materials in Web archives in units of measurement familiar to libraries and their administrations.

• Classification of the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Collection Development to Web Archives, University of North Texas Libraries (21 April 2011).
• End-of-Term Web Archive

ORPHAN NEWS

This week was relatively quiet at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project.

The list of orphan states in need of adoption is unchanged from last week:

Mississippi
Rhode Island
Texas

It would be particularly nice to have Texas adopted out as an accurate annotated list of Texas databases would likely be used by people evaluating Governor Rick Perry's record now that he's running for President.

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/SADATFS_Volunteer_Guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.

WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

NEW MEXICO (Adrienne Walker)

Licensed Professional Engineers and Professional Surveyors - Search for licensed professional engineers and licensed professional surveyors by license number, last name, first name, city, state, zip, license type, branch or status (there is a key available on the search page to assist in the selection of license type, status or branch).

New Mexico Coal Mines Query - This database displays information from the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. This site includes general data and statistics about active mines, notices of violation and water quality samples.

LOUISIANA (Rita Franks)

Restaurant Inspections - This state website provides access to restaurant inspections that include critical and non-critical violations, along with corrective actions that have been taken or are pending.

DATABASES REMOVED

MISSOURI (Annie Moots)

Local Telephone Exchange Companies - Searchable by town/city.

Here's a post we just put up that offers a brief overview to a directory where you can listen live to first responders (police, fire, ems). The directory is free to use and the streams are free to access.

Of course, not every county or city has a feed but, for the most part the I-95 corridor is well represented.

Also, the directory is always online (not just a storm resource) and is national in scope. From the Juneau Police Dept. to the Pinellas County Fire and EMS and many other locations.

http://infodocket.com/2011/08/26/hurricane-irene-listen-live-online-to-first-responders-throughout-entire-storm-area/

A second post points out the fact that the FEMA National Situation Daily update is available online (can also be of use after the event) as well as a number of mobile tools from the National Hurricane Center including an option to be alerted to new updates via email or text.

http://infodocket.com/2011/08/25/reference-hurricane-irene-femas-nationa...

Transportation

You can always listen live to most major airport towers and centers in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.
http://liveatc.net

and finally, the AMTRAK Northeast Corridor Twitter Stream and Amtrak (National) on Facebook.

Report/Update

In addition to our usual monthly report, we at the Lost Docs Project Blog will from time to time revisit, check, and update posted document receipts that at the time of their corresponding monthly reports were still classed as fugitives. The following report focuses on the receipts posted from November-December 2009.

Of the 149 fugitive document receipts posted November-December 2009, 49 (33%) of the titles have had records added to the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP), 26 of these have been added since the November and December 2009 monthly reports. Three of the cataloged titles had not been assigned a PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) so we also marked these as "Preservation Needed". While the low percentage of items cataloged is disappointing, we are appreciative of those records that have been created and added to the CGP. A list of cataloged items, based on the posted receipts, can be viewed at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjA1ChZ8rDu5dGw0VllsRHpqSk1HcXc... or visit the Lost Docs Project Blog and view the "found" items with November-December 2009 dates. We have highlighted a few of the document titles cataloged since the 2009 monthly reports, they are listed below.

Read you Loud and Clear!: The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network (EL)

Mineral Investigations in the Bristol Bay Mining District Study Area, Southwest Alaska (EL)

Nuestros hijos, nuestra responsabilidad (EL)

Behind International Rankings of Infant Mortality: How the United States Compares with Europe (EL)

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.

Lost Docs Project Blog Team
Meredith Johnston
Jeffrey Hartsell-Gundy
lostdocs@freegovinfo.info

National Journal's "Tech Daily Dose" has a list of links useful for for staying up to date on Hurricane Irene. These include resources from FEMA, The National Hurricane Center, and the National Weather Service, as well as state, local, and commercial resources.

• Stay Informed: Online and Mobile Resources For Tracking Hurricane Irene

As reported here earlier, GPO rejected the Ithaka S+R report on the future of the Federal Depository Library Program (Modeling a Sustainable Future for the United States Federal Depository Library Program's Network of Libraries in the 21st Century: Final Report of Ithaka S+R to the Government Printing Office, by Ross Housewright & Roger C. Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R, May 16, 2011).

Here is coverage by Information Today of that rejection :

• GPO Disapproves of Report on the Future of Federal Depository Libraries, by Barbie E. Keiser, Information Today, (August 25, 2011).

Although this article mentions that GPO might ask Ithaka S+R to "fix" the report, I didn't find anything in the statement by Mary Alice Baish attached to the report that indicates that GPO will ask anything more from Ithaka S+R. Rather, Baish says GPO will use the report, and comments submitted during the writing of the report, and new comments that it hopes to get now to build practical and sustainable models for the FDLP.

I've heard that librarians are beginning to receive canned responses to letters to Senator Feinstein and they have not been good. Feinstein's response to concerns about the shutting down of the Census Bureau's Statistical Compendia Branch and killing of the Statistical Abstract have been thus:

Dear Mr. ________________:

Thank you for writing me to express your support for the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States. I appreciate hearing from you and apologize for the delay in my response.

As you may know, the Statistical Abstract is data on the social, political, and economic organization of the Nation released by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau publishes the information as well as making it available online for the public.

In February 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau released its tentative fiscal year 2012 budget breakdown, which includes a provision to terminate the Statistical Abstract. I understand your concerns with the Census Bureau's proposal. According to the Census Bureau, in order to fund higher priority programs within the agency, it is recommending that certain programs be terminated or have their budgets reduced. You might be interested to know that much of the information available in the Statistical Abstract is available at university and library resources, particularly the Federal Depository Library.

Please know that I recognize your concerns and appreciate the information you have provided about what this cut could mean. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind during the 2012 fiscal year appropriations process. If you have not done so already, I encourage you to share your concerns directly with the Census Bureau at: 1-800-923-8282.

Again, thank you for writing. If you have any additional questions or comments, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

Particularly disheartening is that she references libraries, ignoring the fact that it is LIBRARIANS who are writing to her! We KNOW that much -- but not all! -- of the data are out there and in our stacks. But we also KNOW that the Statistical Abstract, because it is the aggregation of many data sources and data points across the .gov domain and beyond, is one of the most useful tools that librarians have to serve the public. The Statistical Abstract is the defacto Google for .gov statistical information. THAT'S why we're so concerned that the Statistical Compendia Branch is being cut. Feinstein's statement misses the point completely.

Thanks to a tip from Kevin McClure, a librarian at Chicago-Kent College of Law, I contacted Jean Mullin, section chief at the Statistical Abstract. Ms. Mullin's quick and helpful response confirmed the amount of copyrighted material in the Statistical Abstract. She noted:

"100 of the Abstract's private sector sources contribute roughly 179 tables to the book, meaning that almost 13 percent of what's published in the book is copyrighted. All but a few of those tables are approved for the on-line and CD-ROM versions. There are also several tables in the Abstract, which are special tabulations produced by government agencies for the Abstract and can not be found anywhere else on-line. If one were to reproduce them, they would have to send a request to that agency for the data."

Kevin, in this thread on govdoc-l and working off the same information Ms Mullin gave him, extrapolated the information and stated:

"... I think assurances that we can rely on other data sources are even more off the mark than they sound at first. The Preface to Stat Abstract says that both government and private sources contribute to its mix of data. I checked on what that would mean if we lost the publication, and found out that about 100 of those private sources, which contribute to 179 tables in the book, require copyright permission, meaning that almost 13 percent of the tables in the book are copyrighted. All but a few of those tables are approved for the online and CD-ROM versions.

So the suggestion in Sen. Feinstein's response that we could reassemble much of the data in Stat Abstract with things in our SuDocs stacks and online, on top of being daft and irrelevant in so many irritating ways, also fails to account for that large chunk of data that will no longer be publicly accessible by any means. The resource is literally irreplaceable, because no one outside the Statistical Compendia Branch is capable of collecting it all without re establishing all those arrangements -- that is, without doing what the Statistical Compendia Branch already does, and does so much better and more efficiently than anyone else could. I think that is a point worth emphasizing as we continue to talk to our representatives about preserving the Statistical Compendia Branch."

I hope that readers will use this information as added context in their responses (really just shrugs of their shoulders :-| ) to their Senators and Representatives.

As Paul Krugman recently wrote, “Killing the publication for the sake of a tiny saving would be a truly gratuitous step toward a dumbed-down country. And believe me, that’s not something we need more of.” Google will not and cannot help the public and librarians access that copyrighted data. Without the Statistical Abstract, NONE of that data will be available to the public and the finding by citizens of .gov statistics will be unnecessarily obfuscated beyond reason.

Info about what's coming from the Census was announced at an "operational press briefing" that took place yesterday.

Robert M. Groves, director, U.S. Census Bureau and Stanley J. Rolark spoke at the event.

Presentation Slides (PDF)

A replay of the press briefing should be available soon on this web page.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the public release schedule for the official income, poverty and health insurance estimates for 2010 from the Current Population Survey (CPS), as well as estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS).

Intro and Timetable

Additional Materials Distributed at Event
* Materials Distributed at News Conference
* Count Question Resolution brochure [PDF]
* 2010 CQR Challenges

* Press kits:
- 2010 Census Briefs
- Summary File 1

* American FactFinder Brochure [PDF]
* U.S. Census Bureau at a Glance [PDF]
* Measuring America Timeline [PDF]
* 2010 Data Products Release Timeline
* 2010 Census Data Product Descriptions

As Gary noted yesterday, Performance.gov is now online.

• Performance.gov goes live after lengthy preparations, By Charles S. Clark, NextGov (08/25/2011).

  The long-anticipated and many-times-delayed central federal website Performance.gov went live Thursday morning, providing a new dashboard through which the general public can track spending, cost-cutting and progress in hiring agency by agency.

  ...Peformance.gov links to related dashboard sites at USAspending.gov, Data.gov, Whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov and USA.gov. The new site also invites feedback to improve usability.

via INFOdocket.com

From the Federal Depository Library Program Web Site:

In its efforts to address the value of Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) membership and to determine baseline outcomes-based performance measures, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), working with Outsell, Inc. and the Depository Library Council, developed a survey for depository library users. The survey ran from October 10, 2010 through March 4, 2011 and garnered over 3,300 responses from users of nearly 550 depository libraries. Submissions were well distributed both geographically and across different library types.

Direct to Report: FDLP Users Speak: The Value and Performance of Libraries Participating in the Federal Depository Library Program (61 Pages; PDF)

Recommendations From the Report

* Undertake more promotional activity, not just on the web, but also through library help desks and other local facilities in participating libraries;
* Increase training/tutorial activities both on the web and in participating libraries to assist users in finding Government documents on the web;
* Make more materials available in library collections and online; and
* Develop new tools to enhance access to and discoverability of Government information.

Direct to Full Text Report (Results, Charts, and Analysis for Each Question)

Hello From DC (I mean Shakeytown, it Was My First Quake) Everyone.

As we prepare for our next event around hear and elsewhere along the east coast I thought it might be a good time to share a mountain of news, new resources, and other goodies with all of you.

The material comes from posts Shirl Kennedy and I made to our INFOdocket.com site. This is just a small amount of what we post seven days a week. Plus, we also provide FullTextReports.com. New reports are listed in the left rail (Thanks Jim and James)

We both hope you find and item or two of interest in the following update. More very soon. (-:

1. Hurricane Irene: FEMA’s National Situation Daily Update Available Online & Natl. Hurricane Center Mobile Resources

2. New Web Site: Feds Launch Performance.gov, Now Publicly Accessible

3. Acquisitions: Bloomberg is Buying BNA for $990 Million

4. US Department of Labor Improves Enforcement Databases Including Visualization/Animation Tools

5.U.S. History: “Rare Footage Unearthed Online”

6. New From the Internet Archive: “Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive”

7.“Google Forfeits $500 Million Generated by Online Ads & Prescription Drug Sales by Canadian Online Pharmacies”
The full text of the statement from the USDOJ and FDA

8. Washington Post Op/Ed: “Don’t Kill America’s Databook” (U.S. Census Statistical Abstract)

9. NLRB — Acting General Counsel Releases Report on Social Media Cases

10. Back to School 2011-2012: Facts About Schools, Students and Teachers From the U.S. Census

11. 1940 U.S. Census to be Free on Ancestry.com

12. Government Information: GPO Releases API For FederalRegister.gov (Formal Announcement)

13. Teen Dating Violence: A Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography
From the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress

14. Update: More Digitized Historic U.S. Government Economic and Banking Documents and Reports via FRASER

15. A Look at a Few Resources Using U.S. Department of Agriculture Open Data

16. Cook County, IL: New online database lets anyone see who has outstanding warrants

17. Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50 Endangered Languages

Wikileaks announced via twitter that they are releasing 35,000 U.S. diplomatic cables today. The current count of US Diplomatic cables released is 51,122 out of a total of 251,287 total. Check out the Twitter hashtag #wlfind for crowdsourced finds. That thread is quite an interesting read.

GovLoop, the social network for government, has an interesting piece with lots of comments by government workers on the question "Should Government Be Run Like a Business?"

• Should Government Be Run Like a Business?, by Patrick Fiorenza, GovLoop (August 17, 2011).

Quoting from an article (Denhardt, R. B. and Denhardt, J. V. (2000), The New Public Service: Serving Rather than Steering. Public Administration Review, 60: 549–559) Patrick suggests that Public Managers Should:

1. Serve, rather than steer

2. The public interest is the aim, not the by-product.

3. Think strategically, act democratically.

4. Serve citizens, not customers.

5. Accountability isn't simple.

6. Value people, not just productivity.

7. Value citizenship and public service above entrepreneurship.

See also: E-Gov: are we citizens or customers?

Here is an interesting overview of the findings of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries. It seems students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it, and they need help. Very, very interesting findings! Must read.

• What Students Don't Know, by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed (August 22, 2011).

  The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project -- a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses -- was a meta-exercise for the librarians in practicing the sort of deep research they champion. Instead of relying on surveys, the libraries enlisted two anthropologists, along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods.

  The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant but shallow, provided deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions. The resulting papers are scheduled to be published by the American Library Association this fall, under the title: “Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.”

VOLUNTEER AND ORPHAN NEWS

This week the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project welcomed three new volunteers who have publicly claimed their pages:

District of Columbia - Adopted by Shirl Kennedy
Indiana - Adopted by Kimberly Brown-Harden
Hawaii - Adopted by Gwen Sinclair

With the changes above, the current list of orphan states in need of adoption is:

Mississippi
Rhode Island
Texas

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/SADATFS_Volunteer_Guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.

WIKI ACTIVITY

See our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs for a blow by blow description of changes to the page. Here are a few highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (Shirl Kennedy)

Food Facility Inspections Online - Search for and view inspection reports for facilities that serve or sell food to the public. Site says, "The majority of the permitted food service establishments in Washington, DC receive two routine unannounced food safety inspections per year." Database contains reports for the last three years. Reports are in PDF format.

Shirl added seven other databases to the DC page. Check them out!

NORTH CAROLINA (Jennifer Davison)

NC Open Book : Transparency in NC State Government NC OpenBook is designed to show you where North Carolina's money goes. Allows searches for awardees of grants and contracts.

Jennifer also appears to have added and reorganized other material on the North Carolina page. If you haven't visited recently, it would be worth it to go back.

DATABASES REMOVED

ALASKA (Daniel Cornwall)

Alaska Consultant List - From the website "The Alaska Consultant List is intended to be a shortcut to finding Mining Engineers and Geologists that are properly licensed to perform consulting service business in the state of Alaska. The list provides names of persons by service who have requested to be listed. Pull down the list by service and click on the selected name to show contact information. The list is intended to be a service to the public; the Office of Economic Development makes no representation as to the competency of the persons or businesses."

This resource is still live on the web, but we realized it did not fit the criteria for a searchable database. Since it is a useful resource, we moved it to our Not Database/Not State page at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Not_Databases.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has a new piece online "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?" that will churn your stomach. A whistleblower SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn came forward to Congress earlier this summer to describe the systematic destruction of SEC records that were supposed to be archived for 25 years.

Taibbi's piece shows the worst of the revolving door between .gov regulators and the industry they're entrusted to regulate and investigate. It also highlights the tenuous nature of the preservation of government information and the critical need for trusted 3rd party organizations -- libraries! -- to be part of that system of preservation.

This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – have apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

This is a fascinating look into conflict of interest within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) -- which always reminds me of Pogo the comic: "we have met the enemy and he is us" :-) -- they sent a letter to DARPA which prompted an investigation into DARPA Director Regina Dugan's possible conflict of interest in awarding contracts to a company she used to own and which is now run by her father:

The Department of Defense Inspector General (IG) is auditing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and looking into financial ties of DARPA Director Regina Dugan after POGO called for an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the agency.

The audits will cover two areas: all of DARPA's contracts and grants from the last two years and a special look at the contracts awarded to RedXDefense, a bomb detection firm founded by Dugan and currently run by Dugan’s father. The Pentagon IG explained the audits in a letter to POGO sent on Friday.

In addition to having family ties to the company, Dugan still has a financial relationship with RedXDefense.

“RedXDefense owes Dugan $250,000 for a “loan/note” and additionally details that she has between $151,000 and $305,000 in assets and income from RedXDefense,” we said in a May 9, 2011, letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

here's more explanation from Wired's Spencer Ackerman, who tracks these types of issues via the Wired Danger Room blog.

[HT to Ellen Miller at Sunlight Foundation for this tidbit!]

During the past month we've posted about 11 new apps (all free) posted in the USA.gov directory.

Several apps are iPhone only while others are available for Android devices. A couple are web apps that should be accessible using any mobile web browser.

1. Three New Mobile Apps from U.S. Government Organizations
Apps from the FBI, NPS, and GSA.

2. Two New Mobile Apps from U.S. Gov Organizations
Includes apps from the NSF and Smithsonian.

3. Six New Apps (Including A Few To Help With Relaxation)
Apps from NOAA and the National Center for Telehealth and Technology

ORPHAN NEWS

This week was relatively quiet at the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States project.

Our list of orphan pages in need of adoption is unchanged from last week:

• District of Columbia
• Hawaii
• Indiana
• Mississippi
• Rhode Island
• Texas

If you're interested in one of the above states, check out our volunteer guide and then send me an e-mail if you'd like to adopt one of the above states. If you adopt a state, be prepared to put your name and contact information on the main project page AND your state page within two weeks of receiving your wiki login. See the Volunteer guide for more details.

WIKI ACTIVITY

Looking at our last seven days of activity at http://tinyurl.com/statedbs, you can see that Adrienne Walker, our volunteer for New Mexico, was primarily responsible for what activity we had this week.

DATABASES ADDED

NEW MEXICO (Adrienne Walker)

Sex Offender Registry - This sex offender registry has been designed to provide information to the public concerning the location of sex offenders residing in the State of New Mexico. The Department of Public Safety (DPS) hopes this site will increase and promote public awareness.

----

Quiet isn't all bad. A lot of link fixing by many volunteers has been done in the past month or so. If things are quiet this week, it's probably a sign that if a page has a volunteer, you can count on the freshness of the links.

For pages without a volunteer, like Mississippi, we have some broken links, like this one:

Opinions Databases - Searchable database of Attorney General opinions back to 1979. Check out the Expert Search if you want a lot of searching options, including date limitations and subject searching.

If you know where the AG Opinions database for Mississippi can be found, please let me know. Or better yet, adopt Mississippi and flesh out its database list.

Richard Huffine, Director of USGS Libraries Program, announced on govdoc-l this week that direct links to USGS publications will be changing by September 1, 2011.

• Direct Links to USGS Publications Changing by September 1, 2011, Richard L Huffine, Discussion of Government Document Issues, (11 Aug 2011).

  The U.S. Geological Survey's Publications Warehouse (pubs.usgs.gov) will complete a process to migrate all of its' on-line publications into Portable Document Format (PDF) files by September 1, 2011. At that time, the USGS will no longer support the previous DJVU format for its on-line publications. Libraries and Web site managers should link to the publications citation page for USGS publications. At sometime after September 1, 2011, direct links to DJVU files will stop working and there will be no automatic redirect to the PDF version of those materials.

  A direct link to a USGS DVJU file currently looks like:
  http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/djvu/B/bull_1967.djvu
  Once loaded in PDF, individual publications will have a link like this:
  http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1967/report.pdf

  However, the preferred link to this publication is:
  http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/b1967

  The citation link is the preferred link because it may include links to plates, maps, appendices, etc. as well as links to the USGS Store to purchase paper copies if they are available. This migration has been sought by members of the research community for some time. The DJVU format offered many benefits at a time when bandwidth was a challenge. The PDF format offers a consistent format for both historical and current publications and it allows users to download and use information from USGS publications in the same way that they use research journal articles and other scientific research products.

  Over 70% of all USGS-published reports are available in an on-line format from the USGS Publications Warehouse. The system currently includes citations to over 100,000 research articles, reports, and products produced by the USGS over the last 130 years. The system also offers an RSS feed to keep users of earth and natural science research informed about the products of the USGS.

  Richard Huffine, Director
  USGS Libraries Program

Here are two reports from the Senate that have been in the news, but may not be preserved by GPO or any library. As noted here earlier, "GPO does not typically catalog majority or minority reports unless it is a joint effort within a committee."

Back in April, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report that he called "the first comprehensive overview of NSF."

• The National Science Foundation: Under The Microscope. "A report by Tom A. Coburn, M.D., U.S. Senator, Oklahoma." (April 2011).

Among other things, the report recommended the elimination NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economics Directorate, which funds social science research.

In July, Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology released a report that criticized Senator Coburn's report.

• Out of Focus: A Critical Assessment of the Senate Report, "The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope". A Staff Report By The Democratic Staff Of The House Committee On Science, Space, And Technology July 5, 2011 v. 1.1.

Last month, a Senate committee decided not to cut funding of the social sciences at the NSF.

For background on the above two reports, see:

• Social Science, Spared Again, by Ken Prewitt, Ken Prewitt, President of The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), and professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Science Magazine (August 5, 2011).