Thomas Jefferson's been on my mind and in the news lately. Today, there was a fascinating article about Jefferson and the breaking of an unbreakable cipher in the Wall Street Journal -- Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code. Rachel Emma Silverman. Wall Street Journal, Thursday July 2, 2009. Don't miss the interactive graphics that describes the mysterious cipher sent to Jefferson by his friend Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and how the cipher was finally broken 200+ years later by Lawren Smithline, a mathematician who works with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

This article comes on the heels of a June 25 NY Times pictorial thought-piece on Thomas Jefferson by Maira Kalman called "Time Wastes Too Fast". That there are over 900 comments is testament to both the power of Jefferson's life and Kalman's words and drawings.

Last but not least, I just finished David Post's truly mind-blowing book, "In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace." Post's book is a juxtaposition between Jefferson's intrigue with large ungulates, the description and mapping of the natural world, and the state and natural history of the internet. Yes I know it sounds bizarre, but Post pulls of the juxtaposition expertly. I highly recommend this book.

Happy July everyone! This month we've got Jeanne Kramer-Smyth with us. Among other things, Jeanne is a blogger at Spellbound Blog, a really interesting blog about the intersection of archives, digital humanities, cultural heritage institutions and technology -- here's her full biography. Take it away Jeanne!

We also want to thank Molly and Lori from the Internet Archive for being our guests for the month of June. They turned us on to a bunch of cool Archive-it digital collections hosted at the archive. We really hope they'll continue to keep us posted on the Archive's happenings. Thanks again Molly and Lori!!

If anyone's going to be in Chicago July 9-13, you might consider heading over to the American Library Association's Annual Conference '09 for their grassroots program. All of the FGI gang will be there. Jim Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo, and friend of FGI Gabriela Schneider will be on a panel called "Libraries and Obama’s Information Policy" on Saturday, 3:30–5 p.m. Hope you can make it!!

Libraries and Obama’s Information Policy
Saturday, July 11, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Hilton, Lake Ontario room

The nation’s information policy is a major concern for the library community. We are facing a critical historical juncture, where libraries can raise our voices and provide a vision of information policy. This panel will provide an opportunity to identify key issues in the new administration’s information policies and discuss ways the library community can participate in forming that policy.

Moderator: Caroline Nappo, Doctoral Student, Information in Society Fellow, University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library & Information Science

Panelists: Jim Jacobs, Data Services Librarian Emeritus, University of California San Diego, Co-creator of FreeGovInfo.info; Gabriela Schneider, Communications Director, Sunlight Foundation; ShinJoung Yeo, Information in Society Fellow Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

There's also a panel on Monday July 13 from 8-10am called "From Legacy Data to Linked Data: Preparing Libraries for Web 3.0." None of the FGIers are on the panel, but we're sure to be there as data is very important!!

I just read Tim Berners-Lee's notes on putting government data online. I must say, when TBL describes it, it sounds like a piece of cake :-) The key seems to be the use of linked data. It's a snap; let's do it! RAW DATA NOW!!

Footnote: Do's and Don'ts

* Do pick URIs which are likely to be persistent
* Do put RDF metadata giving the license.
* Do use the RDF and SPARQL standards
* Make sure your human readable pages are accessible.

* Do NOT hide data files inside zip files unless they are also available directly.
* Do NOT put data up in proprietary formats.
* Do NOT wait until you have a complete schema or ontology to publish data.
* Do NOT seek to replace existing data systems.

Department of State Office of the Historian has just released the redesign of its site: www.history.state.gov. They've done a really nice job with the redesign including new and easier access to my favorite Foreign Relations of the United States. Users can now browse FRUS by themes like decolonization, instability in Latin America, US-China trade etc (though I'm surprised that there's no theme for Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, SALT etc. Perhaps they'll add those additional themes). Users can also browse by country to find history of US diplomatic relations and links to other key publications like Department of State Background Notes, Department of State Country Information, CIA World Factbook, and Library of Congress Country Studies.

The new website boasts greater accessibility and searching within the Foreign Relations of the United States documentary series. It currently offers both textual and facsimile copies of Foreign Relations volumes from the Kennedy Administration through the Nixon-Ford administration. The Office plans to continue to digitize older volumes and eventually house all of the Foreign Relations volumes on its website. The website also contains updated sections on the history of the Department of State, biographies of notable diplomats, and an in-depth timeline of United States diplomatic milestones. The Office’s educational curriculum guides are also downloadable from the website. The Office hopes that through its enhanced presentation and organization, the new website will become the preeminent online resource for U.S. diplomatic history.
--Source: U.S. Department of State

[Thanks Resource Shelf!]

Twitter, the 140 character social media micro-blog, was scheduled to go down for maintenance on monday night. But, according to the CNN blog, a little thing called the Iranian elections and a request from the US State Department caused them to change their scheduled downtime to yesterday afternoon from 2-3 PST (middle of the night Tehran time) in order to ensure that the flow of information from Iran remains open and that Iranians can continue to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. This is a pretty amazing development in that, despite the Iranian restrictions on journalists and news organizations, the world is still able to get up to the minute accounts - complete with video on youtube, hashtags on twitter and facebook. Now libraries just have to figure out how to collect, preserve and organize this massive flow of information ;-)

Mashable has more on why this matters as well as a HOWTO guide on following the elections.

This story has been brewing for a few months, but I just recently came across it again and was intrigued. I may be getting into deep archival waters --the Society of American Archivists (PDF) and a letter of complaint signed by sixteen organizations (PDF) were both submitted in response to NARA's call for alternative models of presidential libraries (more context here from Richard Cox). While you can probably guess that I'm in general agreement with Steven Aftergood that more online presidential resources would improve public access, the call for digitization neglects a fundamental aspect of presidential libraries. That is, these spaces do not only act as information repositories for researchers, but historical monuments. Let's have better access to information but let's not forget about history in the process. Thoughts?

Bush library may be one of last housed in a building. Laura Isensee. The Dallas Morning News. March 31, 2009

The George W. Bush Presidential Library in University Park could be one of the last brick and mortar institutions of its kind.

Congress is looking for ways to cut the expense of overseeing such buildings, and some researchers say the traditional library setup for keeping presidential documents is outdated in a digital world.

What to do? Use a cave to store vital paper records instead of big compounds. Get out of the museum business and let the president's backers run that part of the library.

Those are some of the ideas being floated by federal archivists, who now are asking the public for suggestions to run the library system at less cost but with better access to presidential papers. The National Archives and Records Administration will deliver its report to Congress this summer.

Although the potential changes are not expected to affect the Bush complex at SMU or any of the other presidential libraries, the outcome could significantly alter how future ones operate.

I was away for the weekend and so didn't get a chance to post this. Be that as it may, it is with great pleasure that I bring up to the guest podium Molly Bragg, Lori Donovan and the Internet Archive's Archive-It team (full bio). They'll be highlighting some of their collections as well as anything else that piques their interest for the month of June. Take it away Molly, Lori et al!

From 1981 until 1998, Anne Heanue and the fine folks at the Washington Office of the American Library Association (ALA) published an amazing series called Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government, a chronology of efforts to restrict and privatize government information. In 1986, the publication was listed in Project Censored's annual review, Top 25 censored stories for 1986.

I recently had a nice email exchange with Emily Sheketoff, Associate Executive Director of ALA and manager of the Washington Office in which I suggested that Less Access to Less Information ought to be online for the world to see, read, share etc. Emily graciously gave me permission to digitize the series. So, with the help of Rick and Megan Prelinger, Robert Miller and others at the Internet Archive, I give you Less Access to Less information by and about the U.S. government in several formats including text, flip book, PDF, and DjVu.

• 1981-1987 chronology
• 1988-1991 chronology
• 1990-1996 chronology

I'm still on the hunt for the last 2 years of the series, but haven't come across them yet. If anyone's got them hanging around their bookshelves and would lend them to me, drop me an email (freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com) and I'll tell you where to send them.

That is all.

Yesterday Library Journal published its annual list of notable government documents, "Looking Back, Moving On: 2008 Best Notable Government Documents" written by Jim Church and his team of selectors and judges on the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) Notable Documents Panel. Every year since 1983, the panel has pulled together and highlighted state/local, federal and international government documents in order to "promote awareness and acquisition of government publications by libraries and use by library patrons."

This year's list highlighted such publications as Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports as well as free statistical databases from the United Nations (UNdata), the European Union (Eurostat) and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAOStat). Plus there was a special shout out to Carl Malamud and his Yes We Scan! campaign for Public Printer of the Government Printing Office. Check out this year's list of notable documents. You'll be amazed at the depth and breadth of publications by the various levels of governments. And by all means, if you have a favorite government document that you'd like to highlight, the Panel is always interested in nominations!

(Full disclosure: I'm the chair this year of GODORT's Publications Committee, which oversees the work of the Notable Documents Panel.)

In a "dramatic change of practice," Cornell University Library has decided it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. I congratulate Cornell and hope that other libraries will follow this precedent.

"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks." The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

[HT BoingBoing!]

Digital Preservation Europe is in the process of creating a series of short animations introducing and explaining digital preservation problems and solutions for the general public. Their first one is cute. Future ones will be released on their YouTube channel.

Reason #273 for why working at Stanford is pretty cool! YesWeScan!!

Letter from Michael A. Keller, Stanford Universiity Librarian

GPO just announced that the proceedings for the Spring '09 Depository Library Council meeting in Tampa are now available at fdlp.gov! We really appreciate GPO getting these out so quickly as there was a lot going on and there were a lot of people who could not attend due to the economic situation. We hope you'll take some time to look through the proceedings, read the live blog and notes, and of course watch the video of Cass Hartnett's reflections on a mid-career govt documents librarian.

Please welcome to the podium Justin Grimes, our guest blogger (or BOTM in FGI parlance) for May, 2009. Justin comes to us from the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and the Center for Information Policy and E-Government (Justin's full bio is here). Justin blogs over at justinmgrimes.com and you can also follow him on twitter (@justgrimes).

We're really looking forward to plumbing the depths of Justin's expertise and interests in e-govt and information policy. Take it away Justin!